A benign but drunk man sits in a bar, and the tavern’s waitress keeps ignoring him. He tells fellow patrons that the waitress cannot be from Paris, as she’s claimed, because that’s not how ‘Paris women’ would treat someone.
That’s the scene from part of The Sure Thing, a 1985 film starring John Cusack.
The ‘Paris women’ remark is instructive, for reasons beyond the intoxicated patron’s description of Paris women rather than Parisian (let alone Parisienne) women. It’s reasonable to conclude that the man doesn’t know much about French culture.
That’s not so important – there’s no obligation to know particularly about France, or Sweden, or Laos, for example – most people aren’t cultural anthropologists (and shouldn’t be expected to be).
What’s telling about the scene is that the barfly doesn’t grasp that others – including the audience – realize that he doesn’t actually know much about French culture or the women of Paris.
That’s the joke, part funny & part sad – he knows what he thinks he knows, but he can’t see what other people know.
Everyone faces the risk this problem presents, and the way to overcome it is to push beyond situation bias and confirmation bias, to look at arguments and contentions from more than one perspective.
It’s not enough to look at a problem only as an insider (that is, just one more intoxicated barfly who relies on the ignorance or acceptance of other intoxicated barflies).
It’s critical to look at problems from a sober outsider’s view, from an American competitive standard and not just an edge-of-the-barstool view.
Many schemes, plans, claims, contentions, and proposals go wrong when the perspective is merely from the inside. Proponents find themselves surprised when what seemed so clear after one-too-many drinks meets with a different reception from others beyond that small, sloshed circle.
That’s the ‘Paris Women’ problem, and how to avoid it.