Airport Customs Officials have a very special talent -- the ability to make you doubt the most fundamental facts about yourself. More than once, I've had to stop and think about how old I am or the city in which I was born, simply due to the intensity of the rapidly fired questions. A couple years ago, as I re-entered the country from France, I prepared myself for another game of 20 questions. This time was a little different though (most things in life pertaining to France are a "little different"). The lady in front of me had ticked off the official by crossing the yellow line before he had waved her in.
WAIT until I call you he yelled at the poor woman, who, if I had to guess, did not speak English. When she finally escaped what was certainly a traumatic experience for her, I was invited to the counter. We got through normal questions then moved on to my college life.
What are you studying? he asked.
Um...Psychology I responded nervously.
That's exactly what we need in this world he responded.
Psychologists to deal with crazy people like the lady before you. I silently disagreed ("crazy" is not defined by "non-native English speaker"), but nodded and smiled. If there's only one thing you remember from this blog, let it be to never disagree with U.S. Customs Authorities.
As people, we judge. We also misjudge. It sounds wrong and we can wish it weren't true, but it's a simple fact of human nature.
A couple weeks ago, two others colleagues and I administered a sort of ad hoc social psychology experiment. We stood on a street corner in San Francisco during lunch hour and asked passerbys if we could ask them just one question: What is the most frustrating aspect of your work day? If you're from a big city, the following statistic will make sense. It may come as a surprise to you small town folk though. Only about 1/4 of those asked actually responded. Some of the responses included people, wanting to be somewhere else, not that kind of question and people on the street asking me questions.
There are a number of disheartening explanations for the responses we received that day. People may have been in a rush. Disenchanted by question-askers on the street. Uninterested in strangers. Or maybe they are just rude people in general.
In psychology, actions and behaviors can be attributed to situations or dispositions. Put simply, did a person act a certain way due to a specific situation or does she act in such a way constantly? We have a tendency to attribute our own behaviors to situations and other people's behaviors to their dispositions. We categorize others. Make blanket statements about them. We are the only exception.
After some discussion, my colleagues and I came to the conclusion that for some reason or another, people are not happy with their current state of affairs. Perhaps they were stressed out by work. Perhaps they needed alone time during their lunch break. I accept that we could have been absolutely positively incorrect in our diagnosis. But we deserve credit for the fact that we considered situational and not dispositional explanations, a foreign concept for people like that Customs Official.
There is nothing more important in this world than trying to see life from the eyes of someone else. You'll gain a deeper understanding and appreciation. And by the transitive property, you'll be more deeply understood and appreciated.
As Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho once said, "It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path." If you ask me, the most difficult skill we must develop is the ability to judge ourselves by the same standards we judge others. Because, as Francois De La Rochefoucauld put it best, "A person well satisfied with himself is seldom satisfied with others, and others, rarely with him."
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