Barriers to Agency: Moral Attitudes (Example)

A college student, enrolled in a Calculus course, worked to complete a take-home examination. Upon handing out the exam, the instructor for the course specifically reminded the students that the examinations should be independent work. Our college student heard this as, “Don’t cheat.”

The student was playing computer games in a friend’s dorm room the next day. Six other students from the class were sitting around and talking about the take-home exam as one student worked on his exam. They asked questions about his technique, formulas, and logic. Periodically, one student or another, would leave the dorm room for minutes, and return to the conversation. Our student thought nothing of it at the time and continued to play.

Graded examinations were distributed a week after the examination was due. Our student received a 70/100. The six other students’ scores were all above 80 with no two scores the same. Our student realized that those students had an advantage. You need to understand that the advantage the other students possessed was not cheating, it was collaboration.

Consider your perceptions. First, an opportunity to perform is greater than an opportunity to cheat or not cheat. An opportunity to perform is an opportunity for learning. Regardless of the reward, how best can you learn the lessons of this current opportunity? What resources do you have at your disposal? Will your use of those resources violate relationship? What the six students did was study together. They learned from each other. They created community. They, then, dispersed to complete their exams with that collective knowledge. Our student, just as you seem to, worked on his examination alone. Alone.

Second, ask yourself whether our student learned anything of value. Of course, 70 is a lower score than 80. But, those scores only apply to the course. If you can move beyond the material, the temporal, the right-now, and the external, you will win. If you can define success for yourself in the context of community, you will succeed. If you can value the movement, celebrate the small successes, and collaborate, you will change your world. Our student learned what you must learn. Morality is worthless if it does not promote sustainable relationship and the identification of collective activities.

Barriers to Agency: Moral Attitudes

Judson Mills (1958) conducted a study of sixth graders assessing their moral attitudes following temptation. Social scientists reading this text will be interested to know that Mills’ advisor was Leon Festinger (!). The study offered differing rewards to students after they were tempted to cheat. It then asked them how they felt about others who cheat.

In the study, groups of students who cheated and received a big prize and students who did not cheat and received a small prize had no change in moral attitudes. Those who did cheat and received a small prize displayed a more lenient attitude toward cheating. Those who did not cheat and received a big prize evidenced a more severe attitude toward cheating.

The results suggest that, your attitudes are shaped by the experiences, opportunities, and rewards you perceive. The central question concerns values. Let us separate values from moral attitudes. In the Mills study above, recognize the two variables that call the results into question.

First, who told you that an opportunity to perform must be considered an opportunity to cheat or not to cheat? Second, who determined for you that one prize was bigger and therefore, more desirable than another? These two questions are questions about what you value—your individualized assessment of what is important in any given situation. My point: the value of morality is the relationship above all. Ask yourself whether the moral question supports relationship sustainably. Actions that do not violate valued relationships are options no matter how others may frown upon them.

Barriers to Agency: Balance (Example)

For example, you believe that you are a capable writer, and you have submitted a draft of a paper that we are working on together. I respond to your draft with a number of edits and corrections. In response to this you could choose to:

a) Decide that you are not a capable writer

b) Conclude that I am not a good collaborator, or

c) Conclude that writing is not an important skill.

Another option exists. Consider that you have more to learn about the type of writing that forms the basis of our collaboration. Also, consider that my edits are not a critique of your writing, but my contribution to our eventual product. Now, the question is more precisely, are you motivated to engage in the knowledge seeking required to learn more about writing, or will you give up on the collaboration?

The stress of the dissonance is the motivator. You know this in your thought, “I don’t agree with your edits. Why did you write it that way?” Now, find out. Let us discuss our collaborative work. Let us agree on a definitive source or group of sources for our pattern for writing. Our collaboration is not your search for balance. Indeed, our interaction will challenge both of us to rethink our pre-collaboration givens.

Barriers to Agency: Balance

Fritz Heider has been credited with illuminating a most fundamental human trait, called Balance theory. The power of the human mind is demonstrated in that you can convince yourself of anything. Indeed, you are motivated to create balance in your opinions about objects in the world around you. You form opinions about objects like people, places, your favorite novel, a style of car, your ability, and more. Objects are sometimes related. The challenge we must face together is that the relationships between the objects can cause you dissonance. A further challenge, you will typically resolve your dissonance in whichever way requires the least amount of effort. When faced with dissonance, Heider suggests that you will either:

a) Change your opinion of the original object

b) Change your opinion of the object being related, or

c) Deny that the relationship between objects exists.

Each of the options above is based on two fallacies. The first fallacy is that you have to make a decision as quickly as possible to regain balance using only the information that you currently have on hand. I offer to you that you must learn to tolerate ambiguity. You must seek knowledge that provides you with multiple views of objects and the relationships between them. The time it takes to seek out this new knowledge is not wasted time. Taking time to inform you could mean the difference between a sustainable balance that makes room for growth and an unsustainable balance that stifles growth.

