The game of understanding

PS: Post comes a little earlier than usual thanks to my travel plans for the weekend. Don't want to miss another deadline this week. :)

@Random

Mastering human psychology is all about being non-judgmental, declared my friend S (who happened to be a psychology student as well!). Seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me! I thought it is all about understanding oneself and others - given that psychology is not a 0 or 1 logic, also implies some sort of judgment. But when I thought more about it, the "non-judgmental" part made some sense.

Majority of our world revolves around our judgments, perceptions, view points etc. It's like viewing the world with a coloured glass - you are really not sure whether what you see is what it's. As the story goes, we are like a fish or a frog that thinks that the world can't be bigger than its pond.

But people are so self-conceited that they believe that they understand things, especially "they understand other people". The problem arises, not just because of not understanding, but also because of misunderstanding. So, "non-judgmental", I think, just suggests us to be open, not jump to conclusions (way too early) and at times be ready to say "i don't know", "I don't understand".

Ok, exploring further on the game of understanding others.. As I noted earlier, I believe we are wearing some glasses almost always invariably to constantly, continuously, consistently and at times inconsistently create interpretations, meanings and views.. We start identifying ourselves with the spherical balloon that we have blown through the air called perceptions.. Different people have different balloons around them and there are infinite balloons floating around in this infinite world. People understand other people when the worlds have some overlapping area.

There are 2 view points on understanding people: One view point is that human beings are very predictable and hence can be easily understood. Another view point is that it's really complex for 2 reasons: first, the understand-ee / human-being is really complex; second, Understand-er, as I said earlier, is incapable / reluctant to understand others. To explore this further, I just tried doing a front of the envelop estimate on what percentage of people understand others.
(Click the picture to enlarge)

If you can read the text from the above figure and if you think the assumptions don't have Himalayan errors, we can arrive at a figure of 5.4% of people correctly understanding others. Just 1/20th of the population understands other people correctly!

I believe the keys to understanding people are (a) being aware that you are unaware of entities called 'others' (b) making a conscious decision that you want to be considerate of others (c) be willing to say "I don't know yet"

Just to clarify: non-judgmental may not mean not making judgments at altogether - after all, we can't live without judgments / perceptions. But just being aware of our faulty judgmental system. Esp. when it comes to understanding people!

@Regular

Would be traveling to 2 of my favorite S.Indian cities, in addition to Delhi for few friends' marriage. Just started off with the first chapter of "The Elephant, The Tiger, The Cellphone" - Reflections on India in the 21st century by Shashir Tharoor.

Will update this section in detail next week.