Blasphemy, right?
Sure, the Golden Rule has served for a long time as the go-to guidepost for how we should interact with others. However, when it comes to Person-Centered Thinking, it’s only the beginning and not something we should point to as a simple, straightforward philosophy for achieving “person-centeredness”.
The “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” way of thinking does set a certain tone for developing empathy. That’s a good start towards determining how we relate to others. Without empathy, we can’t develop connections and relationships with other people. Empathy is what helps us seek out commonalities and to find common ground. Without we can’t get far outside of ourselves.
However, to believe that others want to be treated as we would want to be treated leads to a critical error in thinking, or a cognitive bias. Social sciences have a name for this kind of error; it’s called a Projection Bias. In making such an error, we are guilty of thinking that others share our same beliefs, our culture, our values and so forth and we project our own way of thinking onto others. In other words, we mistakenly believe that others are just like us.
The Golden Rule philosophy plays right into this mistaken idea-that of believing others want to be treated the same as us. The problem is that they aren’t us!
Although we may all have some common need for safety and security, for example, our views on what constitutes “safe and secure” may be vastly different. For me, safety might mean keeping my feet firmly planted on the ground; for the parachutist, safety might mean checking one’s pack twice before taking the big leap. There’s a vast difference between what each of us considers important.
To attain true Person-Centered Thinking, we have to be cognizant of our differences and understand how to assess the needs and desires of others, without clouding the picture with our own beliefs and values. The Golden Rule approach doesn’t take us far enough to do that and could lead to unintentional conflict and misunderstanding, rather than to our intended target.
We are guilty of shortchanging the process, if we instruct our employees to adopt such an approach to person-centeredness and we will fall short of attaining our goal. Rather, we must encourage our employees to view Person-Centered Thinking from the mindset of an investigator. That means learning how to listen and to pay attention and how to develop critical thinking skills. These are the tools that will bring us the evidence that tells us how others want to be treated.
