By Daniel Bobinski
Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist behind “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” describes two systems the brain uses to process the world. System 1 is fast, automatic and emotional. It reacts before you’ve had a chance to think. System 2 is slower, deliberate and rational. It’s the part of you that stops to reason things through.
The tension between these two systems sits at the heart of one of the most powerful forces shaping your daily life: confirmation bias. Do you believe people are lazy? Then you’ll subconsciously look for – and see – that behavior. Do you believe people are selfish? You will look for – and see – instances of that, too. People tend to see what they believe.
This phenomenon is called confirmation bias, and it is best understood from an emotional intelligence perspective.
How confirmation bias forms
When we’re one or two years old, we have no control over the events around us, so we merely observe events and experience whatever emotions emerge. Let’s say we encounter a snarling, barking dog. If a parent nearby displays immense fear about our safety, we receive an emotional imprint of fear. Until we reach an age at which we can cognitively reason otherwise, whenever we see a snarling, barking dog, we’ll experience fear.
Once we form a view about something, confirmation bias kicks in quite easily. To quote Shahram Heshmat, writing in “Psychology Today”:
“Once we have formed a view, we embrace information that confirms that view while ignoring, or rejecting, information that casts doubt on it … We pick out those bits of data that make us feel good because they confirm our prejudices.”
Brain chemistry plays a big role in this. When we see something that confirms a belief, the brain’s “reward center” sends signals that make us feel good. But when we see something that conflicts with our beliefs, it’s like our brain flashes a huge neon sign that reads, “Warning! Conflict! No neuropathways exist for this information! Avoid! Avoid!”
Confirmation biases continue to form even in our adult years. Let’s say you have a creepy, unfair, scruffy-haired boss who always wears a particular brand of shirt, which is always untucked. For several years you endure his obnoxiousness, but every interaction makes you like him less.
Eventually this guy retires, but two months later, another scruffy-haired person joins the team who wears that exact same brand of shirt and always untucked. It’s practically guaranteed your first impression of this guy will not be good, even though you don’t know him!
This is exactly the gap Kahneman writes about – the moments where System 1 has already decided, and System 2 never gets called in. Your emotional history fires first. Logic arrives late, if at all. So the next time you form an instant opinion about a person or situation, it’s worth pausing to ask: is this me thinking, or is this an old imprint doing the thinking for me? The awareness itself is a solid step toward seeing the world a little more clearly.
