We perceive through habit, expectation, bias, and assumption. The heuristics that guide us through our days are full of predictable biases (systematic errors). These unconscious, predictable biases are rooted in the machinery of our cognition.
When making judgments or decisions, people often rely on simplified information processing strategies called heuristics, which may result in systematic, predictable errors called cognitive biases (hereafter CB). For instance, people tend to overestimate the accuracy of their judgments (overconfidence bias), to perceive events as being more predictable once they have occurred (hindsight bias), or to seek and interpret evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs and expectations (confirmation bias).
The Impact of Cognitive Biases on Professionals’ Decision-Making: A Review of Four Occupational Areas – PMC
Jiggle the machinery of your cognition by adopting new framing. We can more easily change our framing by adopting new heuristics (rules of thumb). By changing our framing, we correct for the systematic error of predictable biases installed in us by structural and systemic forces.
Reason uses the logics of image-schemas, frames, conceptual metaphors, prototypes, and narratives.
The Neuroscience of Language and Thought, Dr. George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics – YouTube
Words activate frames, and frames are ways in which you structure the world. You cannot think without frames. You cannot speak without frames being there, and those frames are physical, they are circuitry in your brain that carries out all those inferences and imposes that structure. And that circuitry, once you learn a frame, is there mostly for life.
The Neuroscience of Language and Thought, Dr. George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics – YouTube
When we successfully reframe public discourse, we change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently.
The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
Change your heuristics, and change your framing, so that you can perceive those of us on the margins and at the edges.
Common Sense = Neuronormative cultural reification
Post by @yeshes.online — Bluesky
Our designs, our societies, and the boundaries of our compassion are tested at the edges, where the truths told are of bias, inequality, injustice, and thoughtlessness.
The logistics of disability and difference in a structurally ableist and inaccessible world poisoned by bad framing are exhausting, often impossible. We are perpetual hackers, mappers, and testers of our systems by necessity of survival.
We need your help. We need you to help us bridge the Double Empathy Extreme Problem (DEEP). To do that, we all must change our framing.
Dewey’s democratic humanism is thus not a restatement of popular clichés about striving after our dreams; it is instead a recognition that actual social change is a long and difficult task of altering recalcitrant habits and developing new ones.
Use these rules of thumb to challenge and change your current framing so that you can be a true ally to marginalized people.
In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.
The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
Our Rules of Thumb for Human Systems
The links below are to our glossary/encyclopedia where you can read a plain language definition of the term followed by in-depth information.
Read “>” as “over”.
Choose the framing on the left over the framing on the right to understand the realities of marginalized people and help change those realities.
- neurodiversity paradigm > pathology paradigm
- social model > medical model
- social model > deficit model
- biopsychosocial model > pathology paradigm
- structural ideology > deficit ideology
- spectrums > binaries
- agency > compliance
- compassion > coercion
- acceptance > awareness
- acceptance > accommodation
- respectful connection > behaviorism
- identity first language > person first language
- human needs > special needs
- needs based equity > fairness based equity
- support needs > functioning labels
- collaborative niche construction > least restrictive environment
- intrinsic motivation > extrinsic motivation
- agent > patient
- identity > diagnosis
- progressive education > mainstream education
- experiential learning > prescribed curriculum
- communities > platforms
- harm reduction > abstinence
- posthumanism > neoliberalism
- holistic thinking > systems thinking > silos
- ecologies of care > ecologies of control
- human scale > super-human-scale
- competency networks > leadership
- participatory research > scientism
- listening > epistemic injustice
I used to tell my students that ideology never announces itself as ideology. It naturalizes itself like the air we breath. It doesn’t acknowledge that it is a way of looking at the word; it proceeds as if it is the only way of looking at the world. At its most effective, it renders itself unassailable: just the way things are. Not an opinion, not the result of centuries of implicit and explicit messaging, not a means of upholding a power structure. It just is.
the shame is ours
Making the Strange Familiar
Suddenly, even the most powerful people in society are forced to be fluent in the concerns of those with little power, if they want to hold on to the cultural relevance that thrust them into power in the first place. Being a comedian means having to say things that an audience finds funny; if an audience doesn’t find old, hackneyed, abusive jokes funny anymore, then that comedian has to do more work. And what we find is, the comedians with the most privilege resent having to keep working for a living. Wasn’t it good enough that they wrote that joke that some people found somewhat funny, some years ago? Why should they have to learn about current culture just to get paid to do comedy?
The price of relevance is fluency – Anil Dash
We lament the lack of folks willing to bridge the Double Empathy Extreme Problem by adopting anthropological and sociological lenses to “make the strange familiar”, instead siding with a familiar default that is much about the neuronormative domination of people we don’t bother to understand.
Physics has a “strange” particle. A stranger is someone from outside whose practices may be different. Strange can also indicate the uncanny, the peculiar, the “off.” Anthropology courses often begin by talking about our mandate to “make the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” Making-strange, Verfremdung, a focal aspiration of the theater of the absurd, ostranenie, defamiliarization—all these allow us to see what we ordinarily take for granted, by causing a sense of wonder. That’s one reason anthropologists often begin our training by going to an unfamiliar—a strange—setting, because when things are unfamiliar, we notice much more. The challenge for my readers is to make schoolishness strange, to question the familiar.
Blum, Susan D.. Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Learning (p. 8). Cornell University Press.
We all gotta learn to set with our discomfort when listening to marginalized people speak about their lives. We must allow our framing to be challenged. We must question the familiar.
“making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange”
Margaret Mead 1901-1978
American Anthropologist
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