On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Chew Lin Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Arguably we need the state and civil society to do all these things because > left to our own devices, we hardly smile at our neighbours? :)
That's a fair observation. But then I can see this is the case in many neighborhoods in urban India too. While I fondly recall the little town in the hills I grew up in, where everyone met each other on their morning and evening walks, and doffed their hats and made curtsies, I rarely find neighbors today who even know one another in urban India. I think the predominant hesitation in getting too close to another is that they may ask for an awkward favor or some silly fear like that. > Throwing a comment out there until I find more brain space to deal with > it--there is diversity of race, there is diversity of religion, there is > diversity of class. I think the general trend here is that humans lean towards being cautious and are suspicious of anything that's new because thinking is hard. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/name-pronunciation-success/ is a study of how people with easier to pronounce names make more money and enjoy more success in life. Even stock tickers that are easier to pronounce trade better on the markets. And on the other hand it's been established that people who travel a lot, who have adjusted to living in many places around the world, who have read world literature and are multi-lingual have more faith in humanity and fear less. Whereas those who are home bodies, who watch a lot of TV and are less likely to have experienced new cultures tend to be fearful, suspicious of human nature and prone to doubt. This might have something to do with Daniel Kahnemann's hypothesis on decision making with heuristics. "[P]eople are not accustomed to thinking hard, and are often content to trust a plausible judgment that comes to mind." Daniel Kahneman, American Economic Review 93 (5) December 2003, p. 1450 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution Thankfully it's possible to produce better heuristics with training. To a well read intellectual a sentence full of difficult word constructions poses no challenge and may even hold a sense of beauty and charm, whereas a dull boring sentence full of simple words might hold little appeal. To the MBA a sentence without hope and promise and lots of verbs sounds dull and unappealing. These are both people who have moved away from their base state of the modestly literate to whom complicated words and obtuse constructions are a source of irritation, not enjoyment. Thus the popularity of Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat is in no small measure due to their appeal to the lowest common denominator. We dislike people of other cultures, other races, other income levels, or in short, we dislike the other because we don't understand it sufficiently, and it feels too much like work.
