I See (a little bit more than) You



You will bring this case to mediation M@#* F*#&%er!!



Thursday is Training Day for my clinic job. In this scenario, I am Denzel Washington, having that whole mediation experience and having been a convenor all summer and what not. My co-convenor has plenty of experience doing telephone intakes as a legal aid worker before, but she is new to the world of Alternative Dispute Resolution and there are definitely some lawyerly adversarial edges to be bevelled out (GROUP HUGS EVERYONE!!). She's also a perfectionist and unlike me - who will kind of slip in unnoticed, do the projects I've decided should be done and then inform everyone of what I've done and plan to do - she wants to make sure she does everything right before she does it. Crazy girl! Feedback. Guidance. Pshaw. 

It is just like the movie, except without the car or the guns... or... Ok, the word training is involved and if I really cared, I, uh, have... a ... badge(ish).



I am not a Troll - it's a special
Trollifying novelty camera!

My CC has a tendency to go into lawyer mode, and you can hear the gears switching. The biggest challenge for her is that she speaks very quickly when she's nervous and still is struggling with the mentality that she *must* (a) solve the problem or (b) at least get the people to come to mediation. There's an undertone of panic to her telephone mien and this in turn become adversarial when she's speaking with a party. I honestly don't think it's going to change the numbers of people who agree and disagree to mediation, but I do think it might affect their experience of it.

It got me thinking a lot about how people interact with other people's expectations - particularly about the The Rosenthal or Pygmalion Effect. This is basically an interpersonal version of my old friend, The Placebo Effect. We subconsciously signal our expectations about our interlocutors and amazingly enough our interlocutors respond and adapt to these expectations. In one study highlighted in Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior, men and women were asked to have a phone conversation with each other. Before the conversation, the men were given fictional informational packets about their interlocutors. Those men who had files of women with intentionally unattractive photos (and identical histories) reported that they expected the women to be "unsociable, awkward and inept." What's more interesting was that when that conversation was played back for a panel using only the women's halves of the conversation, they made the same judgments as the men had anticipated. When the woman in question had been expected to have positive traits, her side of the conversation reflected those characteristics and vice versa. This raises greater social justice questions in cross-racial education where subtle biases may have longterm institutional effects, but to limit the scope to my meandering musings: we respond to how we're expected to behave, so expectations shape us.

Given that, perhaps it's unsurprising that a mediator's success will have a lot to do with being able to focus on the constructive and positive traits that they can see in another person and forming a version of that person who is reasonable and well-intentioned. As soon as that person is what the mediator sees, there is a possibility of the Pygmalion Effect coming into play. Not always, of course, which is why it's useful to balance that version with variations and keep an open mind, but often. I've called it "modeling the good behavior that you would like to see" and I have found it really valuable both in mediations and over the phone. Alternately sometimes familiarity with a disputant brings familiarity with his/her more frustrating qualities. And I think one of the slipping stones in both mediation and interpersonal relationships in general is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy loop when you merely think you're being realistic.

It makes me think more broadly about human relationships. How much of the strength of our relationships depends on the version of ourselves that our loved ones have of us? I've read that newly married couples who still overestimate their loved one's qualities tend to be have longer and happier marriages, for instance.

I also know from experience what it feels like to be forced into somebody else's self-fulfilling prophecy and how distressing it can feel to find myself behaving in ways that are completely contrary to my own self image.

Being human and only a little neurotic, I'm drawn to people who have positive views of me. These views may not be spot on to my inflated self-perceptions, but they are based on true and identifiable aspects of my personality. And they are nuanced enough to go beyond the impersonality of idolatry or false flattery (although I've also seen studies that show even when flattery is obviously that, it is still beneficial and useful). I'm a well-developed character to my friends and loved ones - with flaws as well as strengths - but one who is ultimately appealing and something that I can live up to. 

And the more I feel those parts of myself seen, the more they blossom. The more my best self flourishes. The more I want to be what my teacher/friend/lover sees

We're funny and oddly vain creatures. Sometimes I wonder if our choice in friends is stimulated by the same impulse that causes us to spend hundreds on specially posed, well lit, photo shopped pictures of ourselves - are we looking for a "skinny mirror" to our soul? Do we like seeing ourselves just slightly distorted and drawing inspiration from that?

 We also define ourselves by our associations: choosing to hang out with a certain individual advertises our opinions of ourselves in many ways, subtle and unsubtle (depending on how close we are to middle school and the "popular girls" mentality). Of course we also look to our friends for all sorts of things you'd find on a Hallmark card, and pursuing love is also essentially drug-seeking behavior (oh endorphins, oh PEA, oh dopamine!)  

The moral of that little story was the following: (1) I am the pasty female law student version of Denzel Washington and I am that cool, (2) expectations have an amazingly transformative effect, (3) don't make me "look fat" in your eyes. Seriously. That's just not cool!