Tracking

One of the things that fascinates me is how individual desire gets "translated" into social interaction. In research on psychotherapy, they've found that expertise does not account for at least 40% of improvement when therapy goes well. 40% comes from what psychologists call "rapport"--the interactions or relationship between therapist and client. This finding translates into relating in general, I think. John Gottman found that 2 out of 3 arguments even in successful marriages cannot be solved and must simply be lived with. That means that a lot of what makes up a happy relationship involves all kinds of factors like similarities and differences, but how many people really consider that a huge part of overcoming problems in ANY human relationship means having 2:3 disagreements go unresolved. If we look for a simple definition of maturity, we could say that maturity means giving everyone or almost everyone the chance to disagree with me two out of every three times.

So when I talk about maturity, and people say, "But who can say what maturity is?", you can hold me to this personal goal. I want to have the chops to give each individual I meet the benefit of the doubt two out of every three times we disagree at least, and what's more, I want to communicate that this is what I'm shooting for. If I can do that, much of the time I'll be able to at least relate to someone else on a human level even if we don't ever get married.

That lays out a general goal, a general direction why I bring up the rest of this. If the most basic attentional ability is something like playfulness or attentional receptivity, we can look at ways to improve that in ourselves. One way is cultivating the willingness to give others--and ourselves also--the benefit of the doubt concerning their intentions. But beyond that, the second attentional skill is concentration. How does that translate into groups? In some situations, people might be poor at staying focused on their own but find that being in a group helps them stay "on track". Think about sticking to an exercise regime, a new diet, a difficult job, etc. Those things can be made much easier or much, much harder with or without social support. This happens to the extent that many things we could not accomplish on our own we can achieve with a little help from our friends/colleagues/whomever.

So I'll call "tracking" (staying on track) the social equivalent of concentrating (which happens basically "within" individuals). Different skills go into keeping a group on track. Think of someone you know who is such an expert at something that having almost anyone else around getting involved drags their performance down. This is an example of someone who may be a genuine expert, who may be excellent at concentrating on the task at hand, but who is not so good about translating that expertise into group performance. Think of getting frustrated with anything you can do at least competently and the frustration that can arise when working with someone who is a klutz or an amateur in comparison. Concentrating increases our ability to do difficult and complex things, but it can also increase the intensity of frustration when we feel disrupted while we're trying to concentrate. This is the same with all the attentional skills--they are helpful in and of themselves, but no one of them (in and of itself) is enough; we need to complement one skill with another with another. Expertise and concentration, then, can actually disrupt a group by intensifying frustration and destroying cohesion. At the same time, tracking is the closest social equivalent to the individual attentional skill of concentrating.

Because they correlate so closely, we can often make up for one with the other. If I am bored with math, I'll be much more likely to stay engaged with that topic if I'm around a teacher or class that is really excited by math. We naturally want to feel included in what's going on. Fighting or denying that natural inclination takes attention and energy. The brain uses approximately 25% (!!!!) of our energy, so when we waste that energy, we waste a lot. What's more, since we all want to be part of the group, when there is a strong enough pull in the group towards denying an interest in math (or whatever), we look to become part of that denial or we look to split the group. If you like math, you start wishing that the people who don't care would just leave or try. And they seem intrusive for not getting "with the program". If you don't like math, the people who do will seem nerdy, maybe dominating, and you wish they'd just get out of your face with all that noise; if they like math, fine, but leave me out of it.

If you look at it structurally, this makes sense--we agitate for what we want, our negative emotions tell us something even though we rarely listen to the wisdom in them. Part of where a lot of confusion comes in is when we either want a certain degree of maturity from our groups or when we don't want to be held to some high or abstract standard that we haven't agreed to in the first place. It's hard to do intervene well in a conflict situation when we aren't aware of what makes for good cohesion, collaboration, and tracking. Hopefully, as I get more into these subjects, you'll find my logic to be very circular and self-supportive. That's an internal part of logic as well as group cohesion. Somewhere around 40% of what you like or dislike doing depends on how well you are relating to the group. That's almost half of deciding whether you like something or not. Parents who have seen teenagers run through multiple trends know what I'm talking about--when it's trnedy, it means the world; no trendiness, it's nothing. 40%. The same holds for adults.