Blog #2: THE THINKING SELF

           I am a person who prefers to observe first before making an action or decision. This means that I tend to assess people or objects even though I have not encountered them yet. Sometimes, the result of the assessment is significant and useful. It is significant and useful because it gives me an idea of how I should approach them. For instance, when meeting a new person, I assess first his/her personality and behavior by comparing him/her to other people I know with the same behavior as his/her. If I found out that he/she is extroverted, I would rather wait him/her to talk to me because I assume he/she is talkative and prefers to start a conversation. Otherwise, I would be the one to talk first to him/her. In short, how I would approach him/her is based on the result of the assessment I did; and this makes the assessment useful. However, there are times that assessing leads me to judging. For example, when I see a guy who acts like a girl I tend to think that the guy is a gay but when I try to confirm it with people who know that guy, I would find out that he is not really a gay. He just behaves that way. This implies that sometimes my assessment could lead me to incorrect conclusions. 

          Because of that, during the lesson about the thinking self, I was triggered when the class was discussing about the cognitive biases. I was actually recalling my experiences of making assumptions and drawing conclusions about people, objects or events. While doing this, I realized that most of the times I ended up having incorrect assumptions and conclusions. Honestly, this affected my way of interacting with other people. I have mentioned above that how I approach people or event is based on the conclusion I have drawn from my assessment. Most of the times, this assessment leads to cognitive biases; therefore, I interacted with other people having wrong assumptions about them. 

          After I learned about the two systems of thinking and different cognitive biases, I became aware of my thinking self. I know it will not be easy for me to stop myself from making wrong assumptions and drawing incorrect conclusions, but at least I can now recognize the signs of cognitive biases; therefore, preventing myself from doing so. 

APPLICATION: Enhance self-awareness by understanding how these cognitive biases occur.