Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer is perhaps the nation’s leading expert on the role of unmindfullness in the production of human error. She first introduced her work outside of academe in Mindfulness.
To illustrate the creative potential of mindfulness, Langer describes an experiment in which two groups were shown the same three items. The items were introduced to the first group as being an extension cord, a hair dryer and a rubber dog chew toy. The second group was told the same three items could be used as an extension cord, a hair dryer and a rubber dog chew toy – in other words, each could potentially be put to other useful purposes.
Subjects were then given pencils to fill out a questionnaire. Part way through the exercise the experimenters told subjects the session had to be aborted because of an error in the instructions on how to complete the questionnaire and no other copies were available to start over.
The first group accepted the verdict. However the second group concluded that what could be a rubber dog chew toy could also be used as an eraser to remove already filled in answers from the form.
With a mindful approach, the second group got beyond seeing the dog chew toy in a context that precluded its use as something else in a different context.
Tomorrow I introduce a book that describes a worldwide contextual change in markets that poses problems which cannot be solved through unmindful application of solutions that have worked so well in the past that no one questions them anymore.
So here is a post about a woman using an objecti n the ordinary way (the way the object was designed), which is percieved by someone else (in a position to impose consequences on the woman) as a, well, evil thing.
The upshot is the woman is penalized for using the object appropriately.
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2004/09/more_criminalit.html
So the question is, who is mindful in this encounter?
Posted by: liz | September 20, 2004 at 10:26 PM
No one is criticizing anyone for for seeing something according to its generic nature. Honestly.
Langer's experiment was conducted to demonstrate how perceiving something merely in terms of its functional qualities blinds us to other, creative inferences about its qualities that may give it a richer value than it has by seeing it only in its narrower, generic "self."
Posted by: David Wolfe | September 22, 2004 at 01:26 AM