We also seek clarity by reducing everything to a distant number rather than a more intimate narrative (Bergquist, 2021a). Statistics provides at least probability—which is reassuring in our search for not only clarity but also certainty. This “ideographic” approach to assessing reality leaves us with the capacity to accurately predict how many boxes of Cheerios will be consumed this month. We are given a specific number (very clear) and specific prediction (hovering on the edge of certainty). We don’t have to taste the cereal at all or even meet any of the people who have chosen this cereal. We can look at a distance and need not get emotional involved with anyone eating Cheerios today.
What then happens when we focus in on the act of a specific person choosing a specific cereal (or choosing something other than cereal for breakfast)? Everything gets less clear and less certain. We are suddenly involved in “nomothetic” assessment, with a focus close up on the actual muddy act of making food choices at breakfast. The cereal eater might surprise us and chose a waffle rather than Cheerios. They haven’t eaten a waffle in more than a decade. We are witnessing a “black swan.” Why the waffle? Does the breakfast eater even know why they made this choice? The behavioral scientists have won major awards (in economics rather than psychology) by delving into these fuzzy decision-making processes. They are willing to live with ambiguity and have offered many valuable insights based on this tolerance of ambiguity (cf. Kahneman, 2011; Ariely, 2008; Ariely, 2012: Thaler, 2015; Lewis, 2017, Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein, 2021).
What happens when we move in even closer to the subject of our study. What happens when this “subject” is us? What do we do with personal and highly intimate portraits of our own life experiences. Often know as phenomenological studies, these inquiries inside our own psyche produces insights of great value to not just ourselves but also other people. I would point, in particular, to the autobiographical and visual portray of his own internal psychic dynamics that are provided by Carl Jung (1963) in Memories, Dreams and Reflections and in his large, breathtaking volume titled: The Red Book (Jung, 2009). It is in these two documents that we see Carl Jung “upfront and personal.” Very few other psychologists (or authors of fictional or nonfictional books) have been as brave (though Jung did request that The Red Book not be published until after his death).
The phenomenologists take it one step further. They challenge the fundamental assumption that one can be objective in their reporting of events or description of objects. Like Michael Polanyi, phenomenologists push for an exploration of one’s own biases and perspectives as an observer and commentator on human behavior. Instead of trying to be objective, one can be honest and transparent. That means being candid about one’s own assumptions, biases and purposes for writing about or discussing a specific event or object. One of the best ways to do this is to be interviewed about one’s direct experience regarding this event or object.
I personally was witness to the profound engagement in this phenomenological process on the part of a graduate student attending my graduate school in the early 1990s. Living with AIDS, my student had just lost his own partner to this disease. I encouraged him to “enter the mouth of the dragon” and focus his dissertation on the experience of losing one’s partner to AIDS and preparing for one’s own death (which was likely during the early years of AIDS). My student took on this profoundly challenging task by conducting in-depth interviews with six other men with AIDS who were grieving the AIDS-related death of their partner. Taking a phenomenological stance, my student first was interviewed by a colleague regarding his own experience. In this interview, his own biases, fears, hopes and reasons for conducting this study were revealed.
Download Article 1K Club
