Dispute Resolution
Abstractions and Generalizations — What Every Mediator Should Know
Two people can use the very same word and mean two different things by it — and never notice. For a mediator, the gap between their private meanings is the whole game. Here's how those hidden hierarchies of meaning form, and why understanding them makes you more effective.
Two people sit across from each other using the same word — fair, respect, reasonable — and mean two different things by it, and neither one notices. That quiet gap is where a great deal of conflict lives, and learning to see it has made me a far more effective mediator than any technique ever did.
We order the world through abstraction and generalization. We build categories, rank them, and then use them — good person, bad person — to judge and respond to the people in front of us. I think of these as personal hierarchies of abstraction, and the more clearly I understand someone’s, the better I can help. The simple, easily forgotten truth underneath it: the perceptions two people bring to the same thing may be completely different.
The hierarchy of abstractions
We learn, gradually, to sort the world into groups — cats, dogs, chairs, people, enemies — to make sense of what we encounter. With time the mind gets better at it, constantly fine-tuning its categories, slowly building a working model of the world.
And early on, we learn to abstract the abstractions themselves: breaking categories apart, finding the traits they share, and building higher categories to hold the lower ones. Out of that grows a whole hierarchy of abstraction through which each of us perceives the world — and no two of these hierarchies are quite the same.
– Read more: Canadian Arbitration and Mediation Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 24