You’re Not Missing Information—You’re Missing Context
Whenever intelligent people attempt to evaluate the communication or behavior of other people, you often hear about the need to define or understand “context”. For example, a common defense when someone is blamed for making inappropriate comments or conclusions, is to say, “You’re taking my words out of context.” This defense makes context sound simple; maybe the critic didn’t understand a fact or two. I think all of my wonderful readers, like me, have heard someone talk about the need to understand the context. But here’s the problem. No one who brings up the subject of “context” ever tries to define it. I find that annoying. With the rapid development of neuroscience, however, there is a new discipline to defining “context” and that’s what I’d like to talk about, along with my own experience related to my problems with context, in this post. I hope you find this helpful in understanding “context”—and what it is, and why the lack of context can cause enormous problems.
What is “Context”?
Let’s begin with a dictionary definition: the kind you might run into if you wanted to know what context was. My online dictionary says, “Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.” Well, in my opinion, this definition is sort of right, except for one thing. The promise that knowing the context makes something “fully understood” is a giant overreach. They should have said “better understood”, maybe.
Neuroscientists got into the game of defining context for a simple reason. Their research consistently showed that neuro-biological context is extremely complex; the brain processes emotions differently depending on context, such as reacting to social threats versus non-social threats (e.g., fear of a person vs. a spider). In other words, there’s not one place in the brain where context is stored, it has many possible connections and associations. In studying context, neuroscientists have standardized the research process to include three basic types of contextual factors to look for when identifying the mind’s path to context:
Personal Factors: Age, gender, personality traits (e.g., extraversion, neuroticism), and personal appraisals influence how a situation is interpreted.
Environmental Factors: The immediate external environment, including social context and cultural expectations, plays a critical role.
Inner Context: An individual’s internal emotional state, mental state, and history (such as personal values).
Their conclusion has been summarized as follows: Context is crucial for accurately understanding, experiencing, and regulating emotions because it provides the necessary “why” behind feelings, transforming raw, subjective responses into meaningful reactions. It shapes how facial expressions are perceived, impacts the success of emotional regulation strategies, and ensures better mental health outcomes.
Dan’s Short Definition
When you take into account all of the brain’s collected learning from all sensory sources, as well as all cognitive sources over a lifetime, you’re talking about what you might discover from the conscious mind, as well as all the influences you can’t easily identify from the unconscious mind. When combined, I call all of this “your life experiences” and it can include anything from the massively connected experience of an individual’s brain. You can also call it “the hidden context”, because much of it may not be definable or even known to the person reacting to his or her context. It’s easy to see now why people don’t immediately jump in and start trying to define context for anyone.
I don’t think you have to know the totality of anyone’s context, but you do need to recognize how important it is, and how to manage or react to your use of it or its absence.
How Your Context, or Lack of One, Can Affect Your Life Outcomes
To me, it all comes down to realizing where your life experience, or your lack of enough relevant life experience, can most dramatically impact your life. I’ll offer my own brief list and then share some of my life outcomes. The most obvious problematic life experiences are those where you begin an important mew life commitment but have little or no prior experience to manage the experience well, such as…
Selecting a school or college.
Getting married.
Having children.
Starting a new job or career.
Buying a home.
Planning or starting retirement.
I’m sure you can identify more of your own big life experiences that require context, but I think you get the idea of what I’m talking about. All of the above experiences require making a commitment of time, money, and emotional energy. All also assume that you think you know what you’re doing, or you wouldn’t be doing it.
So, what can go wrong? Is there a common pattern to big mistakes in these kinds of life commitments? My personal life experience tells me there is a pattern of mistake-making that leads to problems.
Examples of Problems When Missing Needed Context
The biggest problems in life, in my opinion, come from entering into an important life decision with insufficient knowledge and experience to avoid making big mistakes. I’ll offer a few examples to help clarify what I mean by not knowing what you should know, and why that can bring on failure:
My biggest business blunder was starting an ice cream store because I had the money but no experience in that business. I imagined that any retail store owner made money and I was wrong. I discovered that I didn’t like being a retail clerk, I wanted to work behind a desk in my office, and I learned that I didn’t like making ice cream. The only thing I loved about ice cream was eating it. And one more problem - I lost money. I should have worked in somebody else’s ice cream store first, before investing my money in my own store. That’s how you learn a business, by starting at the bottom and doing the grunt work first.
Another big mistake I made was signing up to get a college degree to be an art director without knowing what an art director’s life is really like. I hated it, and almost flunked out of college before I woke up. I should have talked to people who were art directors and spent time trying to work in an ad agency to get that kind of job context first.
Getting married is a commitment, in which and almost half of first marriages fail. I don’t know how to prepare for a lifetime commitment to a relationship other than just getting to know people and relationships better any way you can. I was a recluse in high school, spending too much time alone drawing cartoons in my bedroom. I had a lot to learn about other people and myself.
Retiring is a major life change for everyone and too many people fantasize that it’s like going on a permanent vacation. I saw a video yesterday that claimed that 70% of retirees who purchase an RVs (Recreation Vehicles) for retirement try to return them within 18 months. Couldn’t they have just rented one and tried it out first?
Dan’s Net Take-Away
Here’s how I would now summarize my definition of context, why it’s important, and what you can do to minimize problems with incomplete context before you start a new life experience.
My Definition of Context
It’s much more than background information, as the dictionary definition implies. It’s the totality of human experience surrounding a subject that helps us better understand what it’s all about. In other words, it’s knowing what it means and how it works. That requires understanding it logically, emotionally, and even behaviorally. As I used to tell my students at Rutgers, if you really want to learn to swim, you can watch all the videos of swimmers you want, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to get into the pool and start doing it.
Why It’s Important
If you’re familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, you know it’s the cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence. Context is really knowing and understanding instead of just thinking you understand something, because you may be familiar with the term or experiencing it in part. Said simply, it’s the difference between really knowing and imagining you know something. That makes all the difference in your outcome or use of some idea or process.
How You Can Minimize Problems with a Lack of Context
After much negative experience with my own lack of context when I needed it, I came up with two basic rules to minimize the risk of bad outcomes from a lack of context:
Dan’s Two Rules
Never assume you really know what your new life will be like without attempting to test your new experience out before fully committing to it, any way you can.
In reviewing possibilities, and testing, keep your eyes wide open and look for the realities of it—not just the pleasures you anticipate.
I hope you find this post understandable, useful, and even inspiring to jump into the pool, rather than depend on what other people tell you. Good luck with whatever context you want to learn.
