Remember when I walked from midtown Manhattan to Park Slope because I thought taxicabs were wild animals? Oh, yes, you do.

Anyway, here is a good article from today’s Globe that explains the whole metaphor-as-thought thing at greater length than I was able to. Check it out.

An article in the Globe this Sunday reported on an MIT student project:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction.

Well, yeah. People in general tend to like to hang out with others who are like themselves. This isn’t really news, and I’m not sure why the article pitched it as a privacy issue:

Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: if all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too. The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks, but also a possible pitfall. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

Did we not already know this? I mean, just keeping to the “gay” thing, if I’m gay and in the closet, even pre-Facebook, I would probably make sure that I was not seen coming out of gay bars, and I wouldn’t hang out publicly with gay-rights activists. People are judged by their friends.

Which I suppose means, if you don’t want anyone to know your sexual preference, political beliefs, religion, or sports team affiliation — why are you even on Facebook? But if you want cover, you should, obviously, get as varied a group of FB friends as you can. “Celebrate Diversity: It Keeps People from Knowing What You’re Up to.” Now there’s a slogan that might just work.

I’m not sure what the software would say about me, except that I’m probably a mobbed-up farmer living in Fairyland. Which I suppose could be considered true in some highly metaphorical sense, but what couldn’t?

Anyway, when I posted this question on my boston.com blog about whether or not one should refrain from posting happy updates on FB when a friend is in mourning, I got to thinking about the shape of social networks of FB users. What does your network look like, if you’re on FB? How connected are your FB friends with each other? Does your network look more like this:

Or like this:

If you have “clumps” of friends on FB who all know each other, what are the clumps?

This struck me in relation to the mourning question because I think one element of that is how interconnected the friend in question is to the rest of your network. I have two major “clumps” of Facebook friends: my maternal cousins, and some friends of theirs; and friends from my Kansas City theater days. I think if anything seriously bad were to go down for anyone in those two clumps, the social obligation around it — as regards Facebook only, obviously — would feel different to me than if something bad went down for a friend who isn’t connected to anyone else. Because it wouldn’t just be a matter of the affected person’s feelings, but of everyone else in that particular sub-network.

How does your Facebook garden grow? Are you the hub, or are you one hub of many? What are your “clumps”? And have you ever had the experience of realizing that friends from different contexts knew each other on Facebook?

Nice post on the New York Times “Happy Days” blog about the inevitable way we compare ourselves with others, and how insidiously easy it can be to see other people’s life choices as a referendum on your own:

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.

Beautiful. This is a major theme in Mind Over Manners. In the conclusion, I wrote something similar:

Many of our choices have ambivalence to them. Even the most happily married person occasionally misses the freedom of her single days. Even the most career-driven professional would like on occasion to chuck it all and become a beachcomber. Even the most ardent locavore is occasionally attracted by the whiff of a McDonald’s French fries. That ambivalence within our own souls—we can so easily project it onto others. Many of the choices we make represent an argument we’ve had with some part of ourselves. When we see another person who made the opposite choice, we’re afraid that she might awaken the part of us that lost the argument and therefore introduce conflict into our lives. Often, out of an instinct of self-protection, we go on the attack.

So, let’s talk a little more about religion and language. As noted, we use magical talk to express our hopes for others (and for ourselves). I’m not really sure I have a point with any of the below–but hey, I’m blogging, I don’t have to have a point. These are just some ideas I’m batting at you.

So if I sneeze, perhaps you’ll say to me, “God bless you.” If I hit my thumb with a hammer, I know what I’ll be saying, and it will be rather on the opposite end of the devotional spectrum. And my blue streak might serve a purpose. A study published this summer indicated some scientific backing for the folk belief that yes, cursing up a storm does, in fact, help you cope with pain. Subjects could hold their hands in ice water, and reported less pain, if they got to swear while they did it. Words are magic. (The scientists point out, interestingly, that swear words can lose their mojo if overused–no, mojo wasn’t their exact word, but you know what I mean–and thus not have a pain-relieving effect.)

