Discovering Who Your True Friends Are & the Use of Punctuated Equilibrium to Determine One's True Motivations

Most people who follow my research areas know this about me, but I tend to be much more interested in why individuals do things than in why groups of people do things. To me, history is not about how groups interact or act, but in how motivations push specific individuals to do the things they do. In other words, rather than try to figure out why the majority of people might have thought one way or another during the Moscow uprisings of 1991, I look at the influential people who swayed large groups of people so that we can see what that individual's actions did to move the crowd. Even more important to me is what was done by specific individuals that history does not record. So, rather than focus on the great speakers that swayed the founding fathers to do what they did, I look into the Tory speakers and writers who kept people from making the resistance unanimous. It may seem like common sense, but we don't study things that way other than as some kind of post-modernist approach to studying the status quo. I'm interested in it for the long term, to see how those individualists might be projected on future conflicts to see what might cause one rebellion to win while another to fail, instead of leaving them stuck in their own little footprint in time.

But I'm getting ahead of myself with this post. What I wanted to talk about is a symptom that I often study in social science that I also have started to observe in every day life. Right now, I'm having some real problems in Korea. Therefore, I started to turn to old friends who I have helped out in the past, figuring that the whole definition of friendship is that it is a person you can count on in a crisis. What I am discovering is that friendship is very situationally dependent. Some people I have helped out at great cost to myself in the past I recently contacted, asking for some assistance when needing to return home, and I was actually shocked at apprehensive they were to offer assistance of their own. One friend, in particular, is someone I have helped out in numerous situations where he has called me up and asked for assistance. Without a second thought, I was always willing to lend a helping hand, even canceling some of my own plans to help him out at the last minute. Imagine my susprise when I was asking him to help me figure out how to get back to the states with as little trouble as possible. I found the hesitation to be quite interesting, and the rambling while trying to find a way out of the conversation to be even more telling. Finally, I thanked him for his help (which he didn't give) and then I hung up. I realized that some people treat friendships one way, and once the need to reciprocate occurs, they waffle and go the other direction.

This is very much a part of my study of the human condition that I detail so much in my studies. It matches something I have believed for so long now that I constantly argue with people over. But the premise is simple: You can never tell the true nature of another individual until that person is required to step outside of his or her natural element. It was the same thing with combat. The tough talking guy was often the guy who ran the other direction. The quiet, demure one was the one who ended up saving the team.

This is one of the reasons why I find message boards so intriguing. People argue with each other constantly about how they would do one thing or another, but in reality, they have no idea how they would actually respond in any particular situation. They think they would do one thing, but when it comes down to having to make that choice, they rarely do what they expect, but do what they are most likley going to do because their decision-making skills are not based on their thinking process when things are not in crisis mode. Only when they have to face the realization that their actions will yield results that they cannot take back do they become aware of what exactly they would do because then they have to actually do it.

Years ago, I was working for a hotel when we suffered a chemical spill. I was the fourth in charge of a security detail, and the spill took out the director (the number one guy) and the safety director (the number three guy). I had gone down into the spill with them, but I was the only one to realize there was danger because of the first whiff of the chemical, so I grabbed towels from the housekeeping laundry (it was in the laundry room) and started breathing through that. My bosses were not so lucky. The number two person was not on site at the time, so I found myself having to take over a squad of twelve people who had never seen me in action before. Their supervisor, the one who should have been in charge, was in the control room in complete panic mode when I walked in. He couldn't formulate a sentence to give an order to any of his security officers, so I asked the dispatcher if there were any calls that were behind and not part of the crisis, to which there were a few, so I assigned the supervisor to those and took him out of the command loop. From there, I stated issuing orders to everyone to start doing what needed to be done. In about ten minutes, the director of Property Operations (Engineering) realized that Security was actually starting to lock down the system, so he came running into where I was to start coordinating larger events, realizing that we now had a command area where this could be done. In about fifteen minutes, we had saved another five employees who were trapped in the subbasement where the chemical spill took place (it turned out we had to go on a suicide run to the basement where all of the gas masks were stored in Engineering). In the end, we saved a lot of people that day, and what I found interesting was the after effects of the event. The second in command, the one who was not there, started claiming that she had done all of the actions that I did, because no one but me and a few other select people knew what had really happened. I didn't care but knew she was the kind of person to try to take credit for something she didn't do. Anyway, she would have succeeded but the general manager was questioning her and thanking her for her smart thinking in front of the Director of Property Operations who just lost it right then and there, claiming she was never there and that it was all taken care of by Security's investigator, me. Up until that time, the general manager didn't even know who I was. He knew who I was after that.

The point is: People all responded in different ways that were expected. Some of the security officers realized I was in charge and taking care of the situation so they immediately fel in line and started doing everything I said. In moments, I knew who I could count on and who I couldn't. The supervisor I mentioned was a nice guy, but he was not the kind of person who knew how to handle a crisis situation. Unfortunately, he remained in that job for a long time and there were many situations where he was the wrong person to show up at the right time, but those are other stories and for another time.

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