By Sidney S. Stark
“I don’t understand what the problem is.” The manager shakes his head and looks around the conference table with an implicit call for help in his shrugged shoulders. “I’d never ask someone to do anything I wouldn’t ask of myself.” He shrugs again as if a solution to the problem would continue to evade any sane person and his partners around the table nod in agreement. They all seem sympathetic to the argument that nothing could be fairer than a demand for behavior that mirrors one’s own. I look around the table again to see if there are any dissenters. I can’t detect any. Why then I wonder has the warning bell gone off with such a clang in my head? I know it has nothing to do with the extra hours of work he’s required of his employees and everything to do with the comment about the aptness of his request. What was so wrong with ‘I’d never ask someone to do anything I wouldn’t ask of myself’?
Pretending to listen to the suggestions floating around the table for ways to promote the project, I let my mind drift to the first time I was confronted with the challenge to that often lauded opinion about personal demands on others. It was during my freshman year in college when I found myself studying psychology to satisfy a science requirement that left me only ‘Ecosystems of Pond and Field’ or ‘Introduction to Psychology’ as a choice. I thought psychology was the furthest subject away from anything I’d ever studied so that was my choice. I remember opening the textbook to read my first assignment with a fast-sinking heart as I began to second guess my decision before I’d even started the work.
It’s interesting that I can still remember a number of the themes introduced on those fist pages- a strong reminder of how wrong I can be when I jump to conclusions. But the theme that surprised me the most because of the example used to introduce it was about the ego-centric individual who uses the phrase ‘I’d never ask someone to do anything I wouldn’t ask of myself’. I can remember sitting up and staring at the page with the sharp realization that not only had I often had that rationale presented to me but I could instantly see why the text used it as their example. Suddenly the validation using oneself as the standard of the moment seemed outrageous, but I couldn’t figure out why people can’t see it naturally.
There were many things I learned from that surprising first course in freshman psych, none the least of which was that useful things can come from unexpected courses. But the one that has been the most valuable reminder of the danger of ego-centric behavior in the guise of lofty ideals of inspiration was the example using ‘I’d never ask anything of someone…’ as its core. I know from experience that there are many people who don’t see this view as problematic. Is that because they think the psychology text is wrong or they can’t see past themselves far enough to consider its truth and learn from it? The warning bell tolls in my head if not in theirs; how about yours?