Profanity and religious language overlap in the category of “blasphemy.” Subjects in the experiment were allowed to chant the “expletive of their choice,” so we don’t know if any of them were using blasphemy as well as or in addition to profanity. I use both, myself, with frequency and no small degree of skill–but the time in my life during which I was most blasphemous was when I was working at a Catholic college, because I picked it up from the people around me. All the same, though, I don’t think the blasphemy would have worked, would have had any mojo in it, if Christian/Catholic imagery weren’t highly accessible to me. If I had been in that pain and profanity experiment, I bet I could hold my hand in icy water a lot longer if I got to chant “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”–which feels like blasphemy even though those names are not sacred to me–rather than “Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva!,” which doesn’t.*

Just as taking the names of Jesus or the saints in vain feels like blasphemy even though, for me, it isn’t, using Christian religious language feels like a declaration of faith, even when it’s not. There was a lot of gospel and country music in July when I visited my cousins in the Ozarks. And I noticed, as I have at the occasional Christmas party-slash-singalong, that I feel really strange singing about Jesus. Singing in general, of course, is not a good idea for me, but I don’t usually feel the need to assess the truth conditions of lyrics before firing up the karaoke machine; I’m not going to refuse to sing “My Boyfriend’s Back” on grounds that I am a faithful married woman. (“But they did not in fact try to make me go to rehab, nor is my father in any position to have an opinion on whether I am fine or not, having been dead these ten years.”) Songs with religious language in them feel different, though; it feels strange to sing something I don’t believe in.

As long as I’m singing it in English. I suspect I’d have no (spiritual) problem singing a Christian hymn in Latin, however vocally challenging I might find it. The Traveling Psychologist does research on this kind of thing: one’s native language feels real in a way that other languages, even if spoken fluently, do not. People have a stronger physiological response to seeing emotionally charged words (sexual, aggressive, religious, or otherwise taboo) in their native language. She told me once that in China, the words “I love you” are used very rarely, perhaps at one’s wedding and/or deathbed. Chinese pop songs about romance will often use the phrase “I love you” in their chorus–in English. You can say the deeply emotional, taboo phrase in a foreign language, even if people know perfectly well what it means.

We once had some young neighbors, foreign grad students, who had a rather tempestuous relationship, and we could often hear them arguing in their native language. Occasionally, the woman would yell at the man, “I hate you!” I was always tempted to tell him that as long as she was saying it in English, he was probably safe.

*One spring while I was teaching at Emmanuel College, I was helping to clean up after a Purim celebration at my synagogue and dropped a table–not on, but frighteningly close to, my foot, and gasped, “Holy Mother of God!” At which another woman on the cleaning committee looked up and said, “Oh, do you work in a Catholic school too?”

This article in the New York Times tackles an issue of burning social import: do dogs and their owners look alike?

The research, apparently, is as mixed as the heritage of the beloved Milo. Milo is an exceedingly good-looking little fellow, and my immediate reaction upon seeing the headline “Some Dogs Look Like Their Owners” was, “I wish!” My brains and Milo’s looks and general adorability would be a potent combination indeed. And there would have been no question of me winning that “Mad Men” contest, either: Milo is the epitome of sleek, understated early-60s design. Peep this handsome little man:

Does your dog (or cat) look like you?

More interestingly, do you see your dog or cat as being similar to you in personality or life story?

Milo’s black-on-white spots aren’t the only thing he has in common with a Rorschach test. As I wrote on his first Gotcha Day, “I know you grew up in a suburban backyard, without many friends, and that once you were old enough you got bored and lit out for something more. I could identify …” I also identify with Milo’s hatred of the heat, his neuroticism, his distrust of strangers, his love of Greek yogurt and olive oil, and his fastidious grooming.* Mr. Improbable, if asked to describe some of his favorite things about Milo, would probably note his boundless energy, his curiosity, his athleticism, his friendliness, and his love of being laughed at.

I don’t think this is accidental.

Research** suggests that people do see their pets as being similar to themselves in personality, and that the more similar you think you and your pet are, the more you like your pet, and the more you think your pet is better than other pets. (This would explain the wholly objective observation that Milo is, in fact, the Best Dog in the World.)

