Wellness Wednesdays with Diana: Your Weekly Dose of Happiness, Nutrition and Fitness Tips
Surprise Me
If there’s anything you should take away from the Psych 001 slide decks you looked at for the first time two hours before your final, it’s an understanding of confirmation bias. This concept refers to our tendency to seek out information in the world that confirms our existing beliefs.
We rarely approach anything these days without some knowledge of what to expect: “I heard this place is really good” or “I heard the service is terrible at this restaurant” or “Penn Course Review said he’s the best professor of all time.” We know way too much going into a class, a restaurant, or meeting someone for coffee. We’ve all Googled our professors or looked someone up on Instagram and judged them based on their unrestrained use of the Nashville filter. We can’t help but seek to confirm what we already know about a place or person.
Take California for instance. Yes, it’s beautiful and warm and incredible, but maybe so many people fall in love with the West Coast because they approach it with rose-colored glasses. And in this case, I’m all for confirmation bias, since it’s prompting us to adopt a positive and optimistic outlook, but what about the flip side of that? The places people have convinced you are ugly and dangerous or the people you’ve heard are painfully shy and awkward?
Snyder and Swann (1978) asked college students to interview students they’ve never met before, but they initially told them they were about to meet someone who was either introverted or extraverted. These descriptions were totally randomly assigned to interviewees, but they led interviewers to seek out information that would confirm what they already thought they knew about their interviewee, which is really bad news for human interaction.
Call me naïve, but I think we should approach people with a blank slate. Give people a chance to show you who they are and judge for yourself, don’t let anyone else do the thinking for you. It’s really easy to lose sight of independent decision-making in college. I often think in “we” terms with my close friends, and I definitely will always take their advice and warnings about restaurants, jobs, classes, even boys into consideration. But a few months away from graduation, it may be worth the try to practice thinking for yourself in moderate (not selfish) “I” terms.
We belong to so many circles in college that provide support and love, and that’s wonderful, but geographically speaking, many of these circles will dissolve next year and you can’t exactly be making calls from the East Coast to the West Coast to ask your friend whether you should go for an everything bagel or if it’s more of a honey whole wheat kind of day.
So how you can you start? Like every loyal creative writing student, my solutions to problems usually involve a journal. You’re going to start a surprise journal! An article in Slate Magazine inspired me to keep a journal on my phone of instances that surprise me. Like that time Saxbys gets your order right. Or The Bachelor uses a word other than “amazing” to describe every girl. And Chipotle doesn’t remind you that guac is extra.
I know many of you are going off to do amazing things next year, but no profession is really safe from confirmation bias. Julia Galef, of Slate Magazine, reports that teachers judge a child’s academic ability based on prior knowledge of his socioeconomic status. Jurors are guilty of the same bias. Whether you go off to be a lawyer or you join Teach for America, be mindful of these findings and let your guard down. Our brain is wired to make predictions and jump to conclusions, but you have to let yourself be vulnerable to surprises.
We’re so busy looking for evidence that confirms what we already know about people that we neglect the times they do things that surprise us and shake our expectations. Once you open your heart to the possibility that people, in particular, have so many layers to them, you may see them in a different light. Next time you visit your least favorite restaurant and actually have a good experience, write it down.
Diana Gonimah is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania from Cairo, Egypt. She is a writer, Features Editor, and Recruiting Chair at the UPenn chapter of Her Campus. She’s passionate about psychology, journalism, creative writing, and helping people in any capacity. Check our website every Wednesday for Diana’s column!