Rock Paper Scissors Chapter 6&7 (Shanay)
Chapter 6 of Len Fisher’s Rock, Paper, Scissors talks about trust, and the importance in the world. He starts of with a slightly amusing example of him recreating when Sir Walter Raleigh took of his coat and out it over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth’s feet wouldn’t get wet while she crossed. His experience was different from Sir Walter’s as none of the women he graciously took his coat of for actually took advantage of his offer, instead they walked around it. Even though the means of obtaining this information were out of the ordinary a fact is still a fact: the sense of trust unknown faces is not present. He explains how having mutual trust can turn out to be a win-win for both people involved. I believe that this is extremely true and having a mutual trust with a person is in everyone’s best interest. As I kept reading Fisher talks about another reason why people are less trusting, with the amount of scams and evil things people are capable of doing its easy to figure out why we lock our doors every night and keep private information among ourselves. The first time I was let out of my mom’s sight in the outdoors she told me “ Don’t talk to strangers” and I understand that’s one of the first thing every parent tells their young kid before going out in the world. When this ideology is told to you at a very young and impressionable age its understandable that people don’t walk around talking to everybody and walking on stranger’s coats. Later on, in the chapter Fisher brought up a very interesting point, for me at least. He talked about how a person’s ability to trust is instilled very young, and their primary caregivers have a lot to do with it. If the caregiver is always around and dependable you grow up to be more trusting towards other people. In my experience ( and I’ve lived a pretty sheltered life) this seems to hold true.
In chapter 7 Fisher’s goes on to describe how if people treated other people how they wish to be treated the world around us would be much better and productive. I have a pretty simple example for this that applies to everyone. If a person is rude and obnoxious to people that person would have no one to be with, however if a person is sweet and kind he/she would be surrounded by people who want to spend time with him/her.
Jaclyn Kemly
I also found the connection between trust and the primary caregiver very interesting. Until Fischer highlighted the connection, I chalked up the trusting character trait to a side effect of personality. I also think it is interesting how we are given hard-and-fast rules as children, such as “Don’t talk to strangers”. As we grow up, however, those rules seem to combine with our own judgement into a different kind of trust. For example, basically all I’ve done since coming to college is talk to strangers, but there have been people that I have deemed “creepy” and have opted to avoid opposed to showing my usually friendliness. On the other hand, there have been people that I’ve found myself in conversation with that ended up creeping me out even though my gut did not tell me to avoid them. This is another indicator that gut reactions are not reliable whatsoever, though we rely on them heavily.