The
Myth of Fingerprints
My
daughter attended a work-related conference last year, and as part of
the conference festivities, there was a booth where two people, with
headphones and sunglasses on, would generate a written personality
profile of a person just by looking at them. No questions were
asked, no verbal interaction between the two profile writers and
their subjects, just visual observation. The profile they wrote of
my daughter was startlingly accurate. She posted it on facebook, and
her friends agreed – eerily dead on. I saw the profile and
thought, ''The Barnum Effect strikes again...”
I
had, myself, run into the Barnum Effect (also know as the Forer
Effect*) in a testing and measurements psychology class as an
undergraduate. The professor who taught the class, wanting to
familiarize the students with the questions and structures of
different tests, would frequently give us pieces of personality tests
to respond to, have us hand them in, promising to eventually give us
feedback on our responses. He came into class one day and announced
that our test results were in and he handed each of us a sealed
envelope with our name on it. There were murmurs of agreement as we
read our personality profiles. He asked for a show of hands as to
how many of us felt the profiles were reasonably accurate. Most of
the class raised their hands. He then asked us to be vulnerable to
each other and exchange our profiles with the person sitting next to
us. A new wave of murmurs, louder this time, rose in the class as we
discovered that each of us had received the exact same personality
profile...
The
entertainer P. T. Barnum (“We've got something for everyone.”)
was a successful businessman partly because he recognized that people
were largely more alike and had more in common with each other than
they liked to believe. He found those commonalities and focused on
them, making people feel like he really knew who they were and what
they wanted in entertainment. My daughter's personality profile
experience was similar in that the profile was general enough overall
to fit a great number of other people, but the visual cues the two
observers were provided with in the one-on-one situation were just
enough to personalize her profile to make it really seem they had
assessed who she was.
So,
now we find ourselves in a personality paradox. We like to think of
ourselves as unique individuals, human “snowflakes”, no two
alike. And so we are. The Psalmist tells us a truth about our
Creator's making of us:
For
you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's
womb.
I praise you, for I
am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful
are your works; my soul knows it very well.
My
frame was not hidden from you,when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in
the depths of the earth. (Psalm 139:13-15)
Everything
I know in the craft realm about “knitting” and things
“intricately woven” implies a loving creation of one-of-a-kind
masterpieces. We've only to look to our fingerprints to see, like a
snowflake's dendrites, they are ours alone. But if we stare too long
at the tips of our fingers, we loose sight of the other great truth
of our creation, that we each share a great commonality with the
living God, and therefore with each other. Even before Adam and Eve
shared a rib, the writer of Genesis tells us:
Then
God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...So
God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
(Genesis
1:26, 27)
And
in case we still don't get it, the apostle Paul spelled it out like
this:
Just
as we have borne the image of the man of dust (Adam), we shall also
bear the image of the man of heaven (Christ). (1 Corinthians 15:49)
Think
about it. Some of the brightest moments you may have experienced in
interacting with others has probably come when a shared commonality
is found. “Hey, I love that, too!” “Yeah, I feel like that
a lot also. I thought I was the only person who did...” “You
mean you have doubts about that, too?” “Why don't we get
together some time and we can both __________
together?" (Fill in the blank...) As good as we may feel when we are lauded for our
unique abilities and talents, or love the unique qualities we see in
others that we ourselves may not share, there is nothing quite like
finding the kindred spirit, the person we recognize as having some of
the same internal pieces we do.
So
we need to embrace the paradox, acknowledging we are unique
creations, sharing a common blueprint. We are one big family of
siblings who are made to all bear a striking resemblance to our
heavenly Father as well as looking more and more like our Brother and
Savior every day. And do we? Can we look past our fingerprints and
see ourselves in each other, the image bearers that we were created
to be?
And
she thinks "most people don't talk enough about how lucky they
are
Most
people don't know what it takes for me to get through the day
Most
people don't talk enough about the love in their hearts"
But
she doesn't know most people feel that same way.
-
from “Most People” by Dawes
He
says there's no doubt about it
It
was the myth of fingerprints
I've
seen them all and, man,
They're
all the same - from “All Around the World” by Paul Simon
