Thursday Thoughts
Read an interesting article by Ruth Ostrow (Home Truths, The Australian, Monday August 2 2017) highlighting the dangers of describing or labelling people in a one dimensional way based on past or recent behaviour.
Sometimes we assume a person is a fixed entity whose views are frozen in time.
“Primacy error”” occurs when, for example, we assume they are the same or have the same views as when we first met them.
“Recency error” occurs when we label people for all time based on how thy were when we last saw them.
Ostrow asserts that there are many versions of us all. Human personalities are multi-dimensional and constantly evolving over time. The facet we display at any one time reflects our state of being, the context and triggers to which we are exposed at the that time.
Struck me that although this is all self evident on reflection, we all tend to fall into the traps that Ostrow describes.
Good food for thought!
Mike Emerson
Brisbane Mediations