Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, has a great column in today's New York Times entitled "He Who Cast the First Stone Probably Didn't."
In the piece, Prof. Gilbert talks about the ways people justify actions that they would otherwise reject on moral grounds:
"In virtually every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine.
After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and “revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first.
That’s why participants in every one of the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the even-numberedness of their punches as grounds for exculpation.
The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of other people’s actions as the causes of what came later..."
Prof. Gilbert summarizes in an elegant paragraph the root reason for why people often get sucked into intractable disputes:
"What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own. Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other people’s reasons and other people’s punches."
In an interesting experiment, researchers in the UK had individuals apply pressure on the fingers of another person, and then asked the recipient to apply the same amount of force back on the initial presser, and so on. Very quickly soft pokes escalated into hard jabs, because each person exerted almost 40% more force than the prior press they had received.
Prof. Gilbert sums it up this way:
"Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses to theirs.
None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance, avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable stew. Until we learn to stop trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves — there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback."
This research touches on the core lessons of dispute resolution. Our brains can deceive us, and that deception lies at the root of many of our misunderstandings. Personally, I'm interested in exploring how technology can help us avoid making “disproportionate use of force.” Maybe we can circumvent some of the shortcomings of our biology.