Possible Reasons For Not Hearing From Other Groups
The Basic Issue
Many times people can not hear the truths which another group has grasped for reasons which have nothing to do with the merit of the information under consideration. There seems to be a widespread tendency amongst people to reject truth from certain quarters.As a minister, this is a problem in that often the very truth a person needs to hear has been picked up by the rejected group, making it very difficult to help the person "hear" it. There are likely many reasons for this rejection of ideas. Some which I have encountered are listed below.
PossibleReasons:
- One reason for not being able to hear the perspective of the other group is the fact that we seem to have a built in efficiency mechanism which enables our minds to recall what we know and not have to re-discover everything every time we encounter it. For that reason, we tend to "see what we know is there, rather than what is actually there".
My wife was at a workshop once with a room full of well educated teachers. The Psychologist handed out slips of paper to each telling them to keep their sentence to themselves for the moment, and to memorize their sentence so that when asked, they would be able to recite it. Just before asking for the recitations, he asked them to count the number of times the letter "f" appeared in their sentence and just call the number out. Soon the numbers started coming...4, 5, 3, 2, 4...and so on. Well, he said, I have news for you. You all have the same sentence. What I did was have you memorize the sentence first. Once you did, then your eye literally did not see the word of. You saw what you knew was there, not what was there. People from the two groups "know" there is nothing of value in the other group.
- A second reason for some people not being able to hear what the other group has come to understand and benefit from is the word-set which the other group chooses to use to express their insight. The author of the ancient Biblical story of the trouble at the tower of Babel had an interesting insight that it is words which demarcates the boundaries of cultural and sub-cultural groupings. Such boundaries are non-negotiable, and total rejection of anything "foreign" seems to be deeply embedded in us. Alarm bells go off within us when certain "flag" words are heard. Both evangelical and mainline churches use flag words which, when heard by the other, completely shut down further communication.
- A third reason is that certain personality types seem to be "allergic" to certain other personality types. Groups can be described by the point of view or "center" or "set of life-imperatives" which the group has made its own. These sets of life imperatives can be grouped in a variety of ways. The grouping which I find the most useful is the one which parallels the "gifts" model set of personality types. In that perspective, groups are seen to have a "personality of preference" and the life imperatives of such a personality form a "tone" of the group.
The "allergy" that is experienced at an interpersonal level between two such people, can also be experienced at an inter-group level if the echoes of that "personality type" are expressed strongly enough by members of that sub-group, despite what a particular individual's own personality type happens to be.
That is, the group is seen as having a "personality of preference" around which all the others tend to center, and that fact tends to give a definite "tone" to a group. For example, the personality of preference "tone" of evangelical and mainline Church groups on the prairies, are in fact ones which, at an individual level, also tend to "grate on each other" (perceiver and compassion- person respectively). Small wonder these two groups cannot hear the insights of the other.
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