Then comes recognizing that the early teen years are when kids move from concrete thinking to more abstract thought – they begin to connect the dots, Biro explains. They may assume the doctor connected the dots the same way, meaning a girl who complains of stomach pain may not volunteer that she fears pregnancy.
"It's not that they're withholding information. They figure they've just told you everything you need to know because the rest of it you should be able to figure out," Biro says. "I prove to them I am indeed about as smart as mud and I have to ask them more probing questions."
They make this sound like a flaw in people skills that is the result of adolescent immaturity. The thing is, I've always had this problem my whole life, and still do. When something is completely obvious to me, it doesn't occur to me that it might not be completely obvious to someone who's supposed to be smarter than me. The patient with the stomach pain doesn't mention that she fears pregnancy because it's completely obvious to her that that's what she's worried about - just like if I had missed a period and was experiencing nausea, I might not think to explicitly mention to the doctor that I'm worried about pregnancy because it's completely obvious to me that that's where the symptoms are pointing.
If I know more about the issue at hand than my interlocutor, I can manage the interaction just fine. For example, as a result of years of working to make documents that were originally written in French sound like they were written in English, I can tell if a person speaking is thinking in French or English, regardless of which of those languages they're speaking. If my interlocutor is another translator, I won't even point this out because it's so obvious. If my interlocutor is unilingual, I'll tell them outright from my position as the authority on the subject, maybe pointing out the specific word choices that give it away. If my interlocutor is a non-translator langling, I'll probe a bit to see what is and isn't obvious to them and adapt accordingly.
However, when I know less than my interlocutor, I'm unable to assess and adapt to their knowledge. For example, my gaydar doesn't ping nearly as often as it should. It pinged for Scott Thompson and Stephen Fry, but not Graham Chapman or Rick Mercer. So if it's obvious to me that someone is gay, it would never occur to me to tell my interlocutor that that person is gay any more than it would occur to me to mention that they have brown hair, because when it's obvious to me it's usually obvious to everyone else. If it isn't obvious to my interlocutor, I have no way of knowing that because empirical evidence suggests that when it's obvious to me it's obvious to anyone with better people-reading skills than me (which is like 90% of the population).
So how am I, from my position as the more ignorant person in the conversation, supposed to know that what I think are obvious pregnancy symptoms don't look that way to a doctor? How am I supposed to know that the most obvious of gayness isn't evident to someone who is much better at reading people than I am? When it's glaringly obvious to me that the property tax model is injust or it's morally wrong to buy pets from pet stores when there are pets in shelters or eliminating plastic shopping bags is not going to affect the number of plastic bags that we throw in the landfill, how am I supposed to know that it isn't glaringly obvious to my much-smarter interlocutor? How do you develop this skill?
No comments:
Post a Comment