As detailed in a press release on the study:
During the simulation, students in Nickols’ course on managing family resources are clustered into various family groups—two parents and two children; an older woman living alone; a single mother with two children; and a cohabiting couple, for example. Faculty members and other volunteers play the roles of community members, such as the town banker, pawn shop owner and a social services employee. During the course of the simulation, the participants must accomplish a variety of tasks, including buying groceries, paying their bills and caring for both toddlers and aging parents while subsisting on low wages and other issues, such as being unable to speak English. During the course of each 15-minute “month,” new situations are randomly interjected. In some cases, these are helpful events, such as an unemployed parent receiving a job. In other cases, the events add to the families’ difficulties, such as a family without health insurance facing illness.
The vast majority of participants (65 of 75) reported greater empathy for those living in poverty — acknowledging the difficulty in staying positive and hopeful, the challenge in finding and accessing community and government resources, and the sheer lack of time to get it all done. One respondent commented, “I think that many people would feel like they were on a treadmill, not really getting anywhere.”
What strikes me most about this research is the difficulty we all have in stepping outside our own privileges and situations to consider the lives of those around us. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert details how the human brain fills the gaps to create a complete picture much like a round of Mad Libs.
When your brain is at liberty to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations of stimuli in just the same way that context, frequency and recency do (p. 172; emphasis mine).
So it’s hard to intuit the motivations and triggers behind another person’s actions or lack thereof, since we only bring our experiences and knowledge to the table. Thus it’s important to approach the grey areas of life with the caution that self-awareness can bring.
Over the past few weeks socially conservative Republicans have engaged in heated rhetoric meant to use abortion as a wedge issue during budget negotiations, particularly where Planned Parenthood funding is concerned. The predominantly aging, white male politicians railing against access to pregnancy termination services repeatedly iterated the existence of alternatives to the preventative care provided by Planned Parenthood with little regard for the actual veracity of those claims. *
I wonder how much consideration was given to the constituents in their districts that relay on these services before politicization of the funding began. Journalist Andrea Grimes decided to seek out those allegedly easily accessible alternatives. She reported on the difficulty and time commitment necessary to find basic health screenings when myriad providers don’t ever answer the phone or call back, print resources are out of date or filled with misinformation and available appointments are frequently months off despite a present need.
On the advice of a anti-abortion activist commentator on her blog, Grimes sought out other federally-funded health centers.
I am privileged to have a flexible work schedule, home phone and home internet access, so I didn’t have to take time off work to go to the public library and use a pay phone, and I didn’t have to sneak around on a conservative, religious or abusive family or partner–and started making calls. Most places I telephoned did not provide reproductive health care and instead focused on providing low-income housing, job training and addiction-recovery programs…
a clinic close-ish to my home had no receptionist and a full voicemail. Another receptionist laughed at me because I’d been given the number for the county hospital front desk and told me to call a place called Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic. When I called Los Barrios, I got an individual’s voice mail and had to take down another number to a switchboard, after which I was transferred to another voicemail that said the women’s health care folks would get back to me in 24 hours if I left my phone number. They’ve yet to call me. Later in the morning, I finally got through to the Los Barrios clinic in Grand Prairie, which is a western suburb of Dallas. They had appointments open in May, potentially, if I could call them back the morning of April 25th. There, a pap smear would cost me as little as $30, but maybe more depending on my income.
I made my last call to a Planned Parenthood clinic in central Dallas. The receptionist there told me they could schedule me that same afternoon for a full pelvic and breast exam. It’d be about $100, but there was a sliding scale.
I managed to change someone’s mind about the relevance of Planned Parenthood in rural and other underserved areas merely by forwarding along Grimes’s blog post. She made a compelling case for Planned Parenthood’s value by acting as if one of the five million women, men and young adults who rely on those services.
There are countless other policy issues addressing people who are otherwise marginalized or less powerful, whole needs are equally important.
And without our own day-to-day lives, understanding is sometimes better realized by setting aside our own limiting beliefs and embracing different perspectives that might not come naturally.
* I’m going to give those politicos the benefit of the doubt and assume they truly believe alternative access to care is easily accessible and that secondary philosophical beliefs about the role of women and acceptable sexual expression aren’t also at work.
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