Confirmation Bias: Your Brain is So Judgmental
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Don't trust your first impressions... Your brain is working to lead you astray.
Social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson explains how to make up for lazy shortcuts made by your brain as well as how to guide other people around their first impressions of you.
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HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON:
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. She is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant for the Neuroleadership Institute, and author of the best-selling books:
Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World for Success and Influence (co-written with E. Tory Higgins), and The 8 Motivational Challenges.
Halvorson is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, 99u, Fast Company, WSJ.com, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.
In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation for her research on goals and achievement.
HGH is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She gives frequent invited addresses and speaks regularly at national conferences, and is available for speaking and consulting engagements, primarily in education, marketing, and management. She received her PhD in social psychology from Columbia University.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Heidi Grant Halvorson: So there are lots of biases that you can basically count on your perceiver being subject to. They’re going to interfere with the way this person sees you. The first and probably the most common is the confirmation bias. So confirmation bias is the brain’s tendency to once you start to kind of go get a sense of what someone is like, so you show in an initial interaction you start to feel like this is a funny person or this is a smart person or this is someone I can trust. And once you start to have that initial hunch your brain naturally looks for information that confirms that initial hunch and kind of ignores everything else. Psychologists also refer to this tendency to really latch on to early information about a person as the primacy effect. And basically what that means is the information we learn first about another person disproportionately shapes our understanding of them afterward. And so, you know, in a way I sometimes feel bad talking about that because I’d love to be the person that came and said you know how everyone tells you that first impressions are so important. Don’t worry about it. They’re not that important. If anything, what the science shows is that they’re really more important than you even think they are because that first impression is those — the initial information that other person gets about you will have a really major effect on everything else they see.
So, for example, if in your initial encounter with someone you come across as kind of a jerk and you know it. You realize afterwards that you didn’t come across the way you intended to. And so the next day when you come in to work, let’s say, you bring them a cup of coffee and you think well that’ll be nice, a nice gesture. It’ll show them that I’m not a jerk. What’s actually more likely to happen is that they’re going to interpret you giving them coffee with the lens of understanding of how you were a jerk before. So they’ll say oh, can you believe this jerk who’s trying to manipulate me by he thinks just giving me some coffee is going to somehow get me on his side, right. So they’ll feel manipulated by the gesture. They’ll interpret the gesture in a way that’s consistent with what they already think of you. And that’s really the challenge...
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