What about you? Do you think your pet resembles you, either physically or psychologically? How do you feel about that? Do you identify with your pet’s positive or negative qualities, or both? (I listed all positive ones for Mr. Improbable, but I’m sure he sees some of his own flaws in the little guy as well.)

*I generally take a lot of care with my appearance, but before any major event my beauty preparations really ramp up. You can imagine what having my first book come out, and “Today Show” appearances and all that, did to me. I–being, as noted, somewhat neurotic–tortured myself over this for a while. Was I betraying my principles? Or was I making a rational decision to invest in my appearance as a career asset? Were the pedicures and retinol and facials an expression of self-love or self-hatred? Then it occurred to me: when I get nervous, I groom myself. I am not the only animal that does this. There didn’t seem to be any need to pathologize or politicize it nearly as much as I was.

**El-Alayli, A., Lystad, A.L., Webb, S.R., Hollingsworth, S.L. & Ciolli, J.L. (2006). Reigning Cats and Dogs: A Pet-Enhancement Bias and Its Link to Pet Attachment, Pet–Self Similarity. Basic and Applied Social Psychology 28 (2) 131-143.

This weekend I went down to New York to see a friend of mine who was in town for a conference, and took the opportunity to visit some Cambridge friends who had moved to Brooklyn last month. I like walking in New York–I find it oddly relaxing, in the same way stimulants can sometimes help people with hyperactivity to calm down. Go figure. So on Saturday, the day I planned to visit my Brooklyn friends, I wandered down from my Midtown hotel to Greenwich Village, and then Soho, and then decided, the heck with it, instead of trying to figure out the subway I’ll just walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and grab a cab on the other side. It’s fun to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on a nice day.

I asked a traffic cop which way Park Slope was, so that I could get a cab that was going in the right direction, and started off. Great plan, except for one detail: there are no cabs in Brooklyn that are not already in service. So I walked, and kept walking.

And walked all the way from Midtown Manhattan to Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Now, there was a moment at which I decided to commit to walking the entire way, because I knew I was going in the right direction and would get there eventually, and once you’ve been walking for three hours, what’s another hour or two? And it would be worth it to see my friends’ reaction. But there was a good long stretch of Flatbush Avenue in which I was really, really hoping to find a cab.

And here’s what didn’t occur to me until Sunday morning: I could have gone into any store or restaurant, asked someone for the number of a cab company, and called one.

How could I not have realized this?

I interrogated myself about this some (because while Saturday afternoon I’d hit the zone and could have kept walking indefinitely, on Sunday morning my butt and thighs were making their opinion of my non-cab-taking ways felt). And here’s what I think was going on. I think in some deep, unconscious way, I was thinking of taxicabs as though they were a sort of animal with two subspecies: domestic and wild. Domestic cabs are the ones that come to your house, the cabs you call, as you would call a dog. Wild cabs are the cabs you encounter on the street, that cannot be called, but can only be caught. Once you have entered the street, the native habitat of the wild taxicab, you can’t call one, any more than you can go on a safari and call the rhinos (or dangeroos) to come in closer for photographs. You have to catch them. (Thanks to my two anonymous FB friends for those links, which aren’t all that relevant but are hilarious.)

So: domestic = house = calling v. wild = outside = catching.

This leads me to three things:

1. Metaphors are fundamental to the way we think. Yes, I know this was a particularly weird metaphor, but there is a whole field of linguistics and cognitive science that is based around metaphor and thought. I don’t mean highly conscious, literary metaphors and similes that are deliberately created for a combination of novelty and recognizability, but basic ones, so basic that they don’t even seem like metaphors at first, but simply like descriptions of how things are. Look at the way we characterize the development of careers, relationships, and so forth as physical journeys forward or upward: “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” “My Harvard MBA has put me ahead in my career.” “My workout routine has plateaued.” “Now that I’ve got tenure I don’t know where to go next.”

