Lessons from Sherlock Holmes

I have tweeted about Maria Konnikova’s excellent Lessons from Sherlock Holmes, which you’ll find at Scientific American, but haven’t written here about her series of articles that explores some of the psychological aspects of the Canon.

From the website: “Maria Konnikova, a writer based in New York City, is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at Columbia University, where she studies self-control and decision making. She is fascinated by the psychological insights that can be garnered from literature and feels that some of the best psychologists are to be found not in labs and ivory towers, but among the literary greats.”

Her latest blog is The Importance of Perspective-Taking, and I found this observation particularly intriguing: “Indeed, so poorly trained are we at actually taking someone else’s point of view that when we are explicitly requested to do so, we still proceed from an egocentric place. In one series of studies, researchers found that people adopt the perspective of others by simply adjusting from their own.” By which I believe is meant: we can stand in another person’s shoes but can’t really imagine that we are that other person. I cannot help but believe that explains some of the bitter divides that exist today.

I am also reminded by several of the principles of the martial art I study, Ki Aikido. These include: Know your partner’s mind; respect your partner’s Ki; put yourself in the place of your partner. I don’t even have to explain the concept of Ki for you to pretty easily understand this means view the situation as if you were your partner. My martial art is so fluffy and non confrontational that we tend to call our opponents our partners. Yes, our goal is to throw our partner to the ground or restrain them from further attack, but we do it by almost literally standing in their place. It’s not too much of a stretch to realize this is conflict resolution. It’s hard to get mad at someone who’s agreeing with you. Unless, of course, the other person tends to view everything from that egocentric place.

It was such a revelation to realize that a detective, to be truly successful, has to be empathetic, a term one would not ordinarily associate with Sherlock Holmes. But obviously Holmes has shown again and again that he is well aware of the psychology of the individual, to borrow from the great Belgian detective.