The second fallacy is that the stress of dissonance is an enemy to health and wellbeing. You must put in the work required to decide the solution to dissonance that is best for you, and best for our collaboration. The stress brought about by the feeling of dissonance can be the motivation you need to consider new alternatives, seek new knowledge, and part with “easy” answers.

Distractions Case Study: 1 of 3

Our story from an ancient text continues. Remember that our main characters, Adam and Eve, were attendants to a beautiful garden. Eve entered into a conversation that served her ambitions well, but left her and Adam confused. They both lived in this garden, content with themselves and the garden except for an insistent desire for knowledge. The text emphasizes that both were naked and felt no shame.

So, Adam and Eve consumed from the tree that they were forbidden to touch. The first result of this insistence on consuming is not in any action or observation. Of interest is the immediate loss of that sense of contentment. A constant nagging, a feeling that something was missing replaced the contentment. Whether you take the story as truth or not, you too have that longing. But, as with much in this life, the longing is not the problem. What you do to fill the longing, though, could be problematic.

The goal should be to identify what your contribution will be to our team. It really does not matter what activity you engage in. When you are clear about your contribution, you see value, gain knowledge, and notice complexities in what others may see as frivolous. But, know that I will challenge you to compete. It is not self-conceit, but positive competition. I will question your entertainment, whether it is productive recreation or self-medication. As you gain the knowledge that you desire, I will expect you to contribute your best and grow even greater contributions for the future.

Distractions: Social Contracts and Political Correctness

Up to this point, I have focused on describing your options as an individual. You have often been deceived. You have also been distracted. Institutions have standardized your deception allowing you to hide behind the plausible deniability of corporate conformity. The more clearly you understand your own identity, the more inconsistent the world appears. This may tempt you to give up on agentic success—achievement conceived by self-reflectiveness, self-reactiveness, intentionality, and forethought. But, take heart. We can overcome the distractions.

Institutions maintain your deception by distracting you from addressing your lack of sustainability. Instead of figuring out why a choice did not work out as you had hoped, you are lulled into a sense of comfort with disappointment, surrounded by people who support this passivity.

If only you would look within yourself. Reflect on your goals, your actions, your reasoning. Determine the origins for your choices. Evaluate your will to succeed. The institutions suggest that to focus on you is to deny community. Yet, this supposed altruism is not consistent with the other messages the institution espouses.

You are told to measure your success by your consumption—if you are the best, you must have the best. You are told to conform so as not to stick out from the crowd—it is conceit to proclaim your giftedness and heresy to pursue an alternative inquiry. You are told to apologize as a reflex in order to avoid conflict—it is better not to make enemies of people you do not know. Standards are relaxed in order to save the feelings of the mediocre.

Distractions: The Next 3 Chapters

Consumerism is the institutional method to medicate through entertainment and recreation. But, you think it is the frivolity that weakens the production focus. It is not the activity that is the problem. The problem is that you are not clear about your contribution. You risk shutting me out because you cannot see the opportunity for our collaboration.

Shame is the institutional tool that seeks to deny individual giftedness in favor of the collective identity. The expressed goals are to maintain order, to be fair, and lend predictability to chaos. To bow, conforming, to shame is to stunt the chaos that motivates change and inspires growth in you and in me.

Guilt is the institutional source of choices that attempt to fix past failures. Rather than achieve goals based in principle, the guilt reflex suggests that you apologize because the goals may offend the sensibilities of another. The distraction is the quest for politeness, rather than the quest for success. Clear communication gives way to political correctness.

The End of Wanting

Too often, you look at the success as the finished product of the producer. You conclude that you cannot achieve the same success. You fail to see the time, the habits of mind, the schedule, and the discipline the producer put into achieving her wish. You only see the end result. If you do glimpse what it takes to achieve, you are overwhelmed. Take heart! Though the process seems overwhelming, it is a process. This means that the beginning of a complicated success begins with that first simple action.

Be sure that you are planning actions based on an honest view of the habits of the producers that you would like to emulate. Recognize that producers rarely are able to articulate what they have done in order to achieve success. They sometimes inflate the time or romanticize the actions they performed on the way to their goals. They either over estimate or dismiss the help they received from others.

For example, the producer, when asked how he achieved, may say, "You have to work hard each day and read a lot." When asked if that was his process, the producer admits, "Oh, no. I don't really read that much." If you could have been a fly on the wall throughout the producer's process, you would have observed a process of idea formulation and commitment to product that spanned multiple years. Even the producer is not aware of how each choice, each rehearsal, each class, was a contribution toward the final product. The producer does not intentionally mislead with his responses, but the achievement of success sometimes reframes the journey as a function of destiny rather than a result of determination.

