Fifteen years ago or so, I taught a course on critical thinking at a community college with a wonderful textbook called Thinking for Yourself by Marlys Mayfield.
One of the exercises in the book presented a picture of a young man with a mortarboard cap on his head walking with a middle-aged man and woman and a young girl. As I remember it, the four people in the picture are all smiling, the girl and the two older people gazing toward the young man with the mortarboard.
In class, I would show the students the picture and ask them a series of questions that they were to answer as “true” or “false”. I don’t remember the questions exactly, but they were things like, “The little sister looks up to her elder brother” and “The mother is proud of her son.” Mostly, the students would answer “true” because that’s what the picture seemed to show.
In the next step, I would break the students into groups. This time, I would have them discuss the questions before answering them. The questions were posed differently, too. Instead of simply answering “true” or “false,” the students were to say what they were certain was true about the people in the picture.
Every student in every class I ever gave this exercise to came to the same conclusion: They couldn’t assert anything with certainty. Every statement that they had initially said “true” to could easily have been false. In fact, as I would explain at the end, the people in the photo were all actors. None of them were related. The young man hadn’t just graduated from college.
Even though I’d never heard of Don Miguel Ruiz at that time and knew little about the Toltec tradition, what my students and I were all learning in class on those days was one of what Ruiz calls the “four agreements” of the Toltecs: Don’t make assumptions.
People make assumptions all the time, usually without knowing it. We assume we understand others’ feelings and motivations. We tend to assume we deserve the rewards and privileges that come our way, even when they are often a matter of what we were born to. And even the most openminded of us make unconscious assumptions based on gender, ethnicity, religion, age, and gender orientation. My college-aged students often assume they know more than their professors about technology, even though we frequently have to help them resolve relatively simple technical issues. On the other hand, I often talk to people who assume that I must have to deal with a lot of cheating, laziness, and discourtesy from my “millenial” generation students when, in fact, they’re amazingly directed, motivated, bright, hardworking, and respectful. The only time we even notice assumptions is when someone makes them about us—then the assumption feels like an intrusion, a label, and a stereotype.
Getting out of the habit of assumption-making is important for everyone, but for writers it is essential. When you write from assumption, you’re not actually writing about what is going on in the world around you, but simply what is going on in your own head. You’re writing about your own attitudes and beliefs without testing them against fact. As Michele Laub writes, “When we make assumptions, it is because we believe we know what others are thinking and feeling…We forget that our beliefs are just our point of view…and have nothing to do with what others think and feel.” Put another way: when you write from assumption, you are not writing from Truth.
How can we stop making assumptions? By listening to others. By withholding judgments. By treating people as individuals, not categories. By working from evidence. “Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama,” writes Gary van Warmerdam on the Toltec Spirit website. . “With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.”