How can your mental models about your world both assist and limit your perceptions when you meet a person for the first time?

In my world, confirmation bias plays a vital role in influencing my perceptions towards different matters and issues. It impacts the way I am able to gather information and interpret and recall the same. For example, I find myself supporting the idea of human progress through increased liberty and seeking information to support this idea to a point where I try to interpret stories on freedom and liberty in a way that upholds this point of view and my existing perspective. This mental model was formed from a natural point of trying to interpret information based on what I know. One of the greatest influences to a confirmation bias mental model is an individual’s environment (Wu et al., 2017). My environment limits my thinking to what I already know, think I know, and the experiences that have given me knowledge.

Confirmation bias is a mental model that drives me towards looking and interpreting information in line with my existing beliefs. Rollwage et al. (2020) define confirmation bias as a biased approach to the decision-making process, one that is largely unintentional and often leads to overlooking any inconsistent information. In my own perspective, I suppose confirmation bias to be my own way of creating rational interpretations, looking for logical explanations, and an attempt to be impartial based on what I already believe due to years of objective analysis and experience on the information available within my environment.

The confirmation mental model assists me when meeting a person for the first time through helping in a quick synthesis of information about the individual for me to place the person in a certain personal category. For example, my perception on violence is that it is a mark of a person with poor human characteristics. Therefore, whenever I see aggression, I immediately classify the individual as a risk. However, this system of synthesizing information limits my perceptions in a manner that may result to poor and risk decision making processes. For instance, in the same example as above, it can be easy for me to overlook red flags in an individual who is come and collected the first time we meet because of my bias towards aggression and violence. It becomes very easy to overlook information that is not aligned to what I am already looking for (Park, Cho, & Kim, 2021). While the idea of a confirmation bias reduces time wasted on analysis, it also increases the chances of making poor assumptions and missing out on information that would make the decision-making process richer and more holistic.

For learning and development both personally and professionally, I need to work on changing perspectives to analyze and interpret information using other points of view that may not necessarily be my own. I plan to achieve this development and learning by accepting opposing and disagreeing positions on different issues. I will also need to keep an open mind and receive and interpret information without involving personal biases.

References

Park, S. Y., Cho, M., & Kim, S. (2021). The effect of CSR expectancy violation: value from

expectancy violation theory and confirmation bias. Journal of Marketing Communications, 27(4), 365-388.

Rollwage, M., Loosen, A., Hauser, T. U., Moran, R., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2020).

Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias. Nature communications, 11(1), 1-11.

Wu, T., Wu, Y. J., Tsai, H., & Li, Y. (2017). Top management teams’ characteristics and

strategic decision-making: A mediation of risk perceptions and mental models. Sustainability, 9(12), 2265.