Worldviews: a bit of this & a bit of that
December 14th, 2006 by Bill
There’s an excellent piece on the CBC site by Richard Handler called ‘Humans and the dance of expectations.’ It’s an opinion column based on the work of U.S. psychologist Jerome Kagan, who has studied children for some 60 years.
His studies have led to some conclusions about us, human beings, which Handler sums up with, ” … human beings are driven by two basic psychological needs, which Kagan calls novelty and coherence.”
In some ways, it seems kind of obvious - certainly if you observe people everyday. The interesting part, for me, is how these two needs are mixed in each person, the ratio of novelty and coherence needs, which are clearly balanced differently in each person.
“Human beings are wired for novelty, true enough. But they become anxious or cranky when they don’t understand what’s happening to them. Their notion of the world must cohere.”
Yes, and when you put two people together, one who leans more to the novelty side of things and the other more to coherence, you get some interesting dynamics.
I’m thinking of this here in my new locale, Fredericton, New Brunswick. I came here because of that need for novelty. However, I’m somewhat anxious now, having been here some five weeks, because of that need for coherence. I haven’t bought a new home yet (haven’t seen anything yet I’ve wanted to sink money into) so there’s a certain sense of what Kagan would likely call coherence missing from my world, for the moment.
But also interesting is that I came down here with my friend, Liz and, between the two of us, my mix of the two needs has more coherence in it and hers has more novelty. So there’s a feeling that we’re living a Hollywood buddy movie, a sort of Odd Couple combo. She’s constantly laughing at my obsessive compulsive quirks and I am amused by her aura of chaos. And sometimes it’s not so amusing and there’s a bit of crankiness.
If this were the movie Some Like It Hot, I’d be Jack Lemmon. She’d be Tony Curtis.
It’s fascinating to me because it all conforms to my own view of things which is basically that everything is it’s own opposite or, put another way, contradiction is the essence of people and the world. Weakness is a strength; strength is a weakness. Comedy is tragedy; tragedy is comedy. Have a look at the title of Seth Godin’s latest book, Small is the New Big. Soon, we’ll be saying big is the new small.
It’s all about perception. We like change or hate it depending on the angle from which we’re viewing it. To employ the old cliché, the glass is half empty or half full – you decide how you’re going to view it. Although, as Kagan might say, your temperament will have a large say in how you’ll see it.
In the meantime, I’m still looking for a house. But I may have one soon. There are a couple that are appealing to me. I may even have a decision by the weekend … early next week is more likely, however.
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