Multiple Interpretations Make the Newsgroup Go 'Round (12/12/96)

GravesPA2 > wrote:
><<>Say that Scully falls for someone who's helping out on a case.  Mulder
>>thinks the case is wrapped up, but Scully makes some excuse about wanting
>>to tie up some more loose ends and Mulder comes up with a convenient
>>reason for why he has to leave right away.  They both know what the real
>>story is.  So Scully has her doomed little tryst.>>
>
>Ick.  Ick, ick, ick.  Scully, the Poster Girl for Self Control, has sex
>with someone she's just met and barely knows?  Ick.
>
I love this newsgroup!  My two favorite things in the world are psychology
and the X-Files, and y'all are continually inspiring me to find new
connections between the two.
Today I'm all inspired about... multiple interpretations! Obviously there
are a bazillion interpretations of any aspect of the show.  If you're like
me, there are some interpretations that differ from your own that you just
dismiss without a second thought ("Ah, what do they know"), but there are
others that really make you sit up and take notice. I feel like I'm
usually on the same wavelength as Paula G. (I have long admired her fanfic
and her posts), we're both 'shippers [Ed. note: I was at the time, anyway]... and yet 
she finds the idea of Scully sleeping with someone she doesn't know well to be truly 
icky, whereas it gives me the creeps to think that Scully could be so guarded
and so ruthlessly rational that she would just pass up one of the rare
chances for lightness and bliss that she's going to get in this life that
she's chosen.  It's amazing how much room for difference there is!
A lot of times when people have these disparate views of the characters,
they'll blame the difference on inconsistent writing (I love the labels
"Mythology Mulder" and "MOTW Mulder" :) ).  Now, given this lackluster
fourth season, I am not in any mood to cut the writers any slack, but to
be fair... we'd be having the same sort of disagreements if we were
talking about two randomly chosen real people whose lives we observed for
an hour a week.
Psychologists have seriously considered the idea that personality is more
in the eye of the beholder than in the actual person.  Studies have been
done examining a group of people who all know each other (kids at a summer
camp, for example), in which each person rates each other person on a wide
variety of personality traits.  Then each personality "profile" is
compared one by one with each other one.  On average there is more overlap
between one person's profiles of two different targets than there is
between two people's profiles of the same target.  Which is pretty
disconcerting, when you think about it.  (And which suggests that most of
us are NOT cut out to be profilers for the FBI! :)  Although there the
emphasis is a little different -- pragmatically it doesn't matter if your
personality description of a killer is completely wrong as long as it
leads you to correctly predict their behavior and find them).
Not only do we have idiosyncratic interpretations of people, but once
those interpretations are in place they are extremely resistant to change.
This is a charge often leveled at 'shippers (and occasionally at
anti-shippers): "It doesn't matter what the episode shows, they'll just
interpret it according to their own little theories..." as if 'shippers
(or occasionally anti-shippers) were some sort of delusional wackos.  Well
lay off, 'cause everybody does this.  Every day.  In every aspect of their
lives.  Our preexisting ideas ("schemas") influence how we attend to,
interpret, and remember information in a staggering number of ways.

Anyway, this whole topic becomes amusingly circular for me: I was really
surprised that a fellow 'shipper's opinion was so different from my own...
which made me think about how our interpretations of people can be so
different... which made me think about how interpretations are so
resistant to change... which made me realize that the whole reason I was
surprised in the first place was that my own M & S schemas had distorted
my memory of Paula's fanfic!!  There are a number of plot/character points
in her longer stories that clearly indicate that her Scully would not have
a brief, spur-of-the-moment romance even under the best of circumstances.
These particular points didn't sit well with my view of the character, so
I kind of skimmed 'em, did a little mental hand-waving to tie the story
together some other way... and promptly forgot all about them.  Leaving me
ready to be surprised rather than thinking "Oooo, Paula's gonna hate
this!" when I posted my speculation :) .
(They're still great stories, even with the points I disagree with left
in!)
EP