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, list a number of what they call “primary metaphors,” including:

Affection is Warmth

Important is Big

Happy is Up

Knowing is Seeing

These are based on our immediate physical experiences (that of being held closely; realizing one’s relative impotence in the face of bigger people; naturally becoming more posturally erect or even jumping when happy; and taking in information visually). Other metaphors we learn through culture. If I didn’t live in a culture that had both domesticated and wild animals, I wouldn’t have unconsciously come up with the metaphor that I did for taxis.

In American society, for example, a dominant metaphor is that “time is money.” On the surface, this only seems to mean that the more you work, the more you will succeed. But if you dig deeper, it goes beyond that: time is a resource. Time can be used well, or wasted. Time can be spent or saved. Time is something we can invest (“I need to put more time into that project”). Time is something there is a finite amount of. Although some people have more or less time than others, time itself is the same for everyone, just as $10 in Bill Gates’s pocket is the same as $10 in mine. Not all cultures have these beliefs about time.

Metaphors can enrich our thinking, but as you can see through my error with the taxis, they can also constrain it.

2. What does it mean to know something, and what does that imply for the testing and evaluation of knowledge? I have no doubt that had the possibility of calling a cab from a restaurant appeared on a multiple-choice or true-or-false test,* I would have answered correctly. In fact, just the night before, my friend had mentioned calling cabs from restaurants in the context of drinking-and-driving laws, and I certainly didn’t say, “What is this strange custom of which you speak?”

I “knew” you could do this, but I obviously didn’t know you could do this. So what does that say about the validity of multiple-choice and true-or-false tests that are based on the ability to recognize information, but not to recall or to apply it? Nothing good, I fear.

3. Dude, I walked from Midtown to Park freakin’ Slope! According to Google Maps, I walked about seven miles, but I couldn’t make it take the path I’d actually used, which involved a lot of wandering up and down and around in Manhattan before hitting the bridge. My normal pace is a little over three miles an hour, and I walked for a little over four hours, so you do the math. A 12-mile walk may be a lot for you or a little, but it’s a lot for me. Endurance has never been my strong suit and even a couple of years ago, I would not have been able to complete a walk like that going non-stop. So I was rather proud of myself.

Which got me thinking, don’t most of us have stories of things we are simultaneously embarrassed about yet proud of? I’m not hugely embarrassed about my unconscious belief that taxicabs are animals, but I do pride myself on being a good problem-solver, and I failed rather spectacularly to be that.

My current theory is that the basic structure of the shame-with-pride story (and I’d love to hear some of yours!) is that you are embarrassed about/ashamed of the stupidity or ignorance that got you into a given situation, and then proud of the stamina/competence that allowed you to either endure, change, or get out of the situation.

Embarrassed to go into the situation, proud to get out of it.

See? That there’s one of them “life is a journey” metaphors.

*Maybe. From the time I was a little girl until now, I have done badly on true-or-false tests. Even as a child, there were very few statements that seemed unequivocally true or false to me; I needed to know the context in which they were meant to be applied in order to judge, not that I would have put it that way in third grade. So then I’d get all weird and start thinking it was a trick question and put the wrong answer down.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir has a nice review of a new movie with an Aspie protagonist and the overall portrayal of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders in the movies:

Autistic and Asperger’s characters in movies are only beginning to move beyond the “Sidney Poitier phase,” in which members of previously despised or misunderstood minorities are presented as symbols, saints or seers — whose most important function is to provide other, more relatable and “normal” characters with the opportunity for moral and spiritual growth. African-Americans, gays and American Indians have already enjoyed this dubious cinematic-shaman role, which is undeniably superior to old-fashioned bigotry but a long way short of actual equality.

From the British Psychological Society’s blog, I found this study on Asperger’s Syndrome. I can’t urge you enough to go read it, especially if you have a child, or spouse, or friend, or co-worker, who might be on the spectrum.

It’s a sociological paper, and it can get a bit dense with Giddens and Goffman and Mead, but don’t let that dissuade you if you’re not the scholarly type. The study was based on interviews with people who have Asperger’s, and it’s the deep attention to and sympathy with their experiences that really makes this special.

