WHY YOUR OWN MIND IS DECEIVING YOUR REALITY!

Friends, I received wonderful response comments from all of you for the post “Managing others perceptions to create your reality”. In fact it has triggered many debates about what is ABSOLUTE reality. While some of my friends spoke about taking FAITH - here. Some spoke of IDENTITY here. What was most amusing was how differently we all perceived the post about perception.

The most interesting comment I received though was that “How others view us or how we view others are all filtered through a set of cognitive biases that invariably deviate quite a bit from rationality and good judgement. “

Wikipedia says, Cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment, whereby inferences about other people and situations may be drawn in an illogical fashion.

And so in this post I will delve a little deeper into exploring how cognitive bias works for a layman quoting an example from Malcolm Gladwell.

Let us get into a mini exercise.

This was pretty quick and easy. Did your results look like this?

 Let us see what is happening here. When the mind is under time pressure, we BLINK not think. That means we make flash judgement. However in the backdrop of this judgement occurs a data processing within your mind. When you see John, your mind fetches all the instances in which you have comes across the word John. In this case it happens to have been men named John and hence it categorizes John as Male. The categorization happens very fast since there is precise information. When it sees the word kitchen it fetches all instances in which kitchen has been seen, heard, or accessed and in MOST of such instances have been associated with females. Hence it associates the word with FEMALE.  

Now let us make a few changes to this test and try again.

Did you take longer to do this one than the previous test?

Why?

The mind’s data processing has just been introduced to a conflict. Historical data calls John male. But most Johns had never been seen in the kitchen. And so the mind needs to THINK and rationalize. I took 7 seconds to complete this test and this is how my results look like.

These two tests are variations of the Implicit Association Test. In simple terms it means, we have different kinds of biases based on information stored in our brain. These can be more than 100 types of biases. However the specific bias referred here is Stereo type bias, where the mind tends to make decisions based on the stereo type information fed into it.

However what does our experience with two tests tell us?

1. Our perceptions are formed by the volume of information available to our brains over a period of time.
2. Perceptions can be broken if we STOP the process of concluding results from the volume of information available. We CAN introduce new ideas to the brain and FORCE it THINK rationally.

Our brain can be forced to think differently fighting past information. It is up to us to enable our minds to think so. And before expecting others to think so, we need to do that ourselves.

A notable point here is that our own minds are susceptible to fall prey to implicit biases. For example: when I took the first test, in spite of me being a working woman who goes to office, I grouped the word “kitchen” under female. WHY? My brain merely processed the massive volume of information fed into it by new channels and historical data. Now in the second test, I stopped myself from auto-grouping “Kettle” under “Female & Office” and FORCED myself to think why can’t a spoon be categorized under Male. Why not desk under female? That is when my mind started changing perceptions and tried to think RATINOALLY.

As woman I want others to view me as a forthright and independent minded person. YET- I realise I have implicit biases within myself. And I sometimes subject myself to fall prey to them. I need to change how I THINK about myself and only then can I change what others think of me. And thus I need to create my own reality and then enable others to see it.

So, what reality are you going to create for yourself today?

References: You can go take the IAT on the internet, read more about it here or refer to the book Blink.