Ladder of Inference
Reality is an illusion created by our mind. We don’t see or perceive reality – we have a perception of reality. We believe that our perception of reality is reality because we have nothing to contradict our perception. While we know every little thing about reality and much less about other people we often infer or project onto another person what we believe.
We can observe someone who has a sloppy appearance and from that decide that they’re a bum, aren’t clean, or are homeless. The direct observation is actually that their shirt is untucked or that they’ve got sweat stains on their shirt. From that, we infer that they have a sloppy appearance. From the sloppy appearance we ascribe or infer something else to them. This process is both natural and dangerous. The problem is that we will infer things about people which aren’t true. Unfortunately we don’t store the inferences as inferences, we store them in our brains as facts. This causes for us the problem of unconsciously applying disrespectful judgments to people that we don’t necessarily intend.
When encouraging dialogue we must be mindful of the ladder of inference we’re placing above people comments – and specifically test them or dispel them as soon as possible. If we believe that someone is a bum, we might ask what they’ve just been doing. We may find out they’ve been working hard to build some landscaping and haven’t yet had a chance to clean up. My favorite story here is one where a man was riding home on the subway and there were a set of unruly kids disturbing nearly everyone on the subway. The man finally, in disgust, speaks to the father of the children who had been to this point oblivious to what the kids were doing. The father of the children responds that he’s sorry that they had just left their mom’s funeral and he didn’t know what he was going to do or notice the kid’s behavior. Our ladder of inference quickly jumped that the father was a bad father because his kids are unruly instead of questioning what the factors that led to the behavior were.