The world is what it is, absolutely and regardless of our wishes. Yet there is some truth to the idea that we make our own world. By what we think and what we do, we experience a world that can be different from that of others. If we are not careful, we may even mistake the world we make for the world that is, confusing our experience for universal truth. This applies to the people we deal with, too. Our thoughts and actions can create us a world where people are mostly happy, considerate and polite; they can also make our world a place where hostility and suspicion is the default attitude.
Our ways of thinking, interests and ideas direct our attention, and we only truly see what we pay attention to. In a crowded room, it can be that there are half a dozen ongoing conversations. We can hear them all, but can only really listen to one. The others we have to ignore, unless something in them invokes our conscious attention. The way we direct our attention determines what information we get; the information we get shapes our beliefs.
One way in which our ideas can shape what we see is known as confirmation bias. This refers to our tendency to look for evidence that supports what we already believe, instead of looking for contrary evidence that could prove our existing beliefs wrong. It’s easy to see how this applies to, say, politics and religion, but I think it can be subtler than that. It can also apply to beliefs about human nature – if you believe people are at root nasty, you can have that belief confirmed everywhere you look, and the same is true of believing in the fundamental goodness of humanity.
It is hardly controversial to point out that many things about us affect how other people react to us. Our status, and sex, and age, and looks and many other things have an effect on how we are treated. The same people will treat a beautiful, well-off woman differently than an ugly homeless guy.
Wondering about how differently the world would treat us if we were older, or younger, or of different sex may be fascinating, but it’s not that practical. But the same principle also holds true about the way we behave and carry ourselves. In many ways our outsides reflect our insides. Some stride around as if they owned the world; others like they wished to apologize for existing. In addition to their clothes, people wear their attitude. Some wear a cloak of hostility or suspicion or boredom. Some bear a crown of happiness; others carry weights of worry and stress. We are constantly sending out signals about who we are. And people tend to respond to those signals.
When we evaluate other people’s actions, we are suspectible to a bias that is so common that psychologists have named it the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error refers to our tendency to too easily explain people’s actions in terms of their personality, rather than the situation they’re in. When we look at, say, a man giving money to a person collecting donations for war veterans, we may mistakenly conclude that he is a particularly generous person, even if most people would act the same way in his situation.
The fundamental attribution error is all about us underestimating the power of situations. Guess what is the one constant in every situation you’re in? You. Every person you talk to is interacting with you. When you talk to a stranger – or a friend for that matter – he takes in what you’re saying, tone of voice, general attitude, manners, body language, facial expression and appearance, and almost automatically adjusts his response accordingly. If you’re not careful about it, you will assume that the way people act when dealing with you is just how they are, a part of their personality. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t – but the first impression can be quite misleading.
Besides the way we subtly affect the responses we get from those around us, we also shape the world around us – or fail to do so, which amounts to the same thing. We choose our friends and the people we deal with. We choose the career we pursue, and the jobs we apply for. We choose our hobbies. Most fundamentally, we choose how we direct our attention. All this can make a huge difference to our lives, and to what kind of world we live in.
Our attitudes, personality, manners, habits and choices change the world we deal with; in the long term, some of the changes become more or less permanent. The world is like a pool of water. When we look at the pool, we see fishes and plants and water, but we also see our own reflection. The first question is, what is reality, and what is reflection? The second question is, how to make sure our reflection makes the sight better?