I Thought You Wanted To

^{The following is a fictional representation of a situation that has happened occassionally in our lifetime}



We ate at Perkins. "It was good, but I sure wish we would have gone to IHOP instead" I said.



Katie replied "Well, why didn't you say so? I wasn't gung-ho for Perkins tonight."



"Huh? I figured you would want to eat here, so I suggested it. I would have rather have gone someplace else."



So Katie and I discovered that neither of us wanted to eat at Perkins, but since we thought that the other person did, we settled on it.



Dumb.



Has that ever happened to you? You try to make the other person happy by doing what you think they want to, and they go along with it thinking that is what you want to do...and later find out that neither wanted to do it?



Oh, and Katie was just reading in her psych book about how we have a tendency to conform to the majority. As an example she had me look at a picture. It was of two boxes. In one box there was a vertical line. I an adjacent box, there were three parallel vertical lines, all different sizes. I was to choose the line that matched the one in the first box. I chose line #2. It was interesting to learn that in conformity experiments, if the majority (purposefully, in the experiment) chose the wrong line, it would actually persuade people to choose wrong instead of going with what they knew to be correct. 1/3 go with the crowd.



Katie said to me "are you sure it's line #2?" and I said "yes!"



I was never one to go with the crowd!



Interesting, and scary statistic considering it is the campaigning season. Why do people feel such a need to conform to the majority?



It's that need to feel accepted I guess.



Next time, it's IHOP!



I always say "no matter how close a friend you are, I can't read your mind!"