Overestimating Difference

The other day at dinner, a friend of mine was describing her brother to me, who tended to be very conservative politically. "He'd hate you," she said to me, "He hates me, and I'm liberal, but I'm not nearly as liberal as you are, so he'd hate you more." To which I flinched. "Are you sure," I asked her, "that you actually know my political views?"

This was not an unusual event for me. Over the past month, in both overt and not-so-overt ways, I have had many people express their assumptions to me about my political views. The basic presupposition is that I'm an extreme leftist. They probably infer that since I worked with a women's museum, come from San Francisco, and am getting a PhD (in anthropology no less) that I must be a pretty darn liberal. Logical enough, I suppose, but in point of fact, off the mark. (And if you question that, then you, too, should ask me what my views are.)

On a similar note, last month, I was interviewing a fairly prominent US political figure-- whose faith and religious motivation is well-known in motivating him to work on global poverty issues. He spent about half the interview with me reassuring me that efforts to have motivations that aren't limited to religious Christians, and that are also bi-partisan and multi-faith in foundation. All fair enough, except that I hadn't uttered a word to him that would indicate I would have a problem with acting from a foundation of Christian ethics...or Republican values. By the way he kept referring to my work with the museum and on human rights work, I can only infer that he had read my bio and made (what probably seemed like reasonable) assumptions about the politics that followed from my professional trajectory... or perhaps my last name.

Except again- he got it wrong by assuming that I would judge him, and made me in fact feel more uncomfortable than if he had just shared his motivations in a more straightforward manner.

We can't avoid making assumptions about people-- we do it all the time, unconsciously even. And often times it helps. Before I give a speech at a university, I always ask my hosts to give me a rough demographic breakdown of the audience so I know roughly who I'm speaking to and can fine-tune the presentation accordingly.

But there are things we shouldn't assume we know about people. We should never assume, for example, that someone will be judgmental about our own views, and thus feel the need to water them down. The US political figure with whom I talked revealed far more to me about his own insecurities and self-perceptions than he would have had he just played it straight.

We should never assume we know someone's politics unless they've actually told us their politics.

And finally, and most basically, we should never simplify the complexity and robustness of someone else's point of view or their ability to understand the opposite perspective. In yet another interview, a leading UK NGO figure told me about a trip he took to Africa with prominent conservative US politicians. "It was our chance," he said, "to size up our enemy, so to speak. To feel them out." But then he told me this beautiful story about how his organization actually learned a thing or two, about return on investment and other matters, from the people he'd assumed he'd needed to teach. And he also found his counterparts, the so-called 'enemies', to be extremely intelligent, reasonably open-minded, very decent people.

Which all goes to show that we often construct in our heads far more distance from people than actually exists in real life.