In particular, the paper is about the extent to which AS folks never get to the point at which social interaction can be done without a huge investment of thought and effort:

… what are commonly perceived to be small, mundane social norms can present as massively significant and difficult to overcome for people with AS [Asperger's Syndrome]. It is as though there are two, incommensurable universes where something mundane, small and taken for granted in mainstream life is an alien, challenging and uncomfortable act for people with AS. The problem is that for people with AS this tension represents the overwhelming majority of their interactions and experiences because they live in a neuro-typical world.

Participants suggest that typical others found it hard to understand how they felt or to make sense of their emotional detachment and yet participants felt enormous pressure to try to reduce such differences, make sense of the social world and try to fit in.
…
Furthermore, the inability to reach the stage of taken for grantedness meant that interactions remained conscious activity – ‘conscious work’ as Richard called it – a process that had limitations and was tiring, draining and constant.

“You do learn strategies from an early age I think and the problem is with people probably on the spectrum is that you have got a lot of information that you need to store away because you have to remember the strategies for those situations [um] because it doesn’t come naturally so you have to pull that out of your little film cabinet that you have got in your head and play it quite quickly so you know what to do. It is not inherent really.” (Tim, aged 44)

I’ve read a ton of psychological research and theorizing about Asperger’s, and I’ve read plenty of Temple Grandin and The Curious Incident and all that, and yet somehow I feel this article is the first time I’ve actually grasped how frustrating and exhausting and just plain old unfair life as an Aspie must feel sometimes.

I often get questions from neurotypical people who are trying to cope with behavior from folks who have Aspie traits,* like this one. I was proud of my advice on that letter, particularly this: “I have talked to a lot of people like this, both in my ordinary life and through my column, and the last thing they want is subtle hints and good-natured ribbing. They don’t understand such modes of communication: That’s part of the problem. What they want are clear, highly specific behavioral guidelines and respect for their own sometimes-idiosyncratic needs.”

That was good, but of course the whole “Mind over Manners” credo is that highly specific behavioral guidelines are not enough for the modern world, that we have to be able to develop the competencies of improvisation, regaining our footing, negotiating, picking up on cues and adapting in the moment. That’s why it’s called mind over manners. It’s a fundamentally anti-Asperger’s orientation. And I don’t really know where to go with that, because I deeply believe that these are the skills we need in a complex social world. So where does that leave those who can’t learn them? What can etiquette do for them, and what etiquette do neurotypicals like me owe to those who can’t live life like an improv game?

Certainly, after reading this, I believe I will be much more patient with people who exhibit Aspie traits. To be honest, I’ve had my difficulties with such people in the past. From some folks–not all, but many–I’ve gotten a vibe of contempt for social norms and niceties: “Your pathetic social rituals are meaningless to me, puny human.” And, you know, I tend not to respond too well to that. But I wonder if maybe some people are, in fact, trying harder than I’ve given them credit for. I was moved to the point of being shaken at how hard some of the people quoted in this paper are trying.

And for those who really are treating social norms and the people who follow them with contempt? Well, if almost everyone in the world were going around insisting that something I couldn’t perceive is terribly terribly important, and I’m defective for missing it … I might start to have contempt for whatever it is they’re making such a big deal of, too. As a way of making myself feel better, and as a way of letting go and getting on with my life. In fact, knowing me, there’s about a thousand-percent chance that that’s exactly how I’d react.

So I’m sorry, folks-on-the-spectrum. I’ve given my fellow neurotypicals good advice about you, I think, but I’m not sure I give a lot of advice you can use. And maybe I haven’t always given you as fair a shake as I should have in my personal life.

If you have Asperger’s, or are close to someone who does, I’d be very interested to hear from you. Has learning the cut-and-dried rules of etiquette–manners over mind, as it were–helped you? Are you trying harder than people give you credit for? Would you prefer neurotypicals make more of an effort to see the world from your point of view, or would you rather, frankly, have us leave you in peace and stop trying to understand? Neurotypicals, what have you found to be helpful in your relationship with your AS child, or friend, or spouse?

