I played a fascinating game with fellow attendees at a conference last year. The facilitator divided us into different personality groups, using the Myers-Briggs classification.
The point of the game was to communicate with another group in a way that would convince them of something. The facilitator explained the differences between the personality types beforehand, as well as what the other groups were likely to respond to in terms of language and emotion.
The task was to speak to the other group in their own psychological language, as that improved your chances of success. Thus, we entered the negotiations with a lot of information. Even so, almost no group could sway the opinion of other groups, because switching to the psychological language of another was a skill people had not learned.
Politics is the same. Our politicians, social commentators, and intelligentsia only know one language – their own. The commies have their own set of words and foot-stomping gestures, the centre their tolerant protestations, and the radicals their fist-punching rhetoric. While these are clear signals of difference, real dialogue will only happen when you understand the signals in their own context.
The Myers-Briggs game not only teaches us about ourselves, but also how to connect with others better, perhaps to enhance friendships or score a business advantage. We should have a similar model for socio-politics.
The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Index) is widely used, based on Carl Jung’s work on personality. It divides people roughly into 4 categories: Introversion/Extroversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. This broad categorisation offers insights into where you focus your energy and how you view your place in the world.
We were told the ESTJ group would respond to messages that appeal to more social people, and that we should use descriptive words with them, adding facts that have an evaluative aspect to them. On the other hand, INFPs would be more likely to have a positive reaction to words evoking emotions and perceptions.
“I am not feeling you, man”
Despite this advanced knowledge, the “A fact is a fact!” crowd just couldn’t get through to the “I am not feeling you, man,” group, even when asked to discuss something as general as medical aid. What makes this outcome even more remarkable is that almost everyone in that room was white, of a similar age, had a similar education, and was generally liberal in terms of politics and economics.
What chance then do the people of South Africa’s different racial, socio-economic, and cultural groupings have, to achieve meaningful national dialogue? We don’t have the language, we don’t have the words. We don’t even have the capacity to divide ourselves into appropriate categories, because we’ve committed the critical error of making racism about race, when it is really about much deeper ideological and cultural differences between collectivism, individualism, and vastly different notions of what “freedom” means. Race is easier, though, and more fun, so we stick to that.
How can we change this? What we need are social ethologists, ethology being a branch of zoology that studies the behaviour of non-human animals. We need translators who can communicate with different groups in their own language. I do not mean Sotho or Zulu, but in “Communism” or “Free Marketism.” Speak to the animal in its own vernacular, like Dr Dolittle. We need political ethologists.
During the latter part of the 20th century, a group of naturalists and animal observers gained fame for approaching nature differently from the classic behaviourism of B.F. Skinner. In a world of sombre men in glasses and laboratory coats, the ethologists were the odd ones out. They dressed in khaki shorts and boots, took a butterfly net, a hat, and a notebook, and spent months in the natural habitats of the animals they were observing.
Behaviourists believed in universality and that “dog, cat, child, or rat” can all be treated and understood the same. Ethologists delighted in variety and understood the different behaviours, even within a species, to be vast and exciting. Skinner studied mostly pigeons and rats in laboratories, claiming that simple reward and punishment reinforcement tactics could shape any living creature in the same way. He was wrong.
A human is not a rat
The ethologists convincingly demonstrated that exposure, genetics, and environment all have major influences on decision-making. Fixed action patterns are not necessarily instinctive; they are learned. Moreover, a human is not a rat. As anyone who has ever owned cats and dogs can attest, you cannot speak cat to a dog and a dog does not understand cat, no matter how many treats you give it or hidings you dispense. The phenomenon of echolocation in bats was discovered by an ethologist, for instance, as was bees’ distinctive communication method using the 8-figured dance. Bats triangulate, bees twerk. Suddenly, we understood the erratic flight pattern of the bat to be triangulation, not confusion. You had to first learn how to speak bat, to grasp that.
Animals communicate differently with each other, and so do humans. Our use of language is indicative of deeper psycho-social constructs. Some cultures don’t have words for “left” or “right,” for instance, they would describe their relative position in terms of compass orientation. Spanish lacks the grammar for ascribing liability to events that happened by accident.
If someone bumped a vase off the table by mistake, a Spaniard would not say: “He broke the vase.” They would say: “The vase broke,” whereas the British would simply say: “He broke the vase.” Similarly, Nguni languages do not have as clear a distinction between concepts like responsibility, accountability, and culpability.
When it is not a vase that breaks, but an economy, the consequences of not understanding each other become more severe. It won’t be the king’s horses and the king’s men that put it back together; it will be a true national dialogue. We have to learn it. Progressives see “equality and diversity” through a power and justice lens that conservatives simply don’t have access to. To the EFF, economic freedom means socialism; to the FMF it looks more like libertarianism. Same words, completely different interpretations. The one triangulates, the other one twerks.
The ethologists returned from the field suntanned, having designed cool and elegant studies, and excited about learning something new. Perhaps South Africa’s real dialogue cannot happen in think-tanks and in government-organised boardrooms and hotels.
What could be very helpful is for some ethologists to go out in the field and return with guidelines, observations, and a user’s guide.
Field experience
I’m keen! Pick me! I have some field experience. I lived in a community that had one foot in a suburb and the other in a township. When our town council and Eskom failed us during a bitter winter, leaving us without electricity for long periods, we suddenly had to talk to one another. I discovered that the word “overcrowding” had a different meaning for the liberal DA voters, as compared to the more socialist ANC voters, who insisted “overcrowding” was offensive, and that we should refer to it as the “overloading” of the electricity line instead.
One side viewed the problem as having an external locus of control, the other more internal. The concept of “illegal” was viewed vastly differently between the groups. Until we could agree on the words, we could not commit to the course of action. As it turns out, what we did was totally “illegal” but also “solving our problems our own way, without government, working with third-party contractors.” I’ve never seen communists behave more libertarian in my whole life!
Political parties and think-tanks have to start asking themselves: Do you want to be correct, or do you want to be effective? If what you are doing is not getting through to the other side, you have to change. What is happening now is that the dogs are barking on one side of the fence, as viciously as they can, teeth flaring and saliva dripping from the intensity of their own self-importance. On the other side of the fence, the cats are calmly looking at them, then turn their backs and lift their tails, flaring a well-placed butt, then having a good lick.
Shouting the answers
At the very least, parties like the DA should get some urgent help in terms of how they are viewed by much of the population. People are shouting the answers at you, but you have to learn how to listen. Similarly, the ANC could do well with a translation service that helps them in how to listen to Trump, for instance. Not to agree with him, but to learn how to speak bully. It doesn’t help to twerk when the other is triangulating.
Most urgently, though, we need our politicians, influencers, and communities to start understanding each other – in the other one’s language. And then we need media outlets to publish the conversations and the learnings.
Let’s get a true national dialogue started.
Join me.
[Image: IgorKocka from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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