1 post tagged “social”
Oliver Burkeman has a great column on homophily - our "tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us".
I've been thinking about this a lot lately - for many of us, we spend much of our social time with people who hold similar views and like the same things; we read books, newspapers and blogs that support our opinions and we watch programmes and films that dovetail with our tastes.
However open-minded they might consider themselves to be, I'm guessing most people probably don't spend a lot of time seeking out people and ideas that will challenge them. If you're lucky, you might have friends who are happy to engage you in a challenging, possibly-slightly-heated-but-mostly-civilised, debate. Sometimes they might even change your mind. But certainly in my case, if I'm not careful, I find this is the exception rather than the rule. So, what's wrong with that? Well,
...as the Harvard media researcher Ethan Zuckerman puts it, "Homophily causes ignorance." (It also makes us more extreme, studies show: a group of conservatives, given the chance to discuss politics among themselves, will grow more conservative.)
However, I have noticed that there is one area of my life that doesn't display this comforting effect - and that's work. At work I don't necessarily choose who is in my team, or who I collaborate with on a project - and that can be a refreshing change. Having to work with someone whose views I don't share, or whose way of working I don't understand can be frustrating or occasionally downright infuriating - but the creative tension sometimes produces much better results, and certainly does its bit to prevent complacency. In short, it's good for me.
Burkeman agrees:
The unspoken assumption here is that you know what you like - that satisfying your existing preferences, and maybe expanding them a little around the edges, is the path to fulfilment. But if happiness research has taught us anything, it's that we're terrible at predicting what will bring us pleasure. Might we end up happier by exposing ourselves more often to serendipity, or even, specifically, to the people and things we don't think we'd like?
He suggests:
... Facebook could easily offer a list of the People You're Least Likely To Know; imagine what that could do for cross-cultural understanding. And I love the Unsuggester, a feature of the books site LibraryThing.com: enter a book you've recently read, and it'll provide a list of titles least likely to appear alongside it on other people's bookshelves. Tell it you're a fan of Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason, and it'll suggest you read Confessions Of A Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. And maybe you should.
Maybe I will.
