Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are two of my all-time favourite films, and though far from perfect there are quite a few great scenes, one of which I have in mind as an introduction for this post.
The scene is near the start of Batman Begins and Bruce Wayne (Batman) goes to Falcone’s (the huge mob boss bad guy) restaurant to show he isn’t afraid. Here’s a link <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtHuoF5qoC8>. Bruce goes to show “that not everybody in Gotham is afraid [of Falcone]”. Falcone tells Bruce that he hasn’t a clue (read in your best mobster accent)- “You think because your mommy and your daddy got shot you know about the ugly side of life. But you don’t.” After a nice little scary monologue in which he threaten’s Bruce’s half-girlfriend and butler, showing Bruce that he is naïve and ought to be scared, he finishes by saying, “and we always fear what we don’t understand”.
Now this quip is just a hollywood quip. It doesn’t really make sense in the dialogue, as the whole point is that Bruce is not afraid of Falcone (he says as much) and that Bruce doesn’t understand how the world, or at least mob bosses, works. Nor does it hold up as a general norm: sure, there are some things we are scared of which we don’t understand (like when a helicopter visits a native tribe), but there are many others we aren’t scared of, as we don’t understand them and don’t realise the consequences. Bruce is in this situation – he isn’t scared and he doesn’t understand. Sure, I’m being pedantic, and I’ll let it go as its a nice quip and the dialogue, as with the rest of the film, is good enough to make up for it, but it does give me something to think about. Bruce spends the next part of the film living among thieves in poverty in order to better understand the criminal underworld to later go back to fight Falcone and his crime empire. The key point is this: Bruce realises he doesn’t understand but that understanding is important to fighting it.
Introduction over, that was half-relevant to the topic here, which is about being open minded to things that we don’t understand. As humans, I think we have some psychological thing which gives us prejudice and assumptions about things that we don’t understand, or at least aren’t aware of. Something we don’t understand is suggested or mentioned, and we react negatively against it. As this isn’t a piece of research I’m not going to attempt to say why this might be, just point out that it’s something we do.
And of course, that it’s something we should be aware that we do and work against, because understanding things is good. We can use or make better use of things that we understand, and prejudice and assumptions – by their nature not being based on evidence – distort us from making more rational choices.
I’ll start with an example. For the last year and a half, I haven’t washed my hair with shampoo; instead, I either wash it with water or, every week or so, I wash it with bicarbonate of soda and then condition it with vinegar (usually white wine or cider, not malt).
The usual reaction I get to that is along the lines of, “that’s weird”. Is that your reaction too? It’s one I’d expect. It’s outside the social norm and probably something you haven’t heard of before. Alongside this “weird” reaction is a negative one. People think it’s a bad thing that I’m doing, laugh at me, think I’m odd, etc. Maybe this isn’t your reaction, but it’s the one I usually get. (Obviously it’s a pretty small thing, I’m just using it to make a point).
But why think that? Sure, it’s weird in the sense that it’s outside the social norm, but shouldn’t receive a negative reaction. If you trust my judgement (and if you don’t there’s little point you reading this blog) then the rational reaction ought be curiosity, not dismissal: as an intelligent and rational human,
it might be that I’ve considered what I’m doing and you can learn from what I’m doing. (For those who want to read a bit more about my hair-washing habits and why I use the bicarb-and-vinegar wash, that’s at the end.) This is an example of something different, something unusual, something that people don’t understand, and I find that in general, instead of being open minded, curious and trying to learn about things they don’t understand, people dismiss them. As I said, I think a better reaction would be curiosity, not dismissal. It could be there’s a good reason why a sensible person (ie me) washes their hair with bicarb and vinegar, so ask about that instead of just dismissing it. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner whose book about intuition and bias I’m currently reading, says that “our minds are susceptible to systematic biases” and that “there are systematic biases in our own decisions, intuitive preferences that consistently violate the rules of rational choice”. I think that the prejudice dismissing things we don’t understand is such a bias, and by being aware of it we can try to guard against it. Though we think of ourselves as rational, lots of things we do are irrational, and the more aware we are of this the better we can counteract it.
Another example I find of people being prejudice against something they don’t understand is with parkour. It’s pretty understandable why people have prejudices about it – that it’s dangerous, for crazy extreme stunt people, or similar – because the portrayal through the media is that. A guy called Charles Moreland says in a TED talk about the misunderstanding of parkour, “Herein lies the fundamental issue with parkour: either nobody knows what it is or they have a grossly misrepresented view of it”. It’s kinda like seeing the 100m final in the Olympics and deciding not to go jogging: there’s a lot more to parkour under the surface. (I’m stopping myself getting sidetracked with a parkour rant by leaving you with this link explaining it <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x-vqr3ZnZE>). To many people, if I suggest they give it a try, they respond by saying that it isn’t for them for one of a number of reasons that typically isn’t true. A negative, dismissing reaction. I try to explain why they’re misunderstanding, but for many people their mind is already made up and they aren’t really listening. By not being open minded and curious and instead reacting with the fear-and-lack-of-understanding reaction, people miss out on the possibility of better understanding it and trying it out.
