Blindsided by Big Details

Our brains seem to be built with many hurdles to thinking clearly.
One illusion that especially intrigues me, and one many people subscribe
to, is known sometimes as the identity fallacy and other times as the
fallacy of continuity.

Either way, the core mistake is the same—thinking that big
effects have big causes. Or that big events must have big consequences.
The corollary mental trip-up is thinking that small events must have
small consequences.

The first blow against the identity fallacy struck me unaware.
Somewhere in the course of motherhood I got my first inkling that big
events might not have big consequences.

It was the end of summer, and my two then-young sons and I spent an
extra day at our beach cottage. While the boys frolicked outdoors, I set
about cleaning out the refrigerator for dinner. Into one big pot I threw
peppers, cheeses and all manner of leftovers. Whatever it was, there was
plenty of it, and we feasted, sunned and satisfied in the summer
twilight.

Fast forward to the fall. One of the boys was celebrating a
birthday. Would I make my famous osso buco or my scrumptious eggplant
parmesan?

No, the birthday boy said after some thought, could I make that
wonderful dish we had the last night at the cottage? Could I make it? I
couldn’t even remember it. It was, however, a most memorable event
for at least one son.

That brought home an important lesson. Life’s most savory
moments often come unbidden and can be so cloaked in ordinariness we
barely notice them at the time. And if two people who were there
can’t even agree on what’s a memorable event, how do we even
calibrate big causes?

Another blow against the identity fallacy came years later. I was
writing an article, which turned into a book, about bullies and victims.
Most all of us would agree that aggression is a pretty big deal.
Violence. Murder. Wars. Harm to others. It causes a lot of grief in the
world, and to be a victim of it is especially memorable.

Not everybody is capable of aggression. It takes a special human
being who cannot merely harm but intend harm to another. Most of us are
restrained by empathy or guilt from intentionally hurting another
soul.

I discovered that most human beings try aggression. In fact, at age
two we’re almost all aggressors. But most of us give it up. Some
kids, however, are encouraged by parental behaviors or neglect to hold on
to aggressive behavior. In other words, bullies are made and not
born.

There is no big bang, no one crisis of development that turn
someone into an aggressor. It’s largely in the nuances of
parent-child interaction. And so unexceptional, so mundane is the process
that it took researchers over 20 years of observing parents and children
together to nail it down.

Essentially it plays out in relatively trivial, but frequent, bouts
of disobedience to which parents respond inconsistently and
intermittently with threats and punishment. Given the lack of a
consistent adult response, a child can’t develop trust in a
caregiver, sowing the seeds for a hostile view of the world.

As an aggressive child grows, his behavior becomes increasingly
unacceptable to a larger group of peers. Eventually the aggressive kids
have only each other to hang around with, and they spin their way to more
or less outcast status that tends to drive even more aggressive
behavior.

In short, it’s a long process. And there’s no one
identifiable cause or momentous moment.

So it is with much of our lives. Seattle psychologist John Gottman,
one of the foremost relationship researchers, contends, for example, that
most marriages die not with a bang but with a whimper. They end not from
affairs but because day and day out partners turn away from each other in
the little “mindless moments” of marriage.

Our brains are built to look for big causes. But life is almost
invariably more subtle and more complex than we give it credit for. And
so we need to counteract the biases that were built into our brains for
life in much simpler times.

I say, let’s pay attention to little things, too. They
establish the climate in which we live our lives and that underlies much
of our behavior.