The ladder of inference, or how misunderstandings arise

You happen to walk past a colleague on the street, you say hello but he doesn’t answer.  Your first reaction is to feel slighted and think that he has deliberately ignored you. You then try to explain what’s happened: “It’s because I didn’t back him up in a meeting the other day”. You continue: “Whenever I disagree with him, he always gets angry and ignores me.”  You then decide that the next time you see him there’s no way you’re going to say hello. However, it turns out that the real reason that he didn’t say hello was simply because he wasn’t wearing his contact lenses and he actually hadn’t seen you!

When something like this happens, we are going up the “ladder of inference”, to use the phrase coined by Chris Argyris. The ladder of inference is a way of explaining one of the principal problems in communication: when one person speaks, the other interprets his words in the light of his own prejudices, past experiences and personal opinions. You see, our brain doesn’t like ambiguity and, when faced with something it doesn’t understand, it tends to look for an explanation. The problem is that it often gets the explanation wrong. Just think how many times we misinterpret emails!

So we need to be very careful how we process information. If we want to go down the ladder of inference rather than up it, we should ask ourselves if our interpretation of what someone says or does really reflects his intention. And if we’re not sure, we would do well to check with the person in question. Unfortunately, many of us unwittingly become Hollywood scriptwriters and create a lurid plot in our minds when the reality is usually much more mundane and simple.

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