That is Within Us

Chapter Three Reflection

Our exercise on impressions and assumptions of our teacher is a good jump-off point for this reflection. In there, we were asked to decide whether the person in question was more situated on either pole of a sort-of character trait continuum. These were numerous and covered a wide range of personality. They were inferences and guesses, and reflectively, we had no idea how we came from those conclusions.

It's a bit like knowing what certain words mean. You 'know' what they mean, but you can't explain the definition when you're asked by an inquiring acquaintance. A bunch of this comes for intuition, I think. I think you don't really know the word, but you have an intuition as to what it is. And this is perfectly okay. Our intuitions are mostly accurate and that's what makes us go to them repeatedly. So relying on intuition is perfectly okay, but not all the time.

As with previous things we've discussed, there's always bias affecting how we perceive things, and that in turn affects our judgements, and our actions. We are very vulnerable to priming, our preconceptions have large stakes, we have the self-serving bias defences and belief perseverance, and we're prone to overconfidence. The last bit is rather dreary since it operates on competence. Over-competence breeds overconfidence. That is, the better your mental heuristics/intuition is, the graver it may set you up to fail. Couple that with belief perseverance means that you'll stick with this false impression against all odds. With the self-serving bias, it protects you from feeling bad about yourself by giving you rosy retrospection and reconstructing your memory, but that hinders you from making better judgements, and well, knowing the truth if you are so inclined.

That last bit may have played a role in our activity. Consider the phenomenon of how we tend to reconstruct the past as being consistent with the present. It could happen to some people who went to University with few of who they knew. It was a new environment and it was a good chance to say goodbye to the bullied yesterday, and build a 'cool dude' persona. Once fully ingrained in the new status quo, said person will deny ever being otherwise. (there's also the case of being much much better now than you were then).

In a parallel sense, this may have played a part in our judgement calls in the exercise (besides the everyday). During the discussion, we tried to pin down how we got those impressions and tried to point in the direction the information. One place we retrieved information from was being in a class previously with the professor. We seem to have discounted the possibility that this year may have been a special case for the person. They may have deviated from their usual self because of whatever reason. We forgot that though personality isn't a transient poof, it also has some degree of fluidity that we shouldn't discount.

Even then, there also seems to be a bit of correspondence bias (or fundamental attribution error) involved. It was mentioned during class that as people observing other people, we only get this minuscule slice of who they are. Even if we fail at judging ourselves and observers turn out to be better at it than the self, the observers are still human, and they are still vulnerable to all sorts of things that get in the way of the truth. Here, we put too much stock in behaviour being governed by dispositional factors (personality etcetera), and too little when it comes to situational factors.

Take again the exercise and how we judged our professor as being talkative (among other things). We might have forgotten the social role and the social expectations for a professor. Although, yes, there are professors who you'd think were mute, there is an expectation for them to be good at talking and discussing lessons. Besides being a good talker, they are also expected to be critical, energetic, analytic, etcetera. That is, even if they really were like that, there are also cases when they simply need to be so. Complementing this is that we are only exposed (in the case of our teachers) to our interactions during class, or in academic pursuits and interests. Though we do get a bit of our professors personal interests in discussions, there's an undeniable wealth of experience and context that we aren't capable of tapping. But we disregard that big elephant and quickly judge people by what and when and how we've met them limitedly. As we saw from our professor's answers, most things are on a situational, case-to-case basis.

Another interesting bit in the chapter comes from the revelation that, well, these attitudes and impressions of yours (prone to being wrong), can affect people to confirm it (even when they really aren't like that), in a self-fulfilling prophecy set-up. That is, this horrible person that I know that hates me absolutely might not really be a bad person (I doubt it). Even worse, I might be making that person horrible by acting towards them in a certain way that I wouldn't if they were my friend, and that they are merely reciprocating this unconscious hate I am expressing.

It's incredibly interesting. And since the theme of my reflections has been hinting at The Truth, I do wonder how we can know what is inherent, and what isn't and is actually of your own doing (or if you fancy external attribution: other people's doing). Although the chapter ends with the footnote that expectations often predict behaviour because they are accurate, the rest of the chapter has hinted at the power inside us. What remains to be seen is how we can limit ourselves (or well, impose on others), and how we can distinguish by what is and what isn't coloured by bias.