In my last post I talked about Bloom’s Taxonomy, and
how we use these skills all the time in our everyday life. One concept I talked
about was interpretation. Interpretation
is natural to human beings. Whatever we see gets filtered in our mind, gets mixed
up with our assumptions, prior experience and the current situation and comes
out as our thoughts.
This was brought home to me the other day when I was
at a meeting with three of my colleagues. Suddenly the door opened, and a
senior member of the institution stood there. He lifted his hand, made a face
and shut the door. One person in the
room said that he had silently rebuked us because he thought we were gossiping,
perhaps participating in a clique. “What
a nasty person”, was her first reaction. That was my reaction too. But the
other two people in the room had a very different take on it. Their
understanding of the situation was that this person barged into the room and
when he saw that a meeting was going on, he quickly closed the door in
embarrassment. The facial expression that two of us saw as a frown, the other
two saw as an apologetic grimace. Same
situation, different interpretation. One interpretation was negative, which
could lead to future negative interpersonal issues, while the other was
positive. Later in the day, I ran into
that person in the corridor. He apologised to me and said he was sorry he
disturbed our meeting. He wanted a quiet place to work and thought that this
room was empty --- he did not know we were having a meeting.
His apology left me very sheepish. It also showed me how deceptive our
interpretations can be. It brought home
to me that our interpretations say more about our own state of mind than about
the other person. Two days ago, I was a
part of a conversation where I had heard someone talk negatively about this
person. It was that conversation that
must have stayed in my mind, leading to my instant negative reaction when I saw
him at the door.
All our interactions with others are based on such
interpretations. However, most of the time, we take our interpretations for
granted --- we perceive them to be the reality, whereas they might be only one way of looking at the situation. The
skill comes in getting into the habit of questioning our interpretations and
acknowledging that how we interpret a situation may be totally wrong. That is where
critical thinking comes in.
