In a message dated 6/8/99 9:10:19 AM, someone wrote:
>Any
>>moderately intelligent person should be able to work out that when you
>>have a huge great gun pointed at you it's a real bad idea to keep moving
>>towards the person who's holding it.
This brings up a point I have always pondered. Any moderately intelligent
person from OUR CULTURE, would know a gun at night from twenty paces, but a
Japanese student raised in a totally gunless environment would obvoiusly find
this behavior so far-fetched ( in fact they have begun training japanese on
American "Street Smarts" since they are such sitting ducks in big cities)
that he would have had a lot of other things he would have assumed that man
was carrying, but likely not a gun!!
So assumptions play a HUGE role in how we percieve intelligence.
The saddest part of this cross-up was that neither one of these parties was
really intending to hurt the other, and both were harmed in a huge and
irreparable way. Both had cross-cultural assumptions about the other.
Is assumptive thinking somehow non-rational? We cant really live with out
it, can we? ( see my story below) But it causes a lot of disruption in
reality. Are our senses are totally dictated by it? Somewhat?(Man in house
sees dangerous lunatic, man outside sees (who knows) a man yelling and
carrying something, maybe a phone...)
I know when I called the cops one night when I saw a guy with a gun, they
interrogated ME!" Ma'am, How do you know it was a gun, how big was it, what
kind" etc.
I only knew because of the WAY he was holding it, and they TYPE of man he
was.. I never actually really saw it close.. it was night.. I assumed, I
ran...
And, my cultural references wre CORRECT: they had a stand off outside my pad
all night long... but if i was rasied on Planet Utopia, I would be dead!