Sophie Mirabella and the headdesk incident

In Monday's episode of Q&A on ABC, Simon Sheikh of GetUp! performed a brilliant rendition of what teenagers eloquently label *headdesk*.

I assume they don't normally mean the sort of episode Sheikh experienced, but at first it did appear that way. The moments after his head hit the desk have been the subject of much Twitter commentary and some media debate.

There appear to be two schools of thought on the response by Sophie Mirabella; "what a cruel heartless person", or "nobody can be judged for their reaction to a crisis."

Both positions are equally flawed.

As a carer, I suspect I shared a response with many; carers, nurses, physiotherapists and aged care workers, the impulse to leap out of my chair and do something. This impulse is neither good nor bad. I see the pending fall before others because I am trained by experience to do so. This can result in my catching someone before they hit the ground, or inappropriately manhandling a stranger who had already stopped themselves from tripping.

As a person with narcolepsy, I suspect I share a response with other people who have experienced their body failing to co-operate in public. I wanted to shout at the camera crew "look away, this is none of your business, nothing going on here. Allow the man some dignity!"

Malcolm Gladwell writes about split second decisions, where we use instinct rather than reasoning, in his book Blink. The instinct is not a natural hereditary response, like an infant suckling, but an instinct nonetheless.

It carries with it a tightly framed comprehension of the world that we call into action quickly. Friend or foe? Crazed gunman or terrified youth with a mobile phone? It is here that we find surprising biases. The author, himself the child of a black parent, took the Implicit Association Test and discovered that he associated "black" with "bad". Under fire, we retreat to basic models of the world, and respond accordingly. There is no time to reason, there is no time to conduct a focus group or write a policy. We just respond.

Mirabella choked. She did not know what to do. She had no underlying script for how to respond to somebody in need before her eyes. While this does not make her cruel and heartless, it does arguably suggest a cognitive dissonance between "my peer" and "vulnerability", or between "person in my vicinity"and "I should do something". No doubt there are other interpretations, and only Mirabella herself can answer that question.

It is however unlikely she could answer it by reasoning, any more than the police officer who shoots an unarmed child. The difficulty with these fundamental biases is that they operate below any cognitive decision making; they emerge only when we don't have time to think. They betray our argued positions and demonstrate what we have learned without choosing. A black kid with a a gun shaped item in his hand is a danger to society; a person experiencing physical collapse is outside of my job description.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the defence of Mirabella has been along the lines of: "this was a crisis; nobody knows how they will respond."

Firstly, is that not what politicians are supposed to do? Manage crises? Is that not where we see their skills as leaders?

But more importantly, this is only a crisis if you believe that someone collapsing is unusual. For many of us it is not at all unusual. Unfortunate, annoying, embarassing, but not a crisis. There are epileptics, narcoleptics, people who experience seizures, people with physical weakness, illness, or any number of conditions who experienced collapse today and just got on with it. That is life.

Excusing Mirabella because the situation was so extreme as to remove all hope of a normal cognitive response denies the reality of people with any number of conditions. It also reinforces the idea that any exposure to such situations is extreme, and provides a basis for exclusion.

If someone is going to collapse on the desk at work, can you really afford to hire them? What about the risks? What about their wellbeing? Is it really safe for them to be there?

These arguments are used time and again to exclude people with a disability, and ignore the basic fact that such incidents often occur irrespective of the circumstances. The only difference is whether the individual is isolated and alone, sitting at home with nothing to do, or whether they are productive and engaged in a workplace with peers and colleagues.

The wellbeing of every individual is found in a place where they are able to assess their own risk and choose to belong to society despite their vulnerabilities.

It also leads to exactly the circumstance that Mirabella experienced; the choke. In What the Dog Saw, Gladwell looks at instances where high performing individuals have choked. The choke is attributed not to an incompetence, but a dissonance between capability and expectation. The second guessing of the black student in a room with a white examiner, the uncertainty of the politician when faced with a real life situation.

Arguably Mirabella did not herself see this as a moment of crisis in which she had no way of responding, but a situation in which the expectations of her in this context were so disparate from her personal sense of self that she was incapable of action.

Both positions create dangerous, albeit seductive illusions.

Firstly, there is the illusion that we must be perfect in order to handle difference, or risk being considered cruel and heartless. This reduces our social capacity for acceptance, and prevents us taking risks with inclusion.

None of us is perfect when dealing with difference. We all make mistakes, say stupid things, do the wrong thing. The important matter is not to be perfect, it is to keep trying.

Attacking Mirabella for being imperfect is unfair and preposterous. It also ignores the elephant in the room; we are all graceless in the face of difference and will only become more skilled at it if we have more practice. Ridicule and name calling do not make us more likely to reach out for more experience.

The other danger is that we create an environment where we do not expect people to cope, and we excuse their incompetence by labelling the situation a crisis. It is not a crisis. It is a situation, and as humans we experience the unknown on a daily basis.

In a final mention from Gladwell, Outliers considers research on aircraft safety. Those cultures with the highest power index, that is the inability for a subordinate to challenge their boss, had the highest incidence of plane crashes. The ability for the co-pilot to step in when circumstances required it provided an inbuilt safety mechanism that prevented disaster.

We have the ability, as a culture, to step in and say "let me have a go" or "hey, have you tried…" or simply "you are about to screw this up, just stop." We don't have issues with authority, we are not afraid to speak out. It would be very sad indeed if a culture that created the safest airline in the world was unable to cope with someone experiencing vulnerability on national television.

Embedded within our national lingo we have all the phrases we need. "Y'allright mate? You look a bit crook?" "Buggered that up didn't ya?" and "She'll be right. Next time's the shot."

They are also all the phrases we need to accept the diversity of human capability, fallability, and vulnerability, and just get on with giving people a fair go.