*Invariably, when I run these questions, I’ll then get letters from readers saying “That person sounds like they have Asperger’s Syndrome! Why didn’t you think of that?” Chances are, I did. But I wouldn’t diagnose someone in a newspaper column based on nothing more than the description of a third party even if I were a clinical psychologist instead of a research one.

The phrase “the wisdom of the markets” sounds like a dark joke these days, but judgments by groups of people are usually more accurate than judgments by a single person. (That is, as long as the group result is the average of a bunch of individual results. The ability of groups to make reasoned decisions together is notoriously bad, as this poster brilliantly illustrates.) The British Psychological Society blog describes a new experiment showing that people can get this effect within their very own, single, solitary mind:

You can boost your quiz performance by unleashing the crowd within, a new study shows. The next time your’re asked to estimate a historical date, for example, try doing the following: make your first estimate; then pause and assume your first guess was off the mark. Consider why, then use this new perspective to make a second estimate. Average your two estimates and, chances are, this newly calculated date will be more accurate than your original answer. The new approach is called “dialectical boot-strapping” and according to Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig, it really works.

…

“Part of the wisdom of the many resides in an individual mind,” the researchers said. “Dialectical bootstrapping is a simple mental tool that fosters accuracy by leveraging people’s capacity to construct conflicting realities.”

I bolded that last clause because this is really at the crux of things. In my Harvard Business School job, I recently reviewed a huge amount of literature on cognitive biases, or the typical ways people tend to make mistakes. There’s a ton of these biases: we overestimate the role we ourselves played in events, for good or ill; we throw good money after bad; we leap to conclusions about other people without taking their circumstances into account; we cannot predict our own emotions accurately. Really, spend enough time reading about all of the ways in which people are predictably irrational and you won’t even want to get out of bed, your chances of making a good decision are so low.

And you can’t really “debias” people like you’d debug a computer program. It’s not a quantitative thing. You can’t simply tell a person, “People typically overestimate how many calories they burn by 20%, so the next time you go to the gym, multiply the number of calories you think you burned by 0.8″ and have that make any difference. The only thing that seems to help people make better decisions is for them to aggressively and imaginatively think through alternate scenarios–in short, to envision how their present construction of events could be wrong. Or could go wrong–even if you are understanding a situation correctly, circumstances can change. If you are thinking to wait out the recession in grad school, say, it would be worthwhile to ask yourself: What if the economy dramatically turned around? Would this still be the right decision?

“What if?” and “How do I know?” — get in the habit of asking yourself these questions. They only make you feel dumb at first.

I sympathize with the Hare Krishna letter writer’s frustration. Clearly, he feels coming out is not an option, and it probably isn’t. I’m sure he knows more about prejudice against his religion than I do.

What he’s asking for, though–for people not only to let him do as he likes, but to cease wondering about his behavior–isn’t going to happen. Other people are the most important and interesting aspect of our environment. Determining why other people do what they do–developing attributions for their actions, hypotheses about their intentions–is a huge part of what human cognition is. Asking people to stop speculating on the motives and thoughts of others is futile.

We are particularly driven to explain behavior that is nonconforming. No one feels the need to uncover the real reason that Jim likes to wear Dockers on casual Friday, but if Jim preferred a leather kilt, most people, if not the letter writer, would devote a bit of brain space to wondering why.

If your first interpretation was “Jim must be wearing the kilt to make fun of management and casual Friday,” you’re probably not alone. We are driven to explain the behavior of others–and often, if we are in doubt, we will make the most negative interpretation. Psychologists Martie Haselton and David Nettle describe humans as “paranoid optimists” who make mistakes in predictable directions based on the possible consequences. Back in the evolutionary day, if someone was acting strangely, you could either assume that they were harmless or that they were up to no good. If you assumed that they were harmless when they weren’t, you might get killed. If you assumed they were up to no good when they were harmless, you had an awkward moment. Given life in the Pleistocene, the occasional awkward moment wasn’t so bad, and even broke up the monotony some. It certainly beat getting killed, so it was generally thought of as best to distrust someone who acting different.