The point here isn’t that you should try parkour (which you of course should – check out the TED talk and remember you’re meant to be open minded!); this is just an example to demonstrate the wider point. It isn’t about missing out on parkour, it’s about missing out on all of the other things that we have prejudice against by not understanding.
A few more quick examples of things that I do differently that I find some negative reactions to:
1. Eating Kiwi fruits with the skin on, biting into it like an apple or in slices. I find it tastes better by improving the mushy texture of the inside of it by having the skin holding it together. Also reduces the effort in preparing and eating it to just requiring rinse instead of scooping out. Sure, it might not be for everyone, but some people might prefer it (though try it more than once, the first time I didn’t like it because it was odd, but I quickly got used to it and found it better).
2. Having a standing up desk. Sometimes I use my laptop standing up to give me better posture, otherwise my back gets sore. I find it more comfortable. Apparently there are scientific studies about concentration or metabolism showing benefits there. Some friends in my room recently commented on it and said “er, what’s that pile of cardboard boxes there for?” I explained it was my standing up desk (cardboard boxes is the best I have at the moment). They responded with, “Sure, if that works for you, but don’t try to get me to do it!”.
An example of a standing up desk. Mine is much less professional looking than this. Image from http://www.flickriver.com/photos/nzadrozny/5476865289/
3. Various eating habits. I generally try and avoid “carbs” (by which I mean foods which have little nutritional value outside the carbs they contain, so pasta, bread, rice, potatoes). I tried it out and found it better overall, aside from potential scientific benefits. But the usual reaction I get to this one is a negative one. It goes against mainstream science, and people have been told to eat carbs and have carbs as a component of their meals since they were born. People assume I must be wrong instead of being open minded and asking why (in a way that they’re actually listening and considering) – to me it seems fairly obvious that if somebody (sensible) does something differently there may be a good reason why and that I should be open minded and ask why to try and learn. I’ve considered the science (on both sides – part of science is about questioning the mainstream, testing theories, and moving forwards, not about assuming that the current idea is correct) and tried it out, whereas the people with the prejudice don’t have all this information.
The examples I’ve given are all relatively small lifestyle things. How you eat kiwi and wash your hair is fairly insignificant. How you look after your body, especially your back, and doing exercise; probably more significant. But there’s so much more to being open minded than this. Racism comes from being prejudiced against people who we don’t understand, and we should be open minded and learn from people who are different or do things differently, both because we realise we shouldn’t be racist and because we might learn from them. As I touched upon, going against assumptions in science is exactly how we progress – people assumed the world was flat, that the earth was the centre of the universe, and the fact that modern medicine is so modern means that it’s based on lots of recent developments too. When put broadly like this its obvious, but in day-to-day life faced with lots of little things, we tend not to do so well. I could’ve used these big examples too, but in day-to-day life it’s the small things we come up against, not the big things.
Going back to the quote from Batman: “We always fear what we don’t understand”. My version here is, “we often have prejudice against what we don’t understand”, that we need to recognise this prejudice and be open minded, and that by doing so, we’ll consider more things and ultimately have a better life because of it. Prejudices mean that we miss opportunities; the more we know, the more we can choose between and the better the result can be.
“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.” – Frank Zappa.
Feel free to let me know in the comments things you think people should be more open minded about – it’d be good to learn from them.
Appendix 1 – Hair Washing
When I first heard about not using shampoo, I was curious and hesitant, but wanted to find out what it’s about; I read a bit about it and apparently the oil in our hair is the hair’s natural way of cleaning, whereas shampoo strips that away and tries to keep hair clean itself – there’s no money to be made in natural hair cleaning! But science and theory is one thing, different people are different and whoever wrote about it could be mistaken, so I tested it on myself. The first month my hair got pretty greasy (as expected), but after that it cleaned itself up. For almost a year it was pretty good but was getting a bit greasier each month, so I did some more research and found a suggestion of using a bicarb and vinegar wash combo (one after the other) and tried that out, which I now stick with. When I used shampoo, I had to wash my hair every day or two and it was fairly greasy, but now that I’m doing occasional bicarb and vinegar washes with regular water washes my hair is better, softer and less greasy, needing a bicarby wash every 4-6 days and water rinses inbetween. The proof is in the pudding, as they say: I use it because it gives better results.