Confirmation Bias: Your Brain is So Judgmental

Don't trust your first impressions... Your brain is working to lead you astray. Social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson explains how to make up for lazy shortcuts made by your brain as well as how to guide other people around their first impressions of you. Halvorson is the author of "No One Understands You and What to Do About It" (http://goo.gl/A6ZlWp)

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Heidi Grant Halvorson: So there are lots of biases that you can basically count on your perceiver being subject to. They’re going to interfere with the way this person sees you. The first and probably the most common is the confirmation bias. So confirmation bias is the brain’s tendency to once you start to kind of go get a sense of what someone is like so you show in an initial interaction you start to feel like this is a funny person or this is a smart person or this is someone I can trust. And once you start to have that initial hunch your brain naturally looks for information that confirms that initial hunch and kind of ignores everything else. Psychologists also refer to this tendency to really latch on to early information about a person as the primacy effect. And basically what that means is the information we learn first about another person disproportionately shapes our understanding of them afterward. And so, you know, in a way I sometimes feel bad talking about that because I’d love to be the person that came and said you know how everyone tells you that first impressions are so important. Don’t worry about it. They’re not that important. If anything what the science shows is that they’re really more important than you even think they are because that first impression is those – the initial information that other person gets about you will have a really major effect on everything else they see.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Aaron Lehmann