We’re not wholly trapped by our evolutionary history. We can probably get somewhat better, overall, at not leaping to negative conclusions. And some individuals will be very good at giving others the benefit of the doubt. (It seems that the letter writer has learned from his own unhappy experience and doesn’t make automatic negative attributions about others. Good for him–truly. Being discriminated against can lead to paranoia as easily as empathy.)

The letter writer didn’t ask me for advice, but if he had, I would have said something like this: If people have a fundamental need to explain nonconforming behavior, the best way to manage them is to give them an explanation. Is there some other logical and true story you can tell to make sense of your actions? Most of what we do we do for more than one reason, after all. If you really enjoyed drinking, for example, your on-again-off-again practice of your religion would probably not keep you from it, at least occasionally. Why else don’t you drink?

Some people will comment that you have every right to say “Mind your own business” and leave it at that. They’re right, you do have every right to say that. And after a while, the people who know you well will stop wondering about your (quite minor) eccentricities, because they will have grown used to them. But you’ll always have to deal with new people, and new people will always try to figure you out. Which gives you four choices: come out about your religion, move to a place where biking, teetotalling, vegetarianism and working on Christmas don’t attract particular notice (you wouldn’t be considered odd in my neighborhood), give people a story to latch on to, or put up with being misunderstood.

Here is a fascinating letter I got shortly before Mind over Manners was published, from an advance reader who called himself a “case study” for the book:

I have spent the last 30 years as a practicing/lapsed/practicing/lapsed Hare Krishna, and while I haven’t told more than 6-7 people that, in the 13 years I have lived in [State], I have found that many people take great offense at the restrictions and prohibitions that I am obligated to disclose in the workplace, volunteering, etc.

None of them have any idea of why I attempt to maintain the restrictions, but that doesn’t stop them from wildly speculating:

“He rides a bicycle instead of driving a car because he lost his license” (not because it is healthy)
“It must because he is an alcoholic, did you know he refuses to go to company get-togethers if alcohol is served”
“I think my neighbor is a racist who doesn’t like black people; why else won’t he come over for barbeque and beer and sports talk?”
“And he doesn’t mind working on Christian holidays….how are we ever going to discourage our company from working on holidays if HE does?” And on and on and on………

I am beginning to think that wearing my chosen religion on my sleeve, on the bookshelf in my cubicle, on the teeshirt under my work clothes may have been the correct choice, because as it stands, I have left a wake of people that are completely convinced I don’t like them for the color of their skin, because they are the boss, because of…….. Anything but the simple and correct understanding which is that everyone is allowed to decide what they eat, what they drink, who they associate with, and until a behavior rises to the level of insult, hostility, violence, etc., the practitioner owes no one an apology or an explanation.

I recently answered a Craigslist ad, when I arrived at the person’s house; he was doing yard work in a leather kilt. I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell. That behavior was easy for me, because of all my memories of being rudely interrogated for behaviors that aren’t illegal, didn’t put anyone at risk, and weren’t anyone’s business.

My response to come shortly. Keeping comments closed for now but I’ll open them up after I’ve posted my thoughts.

Apparently I’m not the only one. Many of you are also driven crazy by comments or questions that you know are wholly innocent and socially appropriate. And I dare say that any of us who have occasionally been in one of those “Just don’t ASK me how [my job hunt, the dissertation, trying to have a baby, selling that house we've had on the market since mid-2008, recovering from my hip surgery] is going!” moods sometimes feel a twinge of discomfort when we encounter friends or acquaintances who are in similarly delicate situations. Ought we ask? Are they tired of talking about it? Ought we not ask? And risk them thinking we are tired of listening? Oy. One wants to be sensitive … yet it is so difficult! With apologies to Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being asked personal questions is not being asked personal questions.

The fear of saying something hurtful-if-not-rude reminded me of this post from my Miss Conduct blog, on the pros and cons of friending one’s parents on Facebook. Many commenters rightly pointed out that nothing on Facebook is really private anyway, with one stating, “[M]y worst enemy will never see anything other than banal posts like ‘I took my dog for a walk’ or ‘I’m grilling hamburgers with the family.’” So that’s the reason so many Facebook posts are notoriously boring! Rather than risk giving offense, or giving ammunition to someone who may wish you ill, people cling to dull, anodyne status updates that no one can possibly object to.

