Difficult Honesty
Have you ever taken a lie detector test? I took my first polygraph test when I was 18 and working at a supermarket in California. An employee had stolen the day’s cash from the manager’s office, so we were all getting tested. I had seen polygraphs on Mission Impossible, Ironside, Mannix, and every other cop show in the 1970s, so I knew they could implicate an innocent person if you were too nervous when you took the test. Naturally, I was a nervous wreck about being too nervous! Despite nearly stroking, I somehow passed the test. After it was over, I told the technician I was relieved to be in the clear. He told me I had nothing to worry about because he knew I hadn’t stolen the cash before I even took the test. Talk about disillusioned! I didn’t get off because of the machine’s markings. I got off because of tester bias! The tester knew the answer before I even took the test!
Talking with people we don’t know very well is also a process subject to tester bias. As listeners, when we hear something we can’t understand or we weren’t expecting, we typically fill in the gaps with meaning we learned from our prior experiences with other people. In other words, we plug the gap with assumptions. We even impute meaning to appearances and nonverbal communication based on our prior experiences with other people. All this “interpretation” is based on personal bias, a custom shorthand that each of us develops over time. When we talk to each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, let’s set aside our tester bias, actually listen to each other, ask clarifying and probing questions, and truly get to know each other as real people—not shadow copies built on assumptions about entirely different people.
Gary Yeats
Difficult Honesty, Romans 6: 12-18
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