As I read the first part of Blink, I am impressed not with the concept of the validity of initial impressions, but of the two things people pick up on really quickly in relationships: respect and contempt. They feel it in just moments, making the difference between doctors that get sued and don't, marriages that last...and don't.
It leaves me asking the question, what happens to those relationships like parent/child, or sibling/sibling that feel that contempt but are eternal? They cannot just "not be related" as we seem to think marriage is so easily dissolved.
Maybe marriage is our chance to use choice to create a similarly lasting, eternal relationship and why it is so damaging to consider divorce, as God honors and validates our choices and empowers it with those same ties that we feel between siblings or between parent and child? Those "ties" are still there and are not undone. Perhaps that is why divorce is such a negative thing?
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"We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for."(pg 69)
I do this!!!!
I like how both the author and those he quotes address the reality that both our instinctive reactions and our actual stories that explain them have basis in reality, even if they are contradictory. We simply do not really know where we stand in those areas!
"Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It's just that the hint was so subtle that it was picked up on only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all the subjects could do was to make up what seemed to them the most plausible one...
...When we ask people to explain their thinking---particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious--we need to be careful in how we interpret their [and our own!!] answers....I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and,...doing so can have serious consequences."
"We need to accept our ignorance and say, 'I don't know' more often." (pg 71)
It leaves me asking the question, what happens to those relationships like parent/child, or sibling/sibling that feel that contempt but are eternal? They cannot just "not be related" as we seem to think marriage is so easily dissolved.
Maybe marriage is our chance to use choice to create a similarly lasting, eternal relationship and why it is so damaging to consider divorce, as God honors and validates our choices and empowers it with those same ties that we feel between siblings or between parent and child? Those "ties" are still there and are not undone. Perhaps that is why divorce is such a negative thing?
*****************
"We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for."(pg 69)
I do this!!!!
I like how both the author and those he quotes address the reality that both our instinctive reactions and our actual stories that explain them have basis in reality, even if they are contradictory. We simply do not really know where we stand in those areas!
"Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It's just that the hint was so subtle that it was picked up on only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all the subjects could do was to make up what seemed to them the most plausible one...
...When we ask people to explain their thinking---particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious--we need to be careful in how we interpret their [and our own!!] answers....I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and,...doing so can have serious consequences."
"We need to accept our ignorance and say, 'I don't know' more often." (pg 71)
