First I want to touch on how and why stereotypes and paradigms come into play. Then I’ll use a true, real-world example of paradigms at play featuring Monogamish Marriage.
When I say true, I mean true to me. True from my perspective given what I know, experienced, and have seen repeated often in the past. In the end, this is just my understanding of things as I see them. I don’t actually know what goes through other people’s heads, and I’m sure other people are happier for it. I can only give my what information I have and my interpretations of it.
Large Scale Sorting and Filing: Stereotypes
We can only know so much about the people with whom we interact in our day. Our brains use shortcuts to organize data, which helps us process information quickly and efficiently.
Stereotypes exemplify this process: They are general, overly-simplified beliefs about an entire category or population based on characteristics that are often true for part of that group but cannot be true of everyone in that group.
Stereotypes are useful and help us navigate social situations by creating a foundation of knowledge for an individual that is not based on anything we know about that individual but rather based on what we do know about people who we have judged to be similar to that person. This is rarely fair to the individual—because it can only be fair if that person completely matches all of the various stereotypes in which you placed them—but it is helpful to have a frame of reference to engage socially.
But this is why it’s easier to engage with people with whom you have a hobby in common: They are in a population for which you have a favorable stereotype because you too are a member. And why meeting someone while both of you are naked can be difficult: Much of our opening impression is derived from visual presentation.
If someone happened to introduce us at PCAP, the following stereotypes might be employed: lifestyler (because I’m there), gym-rat (because of my size and shape), nerd (because of my D&D t-shirt), and a brain-fried druggie (because the person who introduced as the guy who writes about drugs, which I think trivializes my blog, but fine!).
Stereotypes are only problematic when people believe them to be 100% accurate across that population and/or when the stereotype continues as a frame of reference instead of being updated.
Small Scale Sorting and Filing: Paradigms
Paradigms are frameworks of understanding concepts, a way of simplifying what we know about specific things but lumping similar knowledge together. They are more narrow than stereotypes and used to refine and process knowledge instead of creating a wide-base foundation.
To return to the example of when you meet me, during our opening exchange you use stereotypes to gauge what topics I might be knowledgeable about so that you can keep the conversation flowing in a natural, organic way.
But now you are taking information specific to me and using that to cut away some of the junk info you took from the stereotypes. Which is good because meathead-pothead-nerd is a weird amalgamation of dissimilar stereotypes for most people, and that might have made your brain itch. You are developing your Shane paradigm.
Maybe you latch on to how I keep making puns and doubling all the entendres. More than anything else, your impression of me was someone who tries to be funny. “Shane Drug-Guy: Struggling Comedian” gets stamped on the paradigm folder that contains your understanding of Shane.
Your paradigm will be shaped by continued experience of me, and those will either reinforce or break down those frameworks. But those frameworks will also influence how you interpret me and my actions and motivations. Confirmation bias will color your perspective so that you are more likely to see behaviors that uphold your paradigm rather than change it.
And now, for the real example.
Asking the Monogamishes a Question
I exchanged words with Kate and Liam via social media starting this blog. Likely I have a greater sense of them than they do for me given how much of themselves they have put out into the world. The age of their blog alone makes this true, and there is a podcast on top of it.
But they have a sense of me. They each have formed paradigms prior to any meeting. I doubt I shifted it during any encounter with me. Not that we encountered each other much before Erin and I sat down at their session during PCAP 2022.
At the start, Kate mentions they plan on using an app for audience engagement. I have been to several professional conferences and used many such interactive tools. I’ve also been on the host side of such events and have both helped speakers use them and been the designer who implemented such tools for the event app my company had developed for our events.
I have extensive background knowledge about this technology and that knowledge pinged a concern for me (and likely me alone): I often run afoul of unspecified character limits. I had already lost several messages in the PCAP event app because the app did not stop me writing past the limit. It only posted everything before the limit. I had lost more than half of my of a post several times to that PCAP app!
This far into this post, if there is anything you know, you know I am wordy.
But if I know there is a character limit, I can usually make that work. Especially when the character limit is shown and updates in real time.
I raised my hand (ever the good student, me) and asked a question: “Is there character limit?”
A Reasonable Answer (Considering the Paradigms) but a Confusing One
For a moment, I detected confusion in Kate’s expression. I’m used to causing confusion, but I rarely understand why. She then smiles and said, “You can try to find one!”
OK…that didn’t really soothe my concerns about the character limit. Nor I don’t understand why she would be squirrely about that. Having detected that moment of confusion, I know what happened if not why it happened: She thought I was making a joke.
