WHEN PEOPLE MIS-LEARN FROM EXPERIENCES

There’s a mis-belief and a myth about experiences. One myth is sometimes expressed as, “You only learn from experiences.” Of course, that’s obviously false, there are also other ways to learn beyond having a direct experience. Further, sometimes having a direct experience leads a person to learn the wrong thing. Given the experience and the person’s cognitive skills—and cognitive distortions—that person can learn the very opposite of what he needed to learn. And that learning can become a block to learning what should have been learned.

What happened to you?

“I signed up for a course and it was really hard, I just didn’t get it, I guess I’m not made for college. Anyway, if that subject was for it, it would have come easier.” So that’s what you have learned from that experience? Maybe you need to give it more time, study more, ask more questions, and that kind of thing.

“No, no. I don’t have to be hit between the eyes to know that I just don’t have what it takes for that career path.”

Here’s a person drawing a conclusion and reasoning from an experience, but what he concludes and how he reasons is itself the problem. The experience, in and of itself, is just an experience. What anyone makes of it, however, is that person’s interpretation of the experience and these are two very different things. They are not the same at all. In this, experience does not teach anything. Not in and of itself.

Now the list of things that human beings have mis-learned from experiences is actually incredibly extensive. In fact, over the history of mankind, probably the great majority of the things learned were false. Take any field, medicine, geography, engineering, physics, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, etc. and when you consider the ideas that informed that field at the beginning and the ideas that now inform it, there is generally a tremendous gap. In fact, reading what people thought about the human body and medicine even 200 years ago is totally laughable today. Sometimes it’s even hard to believe that people thought such things!

Truly, experiences do not teach, it is always human beings who do the thinking, reasoning, concluding, and meaning-making from the experience. And their cognitive understandings are not always up to the task of truly understanding the experience. More often than not, they mis- understand and draw ill-formed conclusions, illogical inferences, and erroneous beliefs. So what should a human do in the face of the field that experiences do not teach anything?

The first thing is to always be suspicious when someone asserts that they learned this or that from an experience. Always be suspicious when someone tells you that a particular experience teaches

some particular conclusion. Then skeptically question the person about the experience, when, where, with whom, in what way, etc. and about the conclusions— based on what logic, what reasoning, what assumptions, etc. Use the Meta-Model in your questioning to gain more precision and specificity regarding the learning process.

Because an experience is just that—some event that occurred at some time to some person—see how many possible interpretations you can identify. Since you are the meaning-maker and since every person is a meaning-maker, ask around about other possible meanings that could arise from the experience. When you do that, then you generate a menu list of possible interpretations and from that list, you have the choice about picking out the best ones. You have the choice of not being imprisoned by the worst interpretations.

Typical mis-learnings from experiences that undermine everyday human life are these: Some learn from a mistake that they are inadequate, flawed, and inferior. Some learn from a challenge that whatever is hard should be avoided. Some learn from being corrected, that the world is mean and cruel. Some learn from bankruptcy that they should be less honest with their finances. Some learn from coming in second that striving for excellence is stupid. Etc.

I could extend the list for many pages. That’s because one of the common cognitive distortions is too quickly jumping to stupid conclusions before taking the time and trouble to thoroughly think through an experience.