Blob blob?

Ever notice how when some stranger stops his car for you to cross the road, you feel all so happy about that simple incident when compared to when some of your friends help you out with even more compared to that simple gesture and yet, such a feeling does not manifest itself? The funny thing about humans is that we tend to build assumptions around something. Take the case of a stranger, that simple gesture may actually make your day, as you get a good impression of the stranger. Then you generalized this feeling that every stranger is good, you feel elevated that the world is such a wonderful place and with such wonderful people. Why, even when you meet a jerk later, it will not spoil your day, as your mind tend to focus the fellow as an oddball, something you need not care about. The reverse happens when you meet a jerk early at the day, you end up feeling angry and start snapping at everyone else. Your mind tends to assumes thing when there is not enough information available. For example, its like an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle, when you look at it you can actually imagine how the picture will look like though it isn’t incomplete. Why, you assumption maybe totally off until the whole puzzle is complete. Likewise, when you get stepped over by someone you don’t know, the angry, combined with anger and your mind’s innate ability to complete a picture will lead you to the subconscious conclusion that everyone is a jerk. To explain the milder reaction of the good deed of your friends to you is that your mind has enough information to “complete” the picture more effectively. It becomes an isolated case and whatever emotions shown are localized with you and your friends only, thus making the effect less great. You lose the “elevated” feeling faster. A simple example is this, you’re now really old and a small boy offers help you carry your shopping bags. You feel all warm and fuzzy within don’t cha? You’ll even probably go along the whole day with a great smile on your face, feeling that the world loves you. Now say that it is your son that helps you, the effect wouldn’t be so great now would it.

Now lets add a twist to this situation, lets say that this boy is a prank caller and, just 5 minutes ago, has just prank called the fire department. Now given that you saw him did that, how would you react? Heck, I bet you’ll even be snatching back your bags from that boy. You see, with the extra information, you mind’s puzzle is more complete, you can see better, now…or so you thought! Perhaps this boy isn’t a prank caller, perhaps his friends forced him to make that call, and he had no choice. Then your reaction on the whole think will again change. What information is fed to you is what that will determine how far you assumption will deviate from the real thing. The reason you don’t get that high from you’re friends is the simple reason that you know them too well, both the good and bad. With you mind trying to fix the puzzle together, what you’ll get is a more subdued, balanced, response.

Gossip is perhaps the greatest example on how this mechanism works. Say person A is a new student in school and I’ve yet met him. Now, what if somebody tells me that the A is a no good 2-faced backstabber before I’ve met him? Boy, the way I would feel and act would totally be different (regardless of whether I believe the gossip or now, it will somehow affect me!) If that gossip didn’t reach me, then I’ll probably meet A with a neutral judgment. Now here’s the dangerous part, after meeting A for a first time, humans will probably try to determine A’s entire personality! Yes, the mind will try to fix whatever pieces of information we have on a person and make a whole lot of assumptions to make up who he is. That’s what we call as “first impression”! We often forget that there is much more that makes a person, and often we run away before digging in further if we get a really bad impression of him. But if we stick to it, we tend to discover more about a person, with more pieces to the puzzle, we discover that everyone is in someway special, something that has more often than not, been overlooked…

“All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.”
~Cecil Alexander

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 9:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.