The story is told of a famous ethologist, Konrad Lorenz. One day in his
backyard he
experimented
with imprinting baby ducklings—that is, getting them to respond to him
as though he
were
their mother. To do so he walked in the pattern of a figure eight as he
crouched over,
quacking
without interruption while he glanced constantly over his shoulder. He
was an older man
with
a long white beard. Dr. Lorenz was congratulating himself on his spectacular
feat of getting
these
baby ducklings to follow him and attach themselves to him. At this moment
of
self-congratulation,
he looked up—right into the faces of a group of tourists passing by! They
looked
horrified! And then Konrad Lorenz realized that from the tourists' vantage
point the baby
ducklings
could not be seen because at that very moment they were hidden in the grass.
Consequently,
what the onlookers saw was a crazy old man making circles and quacking.
Without
the
fuller picture—that is, the ducklings and the intent behind Konrad's behavior—a
brilliant
ethologist's
imprinting experiment looked only like craziness (Watzlawick, Beavin, and
Jackson,
Pragmatics
of Human Communication, 1967, 20).