And here’s where I’m going with all this. It’s terribly trendy these days to run around accusing the rest of the world of narcissism (I’ve written about this before). I wonder, though: if people are focusing more on themselves, and talking more about themselves, might there be at least some degree of pro-social motivation to this? “Why do you think the rest of the world cares what you have for breakfast?” the anti-narcissism crusader against Facebook thunders. Maybe the person who posted, “Greek yogurt and honey is yummy!” isn’t necessarily convinced that hundred of friends are breathlessly eager for this news. Maybe she simply wants to express herself, a sort of virtual wave hello, but doesn’t want to risk starting a debate about abortion, or having her mother nag her to explain the origin of some private joke, or her employer see that she was out until 3am last night. In short, perhaps all those “Time for bed!” and “Coffee, STAT!” updates are less the result of compulsive self-expression than they are of compulsive self-censorship.

In face-to-face conversation, too, I wonder if we sometimes come across as self-absorbed because we fear asking, or saying, the wrong thing. We hesitate to ask the graduate about his job plans, the mom-to-be about her pregnancy, the groom about his honeymoon, the academic about her grant application. And haven’t we all been taught that when fighting with loved ones, we are to use “I” statements (“I feel hurt when you do X”) rather than “you” statements (“You always do X, you big moron”)? Awareness of diversity, too–of the different ways that men and women, whites and people of color, straights and gays experience the world–can leave the sensitive soul feeling that she can only speak with real authority when she is speaking about herself. (Compare this to some fifty years ago or so, when men and white people felt quite capable of speaking for humanity as a whole.) Certainly, this sensitive soul feels that way. I use a huge number of first-person pronouns in my work–a measure sometimes used as a dependent variable to determine a writer’s level of narcissism! But it doesn’t stem from that at all. I mean, of course I’m in love with my own words, that’s why I’m a writer. But my compulsion to keep qualifying them as my words comes less from hubris than humility. This is my opinion of what your mother-in-law said at the last family picnic. Not God’s. Not Jane Austen’s. Not Oprah’s. Just mine, influenced by my own unique experiences and education. Don’t take it for more than that.

Some people are still self-absorbed jerks, I’m not saying they aren’t. But I wonder if there aren’t other motives at play as well. What do you think?

Today’s column addresses the awkwardness of repeated hallway meetings in the workplace:

During my workday I make multiple trips between my office and other rooms in the building. I often pass the same people in the hallways several times. After the first direct greeting each day, I feel awkward if I do not say something to acknowledge them as we pass. I sometimes have something business-related to mention, occasionally something witty, but always a nod and smile. Is the last response acceptable, as multiple “hellos” each day seems weird?

I tweeted earlier today that this question is “very Simon/Sacha Baron Cohen.” The Baron Cohen cousins are among the world’s most renowned scholars and practitioners, respectively, of the awkward moment. Mr. Improbable explains it all for you.

Today’s column addresses the disconnect between an American woman and her Brazilian friends, who often “cancel plans at the last minute, for reasons that surely could have been foreseen.” They, and her Brazilian husband, all claim that this is typical Brazilian behavior.

Different cultures do have different relationships to time. Shortly after I wrote this column, I read the intensely interesting Beyond 9 to 5: Your Life in Time by Sarah Norgate. Norgate cites another researcher’s experience in Brazil:

In another anecdote [author of Geography of Time Robert] Levine talks about his visiting professorship to Brazil, where he was puzzled that only a few students turned up for the start of his first lecture. Over the course of the “scheduled” two hours, the students walked in, smiled, said hello, sat down and carried on settling in apparently as normal. No one tried to creep in or saw the need to offer an apology; they just came to the lecture when they were good and ready. Punctuality was of no concern; instead the overriding ethos was time’s flexibility–also known as “rubber” time.

Nicholas Kristof discusses some of the research on disgust that has informed my own writing (a few posts on the topic here and here), and its political implications:

… conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses.