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Which Events are Linked?
- Bryan Carmichael
- Sep 27, 2020
- 4 min read
An explanation of coupling and the linking of motives and events
Introduction
Have you ever wondered why someone did something a certain way? Have you noticed that sometimes people do things a certain way even when there could be a potentially easier way to do it? This is all due to the interesting concept of coupling and the links between methods and actions.
Coupling has many influences on life, it comes into play when planning for something, making a decision, executing an action, processing information, etc. That's why it is so important to understand the ideas and concepts behind this strange topic.
How does coupling work?
Coupling is the making of decisions under the influence of something. Take away that something, and the decision is no longer made, even if there are other things that could influence that decision the same way. In a way, it's what determines the predictability of a person. By grouping certain motives and events together, it makes it easier for our brains to comprehend and guess, hence the predictability of it.
The most popular example of coupling is suicide. This was explained in Malcolm Gladwell's Talking to Strangers. He states that if someone were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, and we decide to close the bridge in order to prevent this, following the rule of displacement (the opposite of coupling), this person would just walk to the next nearest bridge and jump off it. However, what we find interestingly, is that if we block the bridge, most potential suicide victims simply walk off and get on with their lives. I know right, what? Their logic is that suicide is only worth it if they jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, nowhere else will do.
An experiment was held by Richard Seiden, who followed up on 515 different people attempting and failing to commit suicide between 1937 and 1971. He found that just 37 of those people had displacement as their motive and committed suicide some other way. The rest of them just stopped trying. The question now is: why is this the case?
Why does coupling happen?
Our brains find understanding concepts easier when they can draw connections between them and other things that it's familiar with. I myself associate beds to be white, simply because my bedsheets and pillowcases are white, against a beige wall. Not all beds are white, but when I think of them my mind brings up the colour white. Similarly with the example above, for those people, suicide means jumping off a bridge, without which they are unfamiliar with the concepts. That is why many people don't commit suicide in more than one way.
Before the First World War, in industrial London, a lot of suicides were committed via Carbon Monoxide poisoning, which was easily accessible through town gas which powered household kitchen equipment. After the war, London converted from town gas to natural gas, the number of suicides decreased as their method of suicide, town gas and carbon monoxide have been eliminated.
Another type of coupling which you may be more familiar with is stereotyping. Stereotypes are a very detrimental aspect of coupling which almost everybody is guilty of in some way or another. The brain's judgemental idea of someone, something or someplace before actually experiencing it firsthand.
One huge example of this is the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. BLM has been going on due to the fact that Native Americans have been oppressed for centuries, and to this day still don't get as many rights as the White Americans. Black people are still judged unfairly all because of coupling that has been ongoing for generations. This is a really sad reality and really has to be changed quickly. This just shows the sheer power of coupling, and how it is used in detrimental ways.
You may be thinking now that coupling is terrible and that we should try to avoid making these connections but actually, coupling is also helpful in so many ways, it's actually a cognitive shortcut to help ourselves understand concepts better. It's just that sometimes it can be misused and instead reflect detrimental values towards society.
A world without coupling...
Would be disastrous. Why would this be? Without coupling, we lose the predictability in ourselves and we lose the ability to be able to convince/persuade others to believe in something, even if it's good. With no way to predict anything that happens, betting services would go out of business, presidential campaigns would be rendered useless; life would essentially be a coin flip.
The advantages of coupling are that there is some sense of structured thinking that makes clear and logical sense when someone makes a decision. There are reasons, however vague, for somebody to vote for a certain electoral candidate for office, for example. The best part is that with coupling, the phrase "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!" actually carries meaning!
Conclusion
Coupling plays an essential part in our cognitive thinking and decision making. Without it, everything becomes impossible to predict, and life as we know it, in extreme circumstances, could descend into chaos.
When used properly, coupling can be used as a very handy tool to memorise important pieces of information, process the content of what someone is saying, as well as determine the characteristics of people from just their subtle actions and appearances (referring once more to the great Sherlock Holmes).
For more information, even more in-depth analysis is available in Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know
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