Sunday, January 14, 2007

Emmaus, Scripts and Travel

While in Colorado for our ski vocation vacation, a number of students and I attended a prayer service. The minister used the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus as his opening for how travel can help us to discover more about God and ourselves. (See Luke 24: 13-35) Of course, in the disciples case, they needed the experience of breaking bread with the stranger before they could recognize him as the Risen Lord and could understand why their hearts had “burned” so strongly all day.

Legendary psychologist B. F. Skinner was right in suggesting that much of our behavior is based on learned stimulus-response associations that do not require conscious processing. Try to run an errand where you must take a different exit on the way home and you have an idea of how our behavior often takes place without much effortful processing. For many familiar activities, from going to the theater to meeting someone for a first date to joining a new health club, we have “scripts,” or mental sequences of actions that define and represent that event.

Psychological research shows these scripts influence what we expect in the situation, how we interpret events that transpire, and certainly our own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Scripts can even bias our judgments and decisions, such as the professional sports writers who judged a college “player” from the same hometown as Joe Montana as being more likely to succeed in the NFL than players from other hometowns (T. Gilovich in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 40, pg 797-808).

I think this is one reason why travel can be so fruitful in helping us to see ourselves and the world differently. When we travel, we are intentionally placing ourselves in situations where we do not have as many scripts for our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. We have to be more effortful and purposeful about every aspect of our day, from waking up disoriented in a strange bed to negotiating our way around a strange city to having new and different experiences with new and different people.

By taking ourselves out of our usual routine, like the disciples walking to Emmaus, we are more likely to notice what we would otherwise miss. We see other people, ourselves, and even God with fresh eyes. This could be during a vacation in Paris or a service trip to New Orleans. It could even be while skiing in Winter Park, Colorado.

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