I’ve been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and just reached the chapter on the power of expectations to change perception. The introductory example comes from sport: the supporters of two rival teams watch the same key, game-deciding moment, and for one of them the ball (or player, or something – it’s American football, so it’s all Greek to me…) is obviously conspicuously in, and for the other it’s just as obviously out.
“Although both friends were watching the same game, they were doing so through markedly different lenses. One saw the pass as in bounds. The other saw it as out. In sports, such arguments are not particularly damaging – in fact, they can be fun. The problem is that these same biased processes can influence how we experience other aspects of our world. These biased processes are in fact a major source of escalation in almost every conflict…”
This will all sound very familiar to anyone who’s read Hexagram 38, Opposing:
‘Opposing.
Small affairs, good fortune.’
Opposing and Diverging has to do with differences in vision – ‘looking askance’, in LiSe’s translation: watching the same things through different lenses, and seeing something different. This is good fortune in small affairs, such as sport; not good in great affairs, such as international conflicts.
The chapter also describes various experiments designed to show how expectations ‘program’ us to perceive differently – and also, interestingly enough, to discover ways that such programming could be overcome.
For instance, it turns out that the flavour of a certain beer can be improved by the addition of a few drops of balsamic vinegar. Offer people the original and improved versions in a blind taste test, and they tend to prefer the one with vinegar. Tell them in advance that one glass contains vinegar, and they tend to find it revolting. But tell them about the added vinegar after they’ve tried the beer, and they still like it.
So if you remove the context of expectations, perceptions become clearer. Presumably if the two sports fans had been unable to identify which team was which, they’d have agreed about where the ball (or the player) landed.
I think this casts new light on 38.2 –
‘Meeting a master in the lane.
Not a mistake.’
This line hasn’t overcome the power of expectations to bias vision altogether – that happens in line 6, I think, where defences are lowered and apparent robbers turn out to be potential allies. Instead, it’s removed the context that sets expectations: the lane is a neutral place, nobody’s home ground, free from formalities and rules. This line’s zhi gua (the hexagram it moves to) is 21, Biting Through: it represents the most direct way to overcome the gulf of separation in 38, creating unity and insight. What you encounter here might still be quite different, even alien to you, but in the absence of preconceptions it can be a master and guide.
Instant replay — the objective eye of the camera — resolves differences in vision in football, but what is the objective basis for “One meets his lord in a narrow street.” I think the image comes from place in sequence (inverse of the togetherness of The Family), the place of the line (line 2 = movement), and the sequence of constituent trigrams (Dui — Li — Kan — Li). The lane is narrow, the two meet in opposition (face to face), and the person of lesser rank stands aside. No blame.
Thanks for this – I’ve quoted you on the forum thread where discussion of this post’s getting underway.
By the way, I also set out to link to your ‘hexagram pictures’ site, but couldn’t find it. Is it still online?
I had to delete it. The host server did not have proper security, had become infected with a virus, and could infect the personal computer of anyone who accessed the site.
Ugh! I hope you can recreate it somewhere one of these days… there are plenty of options now for creating attractive, secure, free websites.
When I get 38.2 that usually means I’ll be getting a phone call almost immediately from the person I’m thinking about. The “narrow lane” is the telephone wire! A brief discussion over the telephone often solves the problem, so I don’t think there is any need to step aside in the “alley” to let the other one by. Actually, I regard these as being fortunate meetings most of the time.
Lane as phone line – I like it. It’s also been my experience that the meetings are good ones – often an encounter to learn from, not necessarily part of any ongoing relationship.