The Art of Garfinkling

Carry out a simple experiment. When you are on the bus or the train, ask a person to give up her seat. Make sure you're young and fit. To make it easier, ask someone who is as fit or fitter than you.

Breaching Experiments

It is a hard thing for most to do. There is emotional distress involved. The fear of opprobrium, the need to be liked, to be nice.

In 1972, Dr. Stanley Millgram asked some experimenters to catch the New York subway and ask people for their seats. 68 percent gave them up. But it was hard for the experimenters to even ask. They often returned without meeting their quotas. Dr. Millgram himself found asking the question exceptionally difficult.

This sort of experiment is known as a "breaching experiment". It involves violating social norms. A famous, pioneering exponent of breaching experiments was a chap called Harold Garfinkle. So much so that "breaching experiments" are known as "Garfinkling"! It was part of a wider field of endeavour he called "ethnomethodology":

"... treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study, and by paying to the most commonplace activities of daily life the attention usually accorded extraordinary events, seek to learn about them as phenomena in their own right." (Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkle, p.1)

Amorphous Convention & the Garfinkler

Asking people for seats on the bus is an obvious breach of convention. But conventions involving strong emotions don't just exist between strangers on buses. They often take a more amorphous, undefined, unarticulated, unconscious form. They are not obvious "conventions". They're not rules your grandmother would "tut tut" to you about as a kid!

How It Works

The simple version of the idea is this. When you watch your own hand movements some parts of your brain co-ordinate the bits of the brain making your hands move with the parts of your brain processing what you see. When you see someone else move his or her hands, the brain co-ordinates your brain with the other person's movement in a similar way. In some ways, it reacts as if you were moving your own hands.

The bit doing the coordinating between faculties is made up of what some call "mirror neurons".

"When a creature watches her own hand movements, an association is formed between copies of motor signals for such movement and visual reafference from such movements. Cells or cell populations mediating this association can acquire similar sensory and motor fields. If the first creature watches another perform similar hand movements and receives similar visual inputs, these will also activate her sensorimotor 'matching' cells with their motor fields. Such a functional architecture predicts neural mirror systems: that cells or cell populations mediating this association would acquire similar sensory and motor field and that their sensory fields would not distinguish the observer's own action from others' similar actions." ("The shared circuits model. How control, mirroring, and simulation can enable imitation and mind reading" - Susan L. Hurley)

She goes on:

"Social cognition is enabled as a specialization of active perception: I perceive your action enactively, in a way that engages my own capacity for similar action, enabling me to copy or understand your action. Shared processing of actions of other and self is a special aspect of the shared processing of perception and action. The distinction between self and other is overlaid on the prior information space they share, which is again preserved as more advanced capacities are built on it."

In this month's Current Biology (April 2010), Dr. Itzhak Fried, Roy Mukamel and colleagues have found "mirror neurons" in the human brain.

Mirror Neurons & Honest Signals

Alex Pentland coined the phrase "Honest Signals" to describe the body language (and other things) we use to communicate with each other. Mostly on a subconscious level.

"We know that these behaviours function as signals because they unconsciously change other people's impressions of your attention, truth, interest, and focus. Moreover, we know that they are honest signals because they reliably predict peoples' future actions across a wide range of circumstances." (Honest Signals, Sandy Pentland, p.18)

These are ancient signals, probably pre-dating language. Pentland goes on:

"Our set of honest signals is much better suited to communcation in forests or around campfires than are the fine nuances of language and affect." (p.19)

How Garfinkling Works

To draw a long bow, when you are Garfinkling, you are literally experiencing what you think other people's emotional reactions are. You are mirroring them in your own mind based on the "Honest Signals" and other communications you perceive. The nuances of words, thoughts and ideas, are nothing compared to ancient caveman campfire communication.

The "social cognition" results in confusion where there was once clarity. Because you are literally thinking for yourself and for others. Or at least what your brain can "mirror". And it is a physical response built into your brain.

Sometimes "Honest Signals" are good. We are social creatures. It makes sense to pay attention to our peers. Even if it makes you change your mind, or you find yourself confused about what you were originally quite clear on, it may all be a useful contribution. But there is also a chance you are being stopped from following your own thinking.

Pentland writes:

"Ever since the enlightenment philosophers overturned the belief that mysticism and revelation were the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom, a fundamental assumption has been that the rational, conscious, individual mind is the font of human intelligence. We think of ourselves as independent, self-aware individuals, making decisions that shape our lives and carve out our place in the world. As a consequence of this viewpoint, our picture of society tends to be one of consciously interacting individuals, learning from each other by argument and example, and building organisations by using each other as convenient repositories of knowledge." (p. 87)

"The sociometre, though, reveals that there is more going on that just individuals engaging in conscious interaction. It shows that our minds are also substantially governed by the unconscious signaling within the social fabric that surrounds us." (p. 87)

We lay the notion of the "self" and "other" over the "social cognition" of mirror neurons, honest signals, and so on. The underlying unconscious communication is more than just hand signals. It's in everything we do and is so subtle and varied we can't process it consciously. It's just too complicated. We just don't have the processing capacity.

Being Reverse Garfinkled is in the process having your own thinking over-ridden by others. The symptoms being you are overwhelmed by confusing emotions that end up making you stay within the already existing convention or do what other people want you to do.

Reality Distortion Fields

It is also can also be a powerful way to enforce social norms (or is that Gnomes?) or impose your will. If you are charismatic enough. A famous and amusing example is a phrase coined by a chap called Bud Tribble to describe Steve Job's charisma. Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field. A one man gang of social cognition no-one could withstand.

Andy Hertzfeld writes:

He showed me the official schedule for developing the software that had us shipping in about ten months, in early January 1982.

"Bud, that's crazy!", I told him. "We've hardly even started yet. There's no way we can get it done by then."

"I know," he responded, in a low voice, almost a whisper.

"You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don't you correct it?"

"Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field."

"A what?"

"A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there's a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve."

"What else?"

"Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it."

I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.

Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.

(Read more splendid tales of about that here, including the tale of possible ways to nullify the Reality Distortion Field with public urination.)

The notion of "reality" being distorted is an interesting one. "Reality" being your own thinking when you are not in the presence of the source (or sources) of the reality distortion field.

Perhaps there is a way to approach it. Accept the distortion field. Make your mind up. Enter the field. See what it has to offer. Then leave it again. Enter several different distortion fields. Sleep on it. Then make your decision whilst sitting in your own Reality Distortion Field!

Or if you seem to be entering some sort of Social Cognition Reality Distortion Field (howzat for jargon!), perhaps you need to talk on the phone, send emails or communicate via a third party instead! :-)