Funny, You Don't Sound It.
I’m currently listening to a series of lectures on Chinese history, part of the Great Lecture series.
(I heartily endorse this series. The Learning Company selects professors for their reputations as classroom teachers as well as academics to deliver lectures on their respective topics. This is important; as a former MIT student, I know first-hand that some very accomplished researchers are dreadful speakers. Some lectures come in a video format, others audio only. The humanities comprise the bulk of the series, but astronomy, economics, and other technical topics are available, too. We especially enjoyed the Roman history lectures, but the American Civil War, impressionist art, and an analysis of the Odyssey were all excellent, the kind of class you’d remember as one of your best, the I-don’t-usually-like-philosophy-but… kind. The only clinker so far has been the Egyptian history lectures, whose speaker behaves as though speaking to six-year-olds: “Did you all try writing your name in hieroglyphs?”)
The Chinese history lectures are audio only. It’s a pity for us that this is so, because Eileene is a very visual learner; without a picture to focus her attention, she isn’t very interested in listening together. On the other hand, it does mean I can listen to the lectures on the kitchen CD player, a decided improvement on the radio host who is usually on while I wash dishes.
I bring up the fact that this series is audio because it led me to a moment of cognitive dissonance. The speaker has a high, tight voice, I’d guess New England. He speaks precisely, and has a nerdy little vocal tic of ending paragraphs with a half-spoken “N-kay?” to make sure his students are following along. My mental image was of a small, slim man, either balding or with thin, dark hair, clean-shaven, with a reluctant smile. Instead, his portrait (on the back of the box) is of a guy with a mane of curly, gray hair and bushy mustache, grinning broadly. He looks like Mark Twain, and should have a round southern drawl to match. Even with the photo in hand while the CD plays, I have a hard time matching the two together. Eileene, who saw the picture before hearing the voice, experienced the same cognitive dissonance in reverse.
This is particularly funny coming on the tail of third-hand information about myself. I play World of Warcraft online, and, like most players, I find it helpful to use the Ventrilo voice chat utility while playing with my guild, so we can speak directly to one another, instead of typing furiously in the heat of battle. Between my voice and the text in my guild forum posts, my guildies have formed a mental image of me, which image came up in conversation a month or two ago while my face-to-face friends Jen and Greg attended a small get-together in Michigan. My online friends imagine me to be tall, thin, and hippie-looking, probably to match my center-left politics.
(Yes, only center-left. I rail so frequently here because our country is spinning wildly and dangerously right. But I digress.)
Well, I’m not tall, thin, and hippie-looking. I’m five foot six, squarish, clean-shaven, and could pass visual inspection at the fuddy duddy convention. People who see my picture before seeing me imagine a large, bearish guy, but that’s because the photos are taken by my even shorter girlfriend, feature me in the heavy sweaters I favor, and often cut my skinny arms from the photo. I sing baritone, but I speak tenor; my voice rises on the phone, or over voice chat, when a lack of direct contact kicks my politeness reflexes into gear.
I wish I could offer a lesson to be learned from this, but I don’t have one, apart from noting the great symmetry of ignorance and misperception. Our first impressions are often right; we have evolved to make big decisions very quickly from insufficient evidence. But when the mechanisms behind the snap judgments we make fail, they fail spectacularly. I can understand why people might imagine me looking like a hippy, just as I imagine a tweedy voice being attached to a tweedy little man. Wrong on both counts. That’s why we have a responsibility to stay conscious of our prejudices: we can’t eliminate them, so the best we can do is stay aware and override them when they overstep their proper place.