Saturday 28 May 2011

Ladder of Inference: Finding meaning in what we say



The ladder of influence is a great model about how and why we make judgements based on what we see: This may be as simple as any boy who does ballet is strange, anyone who listens to radio4 is boring or provide justification for genocide!

The meanings of words come from the person, from within, based on experience, culture and context. The word pants has 2 different meanings: in the USA it means trousers, in the UK it means underwear.

Two people may have entirely different understandings, and put different value judgements on hearing that the defendant wore only pants and a T shirt!

If you can get a descriptive-word wrong, just imagine the scope for error with a judgement-word. Fred Bloggs is GREAT. Ask 10 people what being a great person means and you'll get 10 different answers.

How could this lead to genocide? Because people are lazy they seldom describe things in detail. Rather than say Fred Blogs is 5' 10" tall, blonde, blue eyes, speaks with an American accent someone may instead say Fred is handsome.

Because handsome is not the same for everyone, on hearing this everyone will use their interpretation of handsome and each have a completely different picture of Fred, which bears no resemblance to the facts.

Other problematic judgement-words include quality and expensive, since they are bound to have different meanings to different people.

What if the judgement-word was Evil, or Dangerous. What if due to experience, culture and context people put meanings into words which would result in fear, hate, panic. What if they acted on those feelings?

Unfortunately we all work with stereo-types, bias, pre-conceived ideas. Some are good - they protect us from dangers like fire, animals, drowning, accident - others restrict us, like phobias and bigotry. The only solution is to be factual in our dialogue and open to leaning from listening without bias.

Recommended link: http://server.vettweb.net.au/qho/qhlp/personalintegrity/documents/Theladderofinference.pdf

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