We can be surprised when an audience member begins to describe what they heard in a given presentation. It’s frequently not what we believed the presentation was about.
Most of us operate on a daily basis using what is sometimes called a “correspondence view of reality.” This approach assumes that the material world offers up an endless parade of experiences that we take in and understand in more or less similar ways. The reality on view to all has certain reliable and corresponding meanings. At least that’s the theory.
But after forty years as a rhetorical critic and analyst, I must say that I don’t see much evidence that the world we describe has much in common with what others believe to be present. We all know the experience of listening to a description of an event witnessed by ourselves and others, only to hear an account that misses what we thought were important defining features. There’s nothing new in this, but its a cautionary condition that ought to make us wary of the correspondence view.
I was reminded of this recently by a scene laid out in Lawrence Wright’s book on the negotiations that led to the historic Camp David Accords. Thirteen Days in September documents the 1978 efforts of President Jimmy Carter to find a way out of the chronic Arab/Israeli impasse, working with Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. The President put everything else on hold in Washington to spend time with these men at Camp David in the Maryland mountains. Days passed as these three leaders looked for a way around their considerable differences.
When the talks seemed to be irrevocably breaking down, Carter decided to pack up his entourage for a quick side-trip to Gettysburg, not far the famous presidential retreat. He reasoned that perhaps a look at the bloody American fratricide that occurred on the lush hills surrounding the small Pennsylvania town would help reset the talks.
Over three days in 1863 the Confederate and Union armies saw 8,000 of their members slain and 50,000 badly wounded. This was carnage on the scale of the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War. Begin and Sadat took all of this in, with detailed narratives provided by Carter and the local National Park staff. But as Wright notes, the two old warriors saw very different Gettysburgs.
Like most visitors, Sadat, known for his peace-making instincts, seemed fascinated by the strategies of the generals leading the two warring armies. The timing of attacks and counterattacks are usually at the center of most narratives about this key battleground. But to Carter’s surprise it was Begin, the old guerrilla fighter, who was sobered by the magnitude of the carnage, and especially the words of President Lincoln’s short address at the site. The Israeli leader interpreted the speech as a call for political leadership to rise above the brutal factionalism of civil war. Begin saw Gettysburg as a reminder of the horrible price that strife between neighbors can cause.
We see surprisingly different understandings play out in all kinds of prosaic ways: films we loved that others disliked, the often surprising “lessons” that individuals take away from a story about communication or interpersonal breakdown, the incomprehensibility of a cable news report.
Against the simpler correspondence view of reality that we assume, communication analysis needs something which can be called a phenomenological view of reality. The phenomenologist tends to accept the likelihood that experience is individual rather than collective,and that the material worlds we share are still going to produce separate and unique understandings. Our personal values and biographies are likely to feed into interpretations of events that are specific, distinct, and often exclusive to us. Meaning is thus not a matter of consensus among strangers, but a mixture of ineffable and lifelong influences. In simple terms, two individuals may look at the hilly terrain of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top, but may be taking very different lessons from it.
Humans are all about the business of adding and subtracting to whatever the facts on the ground may be.
Mediators and counselors spend a lot of time working with individuals who are struggling to find common ground. These sessions could be as formal as talks between labor and management representatives trying to forge a new workplace agreement. Or they can be significantly less structured, as in a typical impasse in couple’s therapy, where memories about recent disagreements are different probably producing more heat than light.
It is part of our nature to see things and understand even simple events in unique ways. We may live in the age of the perfect digital copy. As we have noted, humans, by contrast, are all about the business of adding and subtracting to whatever the facts on the ground may be.
A favorite teacher once explained it this way. Imagine two people are hiking along opposite sides of the same valley. They are perhaps a mile or two apart, separating by the valley floor and its varied geography. If we stop them at the same time and ask for a report of what they see, they will describe essentially different valleys. Their foreground views of particular features provide unique impressions about the landscape. So while both are “right” in their own ways, there are clearly variances in their reports.
Such perspective-based observation is simply built into our unique operating system. Perception is a mix of observation and imagination. And though this built-in variability creates all kinds of problems in life, we probably wouldn’t want it any other way. Perspective is what makes us who we are.
Even so, it can be useful to work out disruptive differences of understanding in a process known as mirroring. It’s a simple method where the facilitator or mediator asks one side in a dispute to first restate what the other side has said, to the other’s satisfaction. This summary must be accepted by the other side before he or she can move on and state their own views. In couple’s counseling mirroring may take the form of a therapist asking John to restate what he think he heard in Mary’s last remark. The therapist reminds him to not interpret the remark, but simply restate it as accurately as possible. True to form, John makes the effort, but perhaps not quite to Mary’s satisfaction (Mary: “You’re still not hearing what I’m saying”). So he tries again, probably getting closer in registering her feelings or complaints.
The process stops a common and destructive pattern called “bypassing,” which is the term of choice for “listening” that is really just waiting for a turn to speak. And while mirroring has the disadvantage of slowing down the natural flow of conversation to a measured crawl, its advantage is that it forces each side into acknowledgement of the other. The payoff is clearer understanding and maybe genuine empathy. To restate another’s view’s accurately gets a person a little closer to the elusive goal of full understanding.
This process does not necessarily require a moderator. We know we are on the right track when we hear something like “Let me see if I can paraphrase what I think you are saying.” But a third person can often help.
Try this sometime when you need to step in to the mediator role. Helping others to actually grapple with raw feelings is a useful service we sometimes must provide to friends or coworkers.
