One easy way to see the Web of Human Behavior and Empathy Formula play out is by looking around at people you know. The people who relate to best are usually the people you feel you have the most in common with. But you can relate to anyone if you can figure out how their life is different from yours.
What does that tell us about how people see the world? How do differences between your life and someone else’s affect their feelings about what happens in life and what they should do?
ACT I
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We’ve talked a lot in this series about stories of the world. We’ve worked our way up from the biochemistry of survival and reproduction, to the evolution of our brains.
We’ve followed that all the way through to the Empathy Formula, where we all use our abilities and ideas in our environments to pursue what we value in life. We think of more ideas in the process, which affect the decisions we make.
You can use that as a starting point for understanding how someone else’s life is different from yours. Then you can use the Web of Human Behavior to understand it better.
Now here are two new questions:
What does that tell us about understanding other people’s stories of the world?
And what does that tell us about what we and other people learn from our stories of the world?
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The reason we tell stories of the world today is the same reason people have always told them. Because for us to work together depends on our sharing an understanding of cause and effect.
If you and I were working together to grow food on a farm, first we’d need a plan for how to till the soil, when to plant our seeds, maybe how to fertilize and irrigate the soil, and when to harvest the food. We can’t work together if we don’t even agree on how to do it.
Everyone believes in a story of the world. But people aren’t always entirely conscious of their story of the world. Your story of the world is whatever pattern of cause and effect you feel is true. Even if you don’t know why you feel the way you do about some parts of it.
Even if no one told you your story of the world, your story of the world is what you would tell someone else if they asked you to explain the whole world to them. If you’re a parent you’ve tried to tell that story to your children, or you’re somewhere in the process of telling it. If you have parents, they’ve tried to tell you their story of the world, even though you might not have believed all of it, or even paid attention to all of it.
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Your worldview is the lessons you learn from your story of the world. But there’s a lot more to that than the words people use to tell the story.
There’s also how you’ve felt the pieces of the story coming together. That means that someone who’s learned the same story of the world you have could have learned a very different worldview from you. It also means that someone who believes in a different story of the world could have a worldview that’s much the same as yours.
Just look at the Civil Rights Movement. Most of the Civil Rights protesters and most of the segregationists were Christians. But within the Civil Rights movement, Christians worked with Muslims, Jews, and people of many other religions and non-religions.
A shared story of the world helps to put us on the path to learning compatible worldviews. It gives us a shared vocabulary for talking about our ideas. That helps us talk to each other instead of hating each other and fighting each other over misunderstandings. It also helps us adapt the stories of the world we already believe in to get on the same page as each other.
Understanding people’s worldviews is more complicated than that. It depends on figuring out how people feel about ideas, and how they connect ideas in their minds because of their feelings.
Think about your life, and think about the life of someone you know well. How have your abilities, environments, and ideas affected what’s happened over the course of your lives? And how have those things affected your perspectives on the world?
ACT II
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Drawing an outline of your own worldview is pretty easy.
First, what ideas do you believe in so strongly that you aren’t willing to change your mind about them?
What ideas are you fairly certain of but would be willing to change your mind about if you thought of better ideas or heard better ideas?
What ideas do you not know much about?
The trick to this is that you’ve thought a lot about many of the things you believe, but you might not have thought much about other things you believe because you’ve never heard of a conflicting belief. Maybe you like searching online for ideas you don’t know much about, and by now you’ve heard of so many things that nothing surprises you anymore.
But there are probably some issues you haven’t heard much about because people don’t like to talk about them much. Like sexuality or trauma or dying.
Or you haven’t heard much about them because a relatively small number of people are affected by them directly. Like indigenous rights or transgender issues or health effects of rare diseases.
Everyone else’s worldview works that way too. Some things they aren’t willing to change their minds about, some things they’re fairly certain of but could be willing to change their minds about, and some things they know they don’t know much about and are curious to learn more.
Curious people wanting to learn more isn’t a problem for science, education, anti-racism, or the environmental crisis. The problem that makes our communities break down when we need them most are strong incompatible beliefs.
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Your strongest feelings, and everyone else’s, involve a lot of subconsciousness. So there is no easy, direct way to talk about strong beliefs that makes people feel like changing their minds.
The Empathy Formula is a good place to start looking for a way through that. We all value the same basic things. We use our abilities in our environments, and we think of ideas in the process. So v = aei.
You’re trying to understand how the other person’s ideas evolved. If someone believes in something very strongly, it means they were convinced of it very strongly by something they probably aren’t telling you about.
Should you keep arguing about your conflicting ideas that you each strongly believe in? Or should you try talking about the ideas your strong beliefs are based on?
When things happen to us, we use our abilities and our ideas in our environments to try to understand what happened and to react to it. If someone has thought of an idea that you haven’t thought of it means at least one of those three things was different.
This is what Stanislavski called the Magic If.
Think about your life. Then think about one thing being different. How many things in your life would that affect?
Now think about another thing being different. What would that affect?
If you keep adding differences like this one by one, eventually you can work your way around to understanding anyone’s point of view.
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Environment means that something external was different. An event that happened to you didn’t happen to the other person. Or it happened to them and not to you. Or the same event could’ve happened to both of you but something about the rest of the environment was different.
If you stay in school and someone else drops out, they’re changing their environment. You’re going to take classes and learn things that they never will. But at the same time, they’ll spend their time doing things that you aren’t doing, and they’ll think about them and learn things from them.
