There will always be several salient reasons to not do the right thing, but none of them alone, nor combined, is sufficient.

The only way a person's perceptions can be (objectively) "accurate" is if only that one person inhabits his world.

What a difference it makes to switch the order of the words "just" and "not"...

Be your own hero first.

Awkwardness as a Consultant

Awkwardness, naturally, is uncomfortable. But perhaps it is time to desensitize ourselves to this social distress and see the utility (and therefore positivity) of this construct that gets a bad rap.

To understand how awkwardness may be useful, I will first acknowledge that there are several different strains of awkwardness: that which results when a guy encounters a second girl he's seeing while he is out with another girl is conceptually different from that which ensues when a girl refuses a social situation that presents a moral dilemma in some way. The focus here is on the latter-type instance. In this latter case, what does awkwardness truly represent? It is a dissonance between one's personal belief and that which is presented as the presented/available/preferred circumstances of/by an interactant with this person. So that there is minimal ambiguity, such might occur when a romantic couple gets into an argument and one of the dyad feels such discomfort that, despite his/her deepest values contradicting whatever the other believes, he or she acquiesces and distances him-/herself from these values.

The way the situation is presented above, of course, makes it seem obvious that deviating from one's values would be a poor choice and it may even seem like an easy problem to field. But how often has anyone encountered a similar situation of varying degree? It is more common than you think (just one example is that you don't want to make a "scene" with a store clerk by saying something even though they dropped your fresh fruit such that you are now the owner of bruised fruit (maybe you could get new fruit), or stretched a sweater as they wrapped it such that it no longer will look good on you (again, there is the possibility to replace it). Such situations are ones that one may encounter on a typical day.

While some of these instances are relatively benign/low-impact, others have more potentially serious ramifications for not transcending the awkwardness (a girl saying "no" to a guy in applicable situations, etc.) Regardless of the gravity of the consequences, however, it is important to train to assess the situation properly. Each instance is an opportunity to access one's beliefs; they are accessible, for they are a requisite for the feeling of awkwardness. To the extent that you allow the dysphoria of awkwardness to overwhelm you, you may not make a good decision, for the decision likely goes against your values. The point need not be elongated further: in short, if you resign yourself to the fact that awkwardness is going to be awkward, you can to an extent immunize yourself to its deleterious effects in decision-making. You can then generate the (obviously) logical conclusion to stay with -instead of stray from- your values. Becoming more comfortable with awkwardness is the antecedent to a host of superior decisions that you will, in retrospect, be happy to have made.

Sometimes the "right thing" to do is not the correct thing to do...oh, when conscience is maladaptive! The goodness of conscience may be importantly qualified by the fact that we only get one life and we must do what makes sense for us...this may seem paradoxical with my post on doing the right thing the wrong way being superior to doing the wrong thing the right way. But the contrast of the correct thing to the "right thing" above is not necessarily equating it to doing the wrong thing, in light of the qualification :)

Conversation overheard in a NYC lobby between a four year old and her mother:

Girl: Mom! Mommmm!
Mother: Yes dear...?
Girl: What is 'arm' without the 'r'?
Mother: 'Am.'
Girl: Nooo. It's 'm.' I said 'arm'!
Girl again: What is 'arm' without the 'r'?
Mother: 'Am'.
Girl: Nooo- I said 'arm'! The answer is 'm' mom!

This cycle went on for another two rounds, each campaigner sticking to her initial answer. The mother eventually stopped answering and the girl eventually stopped asking. It's interesting/maybe sad that the mother appeared too worn to have the perspective that both fresh ears and a bit of developmental/social psychology afforded me to disambiguate the misunderstanding.

My first guess when the girl said, "what is arm without the 'r'?" was the same as her mom: 'am.' Then I realized, through the girl's answer, that her mom and I had something in common that we did not have in common with the girl- we could both read. The girl's answer relied on phonetics as opposed to spelling. What the not-yet-literate girl was really asking was "What is arm without the 'ar' (sound)?" Her answer, 'em' (m), then, was based on sound, not spelling. However, the mother was unable to take the perspective of her child to realize a difference in approach to solving the riddle. I was going to point this out to the mother, but just enjoyed catching the conversation bit.

This episode quickly reminded me of something in psychology called the Stroop Effect.

Answer this in your head: What is the color of this text: green

If you are reading this, then you're literate, and like other literate people you likely initially thought 'green,' if you didn't actually say it as well. Yet most young children are quick to correctly indicate the color of a word that does not match the word itself. For instance, to write the word 'green' in pink lettering (above). Why? Not-yet-literate children have little problem identifying the word as being pink in color (the letters g-r-e-e-n mean nothing to them), but literate people get caught on the discrepancy between what their logical brains are reading and the color stimuli itself. This confusion slows down their answer of 'pink,' and often adults will also mistakenly say 'green.'