I’ve just got back from Laos, doing the tourist
thing: as you do. One day we went to the equivalent of what we would call a
national park. They are desperately in need of preserving what forests and
animals they have, as illegal and legal logging is decimating the flora and, as
a result, the fauna. Poaching is another threat and has almost seen off what
was a thriving elephant population. There aren’t many birds either as they have
been hunted for food, and one can buy fried rats the market, but that is
another story.
Then there are the bears. They too have
been hunted to near extinction and are mostly kept in sanctuaries. One of the
reasons for hunting them is for homeopathic (I refuse to call this
pharmaceutical because it is far from that) purposes. One of the weirdest is
the taking a bear paw and putting into a bottle of rice wine. Apparently it is
good for the health. But the most barbaric practice is keeping bears in tiny
cages and painfully extracting bile from them until they can no longer produce
and die a horrible death: mostly practiced in China. Whatever medicinal benefit
bile might provide can be obtained from synthetic substances but it probably
has not health effect at all. Perhaps it’s a good placebo but so is a sugar
pill.
Humans are a remarkably superstitious lot
and this is not just the preserve of so
called developing countries. We see the same sort of psychological processes in
our apparently more enlightened societies and it doesn’t need to be about grand
scale belief systems. It can be spotted in everyday behavior as a primitive and
flawed way of making judgments.
One
example is the way in which we invent explanations for things that we don’t
understand or for which we don’t yet have a scientific reason. This happens on
a daily basis when we observe other people’s behaviour that doesn’t fit with
our model of the world. We don’t understand it so we find reasons that concur
with stereotypes we might have, or preconceived notions that were probably
implanted by a relative, a newspaper or some other ‘respected’ source. Given it
is our only reference point we believe it to be true rather than take the time
to do some research.
You see this sort of thing happening on
Facebook where a wild rumour about some marginal racial, ethnic or other group
gets circulated and people keep sharing it, believing it to be true. A five-minute
bit of research mostly shows these outrageous posts to be false but nobody
takes the time to look. And of course it happens in organisations and groups of
all kinds.
I have often been asked for my expert (sic)
advice on matters in which I have some expertise. These are not many but there
are some things that I do know something about. It might be the quality of the
advice but frequently not only is the advice ignored but the person or
organization does the complete opposite. The usual reason is expediency and a
desire to ignore, as Al Gore calls it, an inconvenient truth. It is just too
hard to do the thing (whatever it is) right so the advice is dismissed and the
more convenient, preconceived approach is used.
One example is the organization that has a
problem and is looking for a training solution. In fact, a brief investigation
finds that the problem involves the organizational systems, processes,
procedures or, more intangibly, leadership. This is pointed out but ignore
because the solution is seen as too difficult. Much better to adopt a solution
that is easy but will not work. But this example can be taken as a metaphor.
This sort of behavior is as primitive as
extracting bile from bears for no good purpose. But, it is part of the human condition.
Our brains have a lot of evolving to do before we can claim to be as
sophisticated as we think we are.