Even between you and someone else who stays in school, differences in your lives outside of school can affect how much you pay attention in school, how seriously you take it, how much you learn from it, and even what you learn from it.
Let’s say your parents are married. If someone else’s parents got divorced, or one of them died, or they were never married and they’ve never met their dad, that can affect your attitudes toward school.
The purpose of education is to prepare you for the future. So you each might think differently about your education because you think differently about your future.
If someone has one or two big life events different from you, your attitudes toward other things might change some, but so little that you don’t notice it most of the time.
The other people you go to school with live in the same area, and know a lot of the same people. So you’re all accustomed to some differences among you, but you also have a lot of similarities.
But it’s easy to imagine more and more difference between you and someone else. Like, your parents are married and you have a supportive home life in a safe neighborhood. The other person’s mom died and they live with their dad who’s a drunk and doesn’t have a job and yells at them all the time, and they live in a neighborhood with a lot of drugs and robberies and violent crime, and their dad sits up all night every night yelling at the TV, so they hardly ever get enough sleep.
That can make school mean something completely different to that person. To them school might be the safe place where they go to get away from their home and their neighborhood, where they see their friends, and where they get the best food they’re going to eat all day. But they might not see much point to most of, or any, of their classes, because their teachers never talk about anything that relates to anything they think about.
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Next is abilities. Abilities means any physical or inherent mental differences between you and the other person.
Schools divide classes up into subjects so students can learn different things and also so they can discover which subjects interest them the most and which they have the best talents for. A lot of people don’t notice this, but the format of school almost always favors students who have the ability to learn from lectures and books while sitting at desks for six hours a day.
Information that’s easy to put into words is the easiest kind to teach, because it depends on the fewest materials. Pretty much all you need are books, paper, pencils, desks for students to sit in, and a classroom to put the desks in. That makes it the most convenient to teach the students who learn best that way.
So what do you do with students who learn best by hands-on experience? Teaching that way requires more investment.
Each student needs more floor space to learn that way than when they sit at a desk. That means you need bigger classrooms.
You also need things for them to put their hands on, so you need to buy more things than books, paper, and pencils.
It also takes longer to get out their hands-on materials at the beginning of every class and put them away at the end of every class. So you need longer classes or you get less learning time per class.
Teaching some students the way they learn best takes more investment than teaching others. So there’s always a trade-off in education. If you invest in the most cost-effective teaching, you focus on teaching fewer things to a smaller group of students. If you spread the money out to teach more skills to more students, you focus less on teaching the smaller skill set to the smaller group of students.
If two people go to the same school, take the same classes, live in the same neighborhood, and both have supportive families, they can still end up with very different ideas about what school is for, if the school accommodates the learning abilities of one better than it does the other. If you learn best from books and lectures and that’s how all your classes are, you can learn a lot from your classes and feel very interested in them. If someone else learns by hands-on experience and there aren’t any classes like that, they can feel that school is mostly boring and not learn as much as you do.
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Next, look at the ideas each of you went into the situation with. If the event and the rest of the environment are the same, and the abilities you and the other person have are the same, you can still think of different ideas now based on the ideas you started with.
Let’s say you and someone else go to the same school and take the same classes, you live in similar homes and similar neighborhoods, and you both feel like you’re learning valuable things in your classes.
If you’ve grown up hearing your parents talk about school as a way to expand your mind and understand the world better, while the other person grew up hearing their parents talk about school as a way to get a job and make money, you’ll still think differently about school.
ACT III
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The easiest way to explain what v = aei means is: Listen to people talk with the attitude that they have good reasons for the ideas and feelings they have, and thatthey know important things about life that you don’t. Whatever they know that you don’t comes from abilities, environment, ideas, or a combination of them.
If you need to take another step in understanding people’s ideas, you can expand the Empathy Formula to the Web of Human Behavior. The variable factors level of the Web is abilities, environment, skills, personal history, cultural background, and goals.
When you need to understand ideas better, think about what kinds of ideas they are.
Are they skills?
Are they personal history?
Are they cultural background?
Are they goals?
Then you can go down another level, to the universal motivations, to see what it’s an idea about.
If it’s a skill, what’s it a skill for?
Survival?
Safety?
Sex?
Family?
Social?
Self gratification?
Self actualization?
Self fulfillment?
Fulfillment of self fulfillment?
Or more than one of those?
If it’s for more than one of those, is it for some of them more than others?
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Your worldview is whatever you feel to be true. It’s the result of everything that makes you feel that ideas are true coming together, whether your ideas are true or not.
You feel closest to people whose worldviews you feel are most similar to yours. The closer someone’s worldview is to yours, the more you feel you can depend on them to help you get what you want in life.
Even if you have family or long time friends you feel close to in spite of big religious or political differences, it means you feel your connections to each other make up a more important part of your worldview than your differences.
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I’ve been talking here about how differences in talents and life outside of school makes the same education system work differently for different people. Life in the adult world is way more complicated than that.
Wherever someone makes a decision that doesn’t make any sense to you, it means there are some factors in their decision making that you don’t understand. But how many ways do people judge other people because the other people make decisions that don’t make any sense to them?
As long as our story of America is mostly a story about rich, heterosexual, Christian White men, or more about any group than any other group, then whoever is being left out of the story is having some of their decision making factors left out.
A story about all of us isn’t a story that tries to use one group of people as role models for everyone else.
A story about all of us is a story about human decision making factors, and how they affect us differently in different situations.