Six Strategies for Creating More Nuanced Perspectives // Variant Perception #25

A superpower in the modern world is the ability to create nuanced perspectives.

Mountains of data bombard us around every corner—advertisements, videos, images, newsletters, movies, more information, more data, more everything. Your capacity to filter that data and form it into a nuanced perspective (also a healthy perspective for your emotional well-being) is critical to being a thriving, modern human.

Building nuanced perspectives allows for deeper empathy. Deeper empathy creates a more whole society. More inclusivity, understanding, wellness, and peace are what we all want, yes?

Creating a nuanced perspective takes work. It’s not something that happens. What I’ve found helpful is to find rules or observations that have helped to make it easier.

I have six observations about life that help me create more nuanced perspectives. This is not a comprehensive list, and I don’t consider it finished. It still helps to inform me of my curiosities for why the world is the way it is, why people make decisions that I would never make, and why things don’t seem to make sense.

Recognizing how we think about the world is one of the first steps to forming nuanced opinions that hold empathy at their core.

The first observation is that behaviors tend to cluster together. When you work for a narcissist, you’ll meet more narcissists. Through a combination of a shared environment, social influences, common beliefs, and structural forces, your peer group and immediate community tend to have similar behaviors, tendencies, and outcomes.

Many colloquial sayings echo this. “Misery loves company,” “bad things happen in threes,” and “crabs in a bucket” all speak to the observation that bad things tend to happen together. If you’re in a bad spot, it tends to coincide with others experiencing something similar.

It’s one of the most challenging aspects of creating equal opportunity for less fortunate people. Behavioral gravity comes with culture and the dominant behaviors inside that culture. It’s not insurmountable, but its presence cannot be ignored.

One of my earlier issues of Variant Perception covered how the grandchildren of the wealthy in post-Mao China, even though their parents and grandparents had all of their status, wealth, and possessions taken away, became the rich group again after China began to open up.

Much of our behavior, perspectives, and worldviews are not the result of original or critical thinking we did for ourselves. Without a dedicated focus on the opposite, we’re more the average of the beliefs of close friends and family. Outcomes are just as much influenced by the behaviors and worldviews of those we surround ourselves with as they are by luck, skill, and decisions.

This leads me to my second observation; human society orients around systems. Decision-making systems, systems of government, school systems, family systems, economic systems, and political systems confine behaviors to certain tracks. These tracks create limited opportunities and outcomes because incentives rule these systems. The direction and the destination of these tracks take time to change. Where the paths lead directly influences the outcomes experienced. Societal outcomes have momentum.

Objects in motion tend to stay in motion, leading to many outcomes that “don’t make sense” when we think about why they occur.

Do you know anyone who desires to live in a more polluted environment? Where our beaches, mountains, skies, lakes, rivers, and fields are more polluted?

Of course not. So, why do these outcomes continue to occur?

For undesirable outcomes to continue, a positive reward must exist to encourage that behavior. In the case of polluting and destroying the environment… the incentives encouraging these behaviors are more substantial than the punishments discouraging.

The pollution of the environment and how we treat the environment segues into the fourth lens for creating nuanced perspectives and removing judgment.

How would you feel watching a man back his truck onto the beach and dump trash into the ocean?

I imagine you’d feel a combination of anger, frustration, despair, or sadness, which is entirely normal. Yet, are these emotions pointed at the guy driving the truck? Or even at the system that supports this behavior?

There exists no right or wrong when the goal is to gain a deeper understanding. When we create an enemy out of a man, a system, or a group, we cloud our judgment and color the perspective with emotions. This prevents empathy and the ability to see plainly the systems and incentives.

That doesn’t mean you cannot have opinions or feelings about the outcomes and behaviors you’re witnessing. Those emotions point you toward areas of your life that you care deeply about. However, forming a more nuanced perspective can help remove the heavy emotional charge by creating more empathy.

The guy dumping the garbage on the beach has a family who relies on his income. The government of his state is corrupt and has not built a proper landfill. When the garbage piles up in the streets of his neighborhood, people get sick and diseased. What would you do if you were born in the same shoes as this man?

The fifth frame I use is always to remind myself how little I know (I’m sure my friends and family will laugh when they read that because I’m known as a know it all…). Plato’s cave allegory represents this philosophy well. Plato describes people who have lived their entire lives chained to a wall in a secluded cave.

Shadows are projected on the opposite wall of a cave. The prisoners, having only one concept of reality, name these shadows. These shadows are their entire world. Little do they know or realize there’s a whole world outside the cave.

We know so little about everything. We know so much about everything. It’s a crazy paradox about the human experience. We have 8,000 years of history from human civilization, much lost or destroyed. Then, we have hundreds of years of scientific progress exploring the depths of the Universe, much of that only just scratching the surface, creating more questions than answers.

One practical behavior is asking yourself, “What do I not understand in this situation?” When you’re presented with a situation or event that does not make sense, assume you do not have all of the information. Intellectual humility will take you far in helping to form nuanced perspectives.

The modern world has become a wild distortion of the vast majority of human behavior. And that trend is only continuing.

We’re entering wholly unprecedented territory. How we respond to these new realities is now more critical than ever.

-Jared

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