SDA #7 - Real Life Psychology

I have a few interesting examples of some ways that minds play tricks on us:

Example A: "I knew I was going to marry him/her from the moment I laid eyes on him/her."

Hindsight Bias:

As a skeptic of the institution of marriage, (the sad reality of a child of a messy divorce), I always found it interesting when I was around newly engaged people and this comment was made. I always thought "oh really, you mean all those times you were annoyed by them when they did something ridiculous in public did not make you question just a little bit." Of course, when I would say this people would give me the look of "you must not really be with 'the one' because you did not 'know it all along." Now, thank goodness, I have a term for it.

Example B:

Selective Perception:

About 2 years ago, I was awoken at 5:30am in the morning to banging on the front doors of my home. I figured my roomate had locked herself out while running so stumbled to the front door only to see a very large man, shaking the doors, pointing at me "let me in, let me in." Stop. What do you think this man looks like?

Now, I screamed and my roomate's boyfriend came out and yelled at the man "get out of here." Following, this interaction the man sits down on the front porch and the two men have a staring contest for 30 minutes through the glass until the police come. The police arrive and take the man to the car and a few moments later the policeman returns and informs us that "this man is not your average prowler. He actually is wearing prada shoes and a rolex watch. I asked him who he is and he responded with I am the CEO of XX company. Are you all sure you want to press charges?" Of course, we responded "yes, we don't care if he is Warren Buffett, he was trying to break into our house."

The police cars pull away and we go out to the porch and find the man's neimann marcus coat on our porch with his business card in the pocket - gotta love google. Turns out this man is a MBA/JD from UNC-Chapel Hill, worth over $30M and has pulitzer prize winning articles written about him and his accomplishments.

Stop! What image do you have in your mind now?

This is exactly how I have told the story over the past two years. Last week, I was at a dinner party with my mom and my old roomate and my old roomate was telling the story. She told the same story except in the first sentence said "this very large African-American man." My Mom turns to me and said, I have heard that story 100 times and until now I never realized he was an African-American man.

What is interesting here to me is that I stopped using adjectives to describe people a few years ago like this white/black/gay/asian/indian/rich/etc. man/woman was doing XXX. While studying sociology and realizing the importance of narrative story telling and its implications for shaping cultural bias , I made a concious effort to stop using terms. I actually noticed that people (even people traditionally viewed as non-discrimanatory) would use a descriptor for negative stories and a not use one for positive stories and not use descriptors of their own race/gender/sexuality when telling a negative story. For example, if the man in this story had been white, generally the person who was white might have said man instead of white man but most likely would have always used black man to describe the person.

Scenario 3: Heuristic ?

Recently, I attended an intensive class in DC focused on the sweet spot of business and politics. The class was basically 4 speakers a day from all walks of Washington discussing their role in the world of government. At lunch on the third day, a few students (Republicans) said I want to complain because almost all of the speakers have been democrats. The interesting thing was that there had actually been 5 Republican speakers and 6 deomcratic speakers. Talk about the impace of hearing things you do not agree with...