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

*See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect if you are interested in knowing more.)