Because I don’t know why my question was not taken seriously, my instinct is to let people think it is a joke. It’s a reasonable assumption given my propensity for making jokes. Which is itself a defense mechanism so that a joke-making precedent is established to use as cover as I back out of moments like this. I flashed my big old goofy smile, gave her a hearty, “Will do!”, and wondered how I messed up asking a simple question.
I could see my error the moment Kate used the interactive tool. It’s a multiple choice app, not a text-based feedback app that might show a conversation flowing on a projected word-wall. which is what I had assumed this app would do. (Giant text blocks play havoc on those text walls and will shunt several messages off the page at once. I should know: I’ve done that twice at other conferences.)
Had I but waited, I never would have needed to ask. So more the fool I in this situation.
Breaking Down the Paradigms at Work
From my perspective, I’d asked a genuine question and wanted a real answer because I get anxious about and embarrassed by my inability to shut up. I tried to find information to calm my anxiety about an imagined scenario that would not have occurred.
From her perspective, I was asking a dumb question for no valid reason she could understand.
Fair.
The next time I raised my hand and Kate met my eye, she checked herself before she called on me and instead went on to take a question from someone else.
Also fair.
Whether that first inquiry was information added or knowledge confirmed, her paradigm of me now included “Joker/Fool.”
Or maybe I’m overthinking things (Me? Overthinking? What?), and everyone gets to ask only one question.
Either way, I didn’t raise my hand again.
This entire interaction is still crystal clear in my mind: her confusion then dismissal, my confusion at the dismissal. Because this is how my mind works.
(Why it does this is another bog post. Yes, I have figured it out.)
But That’s Not the Point to the Story, Because Afterwards…
That’s an OK example of paradigms. But it’s what comes after that story that makes this an exceptional example!
Erin and I have been working on our communication a lot. There are tons of examples in this blog about ways we were not understanding each other: using the word swap to mean completely different things for one. And that’s small potatoes compared to some of the more recent revelations.
Erin made a statement like “when you are doing that, I think you’re….”
I asked, “To what does the that refer?”
She repeated her statement verbatim.
I repeated my question verbatim and added that simply repeating herself did not in fact add clarity.
She gave me a confused look—I’m used to those—so I explained that her that had two points of reference in her sentence and I did not know to which she meant for it to refer.
This conversation went on a tangent that had me explaining that I often get confused by imprecise language and when I ask for clarification, I usually don’t get it. I don’t understand why it happens, but people assume I’m taking the piss (to use a British expression I think fits here better than any American one I know).
And when I can see that my confusion is not understood, that my question is going ignored, I hide my embarrassment with humor.
She asked when stuff like that happened. I gave the example of the Monogamish session when I asked the question and Kate thought I was joking, so she didn’t take my second one.
Erin was shocked. She had thought my first question had been a joke too.
Well-Crafted Paradigms Based on Accurate Previous Knowledge
Kate’s thinking of me as a joker is based upon what knowledge she has of me: I don’t seem to take myself seriously, I make jokes at my own expense all the time, and one of the most common jokes is about how verbose I am. She knows there’s no freeform text exchange in the app, so she doesn’t even get the purpose of the question. Even if there was a text box, why would someone be concerned enough to ask about character limits? Conclusion: He’s got to be making a joke! Joke-making is inappropriate and disruptive in this setting (I agree). No more calling on him. (Quite reasonable.)
Erin on the other hand, had a completely different paradigm but it resolves to the same answer. Moreso because of her own personality passing judgment on the behavior. Being a shy introvert, there is not a question in the world worth asking during a session. And one about a character limit? Who cares? That is info that will be figured out during the first Q&A moment. Just wait! Getting that info can’t be why he asked that…he must be trying to provoke a humorous exchange. (Also quite reasonable logic.)
But Neither Match My Truth
And yet those were not correct evaluations of my motivation. I like well-defined parameters before I start writing. If I write something to the wrong audience, with the wrong tone, or with the wrong purpose and intent, I could waste hours writing garbage that I might not be able to even cannibalize for the rewrite. I have a tumultuous history with interactive apps during conference sessions. Dozens of solid bidet puns were wiped from the PCAP app and flushed before their time, my efforts at humor a waste. It stinks when that happens!
The motivation that Kate and Erin both came up with (despite disparate paradigms of me) makes more sense as a justification for my behavior than the real motivation. I know that the things I do are just a little off, but I don’t usually understand why. To help me uncover such truths, my mind built an instinct for grabbing, storing, and replaying such moments so I can review all of my interactions and scrutinize all the social faux paus I make.
Useful? Yes.
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