Automatic Meaning Making…..yikes
In George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison’s work,“Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains ” addressed many striking and interesting examples from history. Certain examples from the Automatic Meaning Making section of their piece displayed how extremely vulnerable the human mind is and how identities and perceptions are manipulated and altered based on their experiences, beliefs, and their state of mind. Goethals and Allison shared two stories from history that caught my eye. One example from the US Civil War where a desk clerk saw and mistreated a “ very ordinary-looking Union officer and a young boy” and then shifted her behavior when she learned they were actually “U.S. Grant & son, Galena, Illinois.”, a Union hero. Not only did the bystander’s behavior change, but their perception of the two was also altered based on their schema of an American Hero. Need +given information coming together to make a “automatic reinterpretation”… I don’t like it. The ability that one’s appearance has in controlling others’ perception indicates huge implications of the importance of impressions for Political Leaders. I do not like how once appearance has so much weight over how the average American views a potential leader. Ew. This also makes me, someone who tends to be optimistic about the average human’s intentions, upset about how the desk clerk would mistreat some rando due to perceived unimportance. BAD.
This connects me to earlier in the semester when we discussed how “lizard brain” and other innate feelings and urges to survive to drive a lot of human behavior, even when we are not the slightest bit aware of it. Humans’ memory and understanding of the world around them is their brain, constantly puzzle piecing together what they literally see with past experience and learned assumptions. This is helpful in the face of danger like someone running at you with an angry face, weapon in hand… however, when it translates to the modern world where technology, advertising, and media run the show, it is very concerning how there are literal humans who specialize in manipulating how a public figure is perceived… the truth is unknown and people are like mindless puppets. This was made clear in the case of Warren Harding mentioned in the Goethals and Allison reading in how the danger of the financial panic, an epidemic, and hysterical phenomena like the “red-scare” in combination with a poor leaders convincing “physique, bronzed complexion, sonorous voice, and smooth motions” made voters view him “kind, intelligent, honest”. This screams danger to me. Especially with a pandemic, ensured financial crises and our xenophobic world…. urg.
The role that schema and perception play in manipulating the average human’s emotions and perception of all things in everyday life clearly played a LARGE and threatening role in the chaos that was the Stanford Prison Experiment. This simple set up displayed the vulnerable nature of the human mind in ways beyond professor Zimbardo’s or any psychologist’s wildest dreams… I believe the horrific and traumatizing experience of the volunteer college students began when they unexpectedly were humiliated and made to look like a criminal in front of their families and neighbors: setting up their mentality to anticipate unexpected dehumanization going into the experiment. There have been stories that have come out insisting that some of the guards were further (and unofficially ) instructed to carry out more violent or aggressive acts towards the prisoners which definitely would have contaminated the results and amplified the experiment’s intensity. Regardless… the random volunteers who were dressed and treated like prisoners FELT like prisoners… same with the guards. This strongly reflects the findings in George R. Goethals and Scott T. Allison’s work, “Mystery and Meaning: Ambiguity and the Perception of Leaders, Heroes and Villains ”. My question is… how do we prevent these schemas and implicit biases and learned understanding of the world from “driving the bus”… in other words…
I read something one time (and could not even begin to give a source) that said something along the lines of the first thought you have in judging someone is what society says and your second is what you actually believe. Essentially, it was saying how your ‘lizard brain’ leads to implicit biases that are often seen as a snap judgement. This snap judgement stays if your implicit biases match your explicit ones but change if they do not match. Going off that, the answer to the question that you pose at the end of your comment that makes the most sense to me is to make sure that you are paying more attention to that second thought. Then, you are not falling victim to those snap judgements and mind games.