Understand that all sustainable success—the end of wanting—is the result of your determination over time to work, to lead with purpose, to incorporate new knowledge and relationships, and to risk being wrong. Maintain those habits. Connect those dots until patterns emerge and habits result in products.

Faith: The Final Frontier

Faith is the self-fulfilling prophecy spoken by your actions. It is your confidence in what you cannot see, combined with the preparation and sustained action toward what you hope to achieve. It is also a balance between fool-hardy wishful thinking and reality you can touch and take to the bank. Yet, faith is not the abstract, metaphysical wish, it has tangible elements. It just takes creativity, vision, and perseverance to connect the dots represented by those elements. Faith is as real as your will to live that reality.

Perhaps an example will help. You want to be a writer. You recognize that writing takes practice. You know that, each day, writers spend some time writing. You know that you need to improve your vocabulary. You know that you learn best by reading. Connect those dots to achieve your vision as a writer.

Set aside time each day to write. It could be in a journal, a computer, a notepad—as long as you are able to get your thoughts on paper and able to go back to read what you have written. You could even speak your thoughts into a tape recorder and transcribe them later. Subscribe to a magazine about writing. Read the articles to learn what others have done. Discover new ways to plan your time and organize your plot lines. Invest in a vocabulary builder, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Play games with your friends where you identify a word of the day or use a new, similar word to replace a common word you always use. Now, you are on your way to achieving the vision of being a writer. After all, you are doing the things that a writer does. Continue to produce. Self-fulfilling prophecy… Faith is as real as your will to live that reality.

Wanting To Know Yourself for Yourself

You have been taught that you are singularly unique and required to strive toward perfection. You adopt approaches to the perfection question that either perpetuate a cycle of poor mental health, failed relationships, or both. Perfection, in truth, can only be achieved in the context of others. The peak of human experience is discerning through the uncertainty of difference among the multitude of “good” options.

You would rather be convinced rather than convicted. That way, you do not have to take responsibility for the choices you have made and the consequences that have resulted. You were just following the information you were given. Your self-absorption is your excuse and your curse. According to you, you know yourself. But, the knowledge does not result in sustainable choices. The knowledge results in over-thinking rather than doing.

Your excuse is solid. Because you know yourself, you do not place yourself in the position to explore new information. In effect, you refuse the need to grow in an area by steering away from situations that offer an opposing or more in-depth perspective. But, new and expanded information has a way of revealing itself regardless of your ignorance. At that moment, you stand paralyzed, or worse, dissonant acting out of a sense of obligation, guilt, or political correctness rather than clear conviction. You rationalize that you were forced by the situation into a limited set of choices. Not so! You refused to prepare and develop toward a sustainable, responsible handling of new knowledge.

To know yourself is to challenge your internal conversations and your comfortable reactions, to question your answers and your certainties about yourself. Life offers plateaus of arrival, but no end to the journey. You will make mistakes. You have made mistakes. You cannot redo much of what you have done, but you can purpose to engage in new experiences and formulate new directions and opinions. You can be sure of your choices based on the convictions you now hold. You can also, at the same time, be open and receptive to new information realizing that your current conviction could be unsustainable—incomplete and only a piece of the larger puzzle. This realization is not a failure that signals despair, but a motivator toward continued exploration.

Wanting To Know Finally

You have been taught that rightness is a settled question. You do not take time to discuss the questions at hand. In this way, you have no responsibility for inconsistencies.

You seem very adept at designating those things that are forbidden to us. It seems that the commitment to be wise is a commitment to NOT participate in many things. This seclusion makes good sense because many things exist that are unsustainable. You argue that to live by the allowances of freedom is to live reckless and without boundaries.

The danger in your belief is not so much that you shy away from detrimental activity but that you decline from any risk at all. To suspend the finality of your judgments long enough to investigate a reality and explore new information is to admit that you do not know everything—that maybe your past lack of participation was mistaken. You continue in your current understanding because you do not want to be wrong.

Rightness, in truth, is a social construction rooted in the norms of the group. The discussion of rightness is a discussion of sustainability and the long-term responsibility we all assume for the decisions we make today.

You must always remain open to integrating new information. Take responsibility for your decisions. Learn from them. But, do not define yourself by the information or the decisions. Being open to new information means being open to being wrong, accepting the consequences, and moving forward with the lesson learned. In this way, you are never condemned to be what your previous choices were. You are always learning. You have the opportunity to change.

This perspective is difficult because it requires that you allow others to change. It may also extend to a worldview that is less permanent than is comfortable. But, the reward is in the discovery and integration of lessons that add to your development of self. You will find that you engage more authentically, you explore with more wonder, and you genuinely appreciate people and ideas.