A Failure to Communicate

     Back in 1992,  language expert Donald Rubin conducted an experiment that revealed it’s possible to hallucinate a foreign accent. He conducted a fake class for 60 undergraduate students. The students were shown photos of two nearly identical professors, one being Caucasian and the other Chinese. A recording of a woman from Ohio reading an article from the New York Times was played while the students viewed the two different photos individually. Though the same voice was played with each photo, students gave lower ratings to the Chinese professor, claiming that she had an accent that made her more difficult to understand. A similar study was conducted this year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This time, the students listened to a Caucasian and a Chinese professor but could not see them. They were able to understand both professors equally.

     1 Peter 3:8-12 contains God’s recipe for good communication. Readers are told to sympathize, love each other, be tenderhearted, and pay insults back with a blessing. However, once we’ve decided the character of someone else, it’s difficult not to filter everything someone says and does through who we’ve decided they are. I’m not saying that no one gives us information from which we might draw conclusions. Some individuals disappoint us repeatedly. But, God does not see things that aren’t there. He want us to forgive, forget, and learn to live in harmony with each other. We can’t do this if we continue to over-analyze the words and actions of others. We each communicate in unique ways. Our brains find it difficult to interpret accents and forms of communication we aren’t familiar with. That doesn’t mean we should ignore each other.