implied

I have been contemplating memories and what influences them. Specifically, how cognitive biases can influence perceptions of reality.

Previously I weighed the emotional weight or value a conversation or event has to one individual, but lately I have also been considering other factors such as cognitive bias and how that influences our reality. With this, I have also been trying to consider how my own cognitive biases influence how I interpret things, as well as how other’s cognitive biases influence things.

This is a hard one for me to grasp in a way that I can explain; however, I believe that my past and present influences who I am, and at the same time, who I am influences how I perceive things. What makes this difficult is that cognitive biases can be blind spots, that I or we aren’t even aware of them unless we really take a step back and observe events objectively. If this isn’t done in the moment, the cognitive bias could have already influenced our perception of an event or memory and this can lead to another case of discordance between two people’s memories.

This means that in any given interaction there are multiple factors influencing someone’s perception of events:

• The value of it to them
• Their cognitive bias(es)
• Their perception of the interaction

And collectively these things can clash with someone else’s perception.

Knowing this, I don’t choose to not believe someone when they say something different than what I recall, but I instead try to consider my own weights and biases as well as theirs. It is possible that multiple people disagree on the happenings of an event and earnestly believe they remember what occurred. And when this happens it doesn’t mean that anyone involved is dumb or stupid, it just means that for one of these reasons or another, different memories were created from the actual events.