Understanding our Perceptions

“It’s what you make of it that counts.” I’m sure we’ve heard this expression so many times in regards to colleges, experiences, and other choice events that may not always go our way. Even though this cliche seems like a cop-out for someone who doesn’t know how to properly console you, there is a lot of truth behind it. Our perceptions control how we appreciate (or don’t) our lives.

Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioral economics, illustrated this concept in a beautifully stunning manner: by tracking the pain in colonoscopy patients. He measured both the patients’ reported pain as the procedure occurred and their reported pain after the procedure has ended. He found that people perceived worse experiences when their colonoscopy ended on a high spike of pain, even if they had had relatively no pain up until then. Kahneman tried on more thing with this experiment, too. After that big spike of pain where the procedure would normally have ended, Kahneman had the doctors extend the colonoscopy’s duration. This extended time added just small levels of pain. So what happened?

When the operation was over, the patients perceived the extended colonoscopy as a less painful experience than the colonoscopy ending in a pain spike, even though they received that  pain spike and additional pain. The only difference was that the patients who ended with the small amounts of pain remember it ending relatively painlessly, so their perceptions were drastically different from those who received overall less painful procedures. This tells us that our perception of the world around us has powerful implications regarding how we react, consciously and subconsciously, to the events in our lives.

College life also illustrates the power of perceptions well. Though the tier of a college can determine the quality of an education you receive, most of the learning and experiences you will have will by dictated by how you view your college. If you believe you will have a good time and can make the best of your college experience, then you will seek out the experiences and educational opportunities that mean the most to you and have an amazing, immersive time. If, however, you go into a college thinking, “man, this wasn’t even in my top three choices, this is going to suck!”...well, it might suck. Not because of the college though, because of your attitude towards it.*

Even the types of phrasings in popular expressions, like “coming out of the closet,” contain subtle hints as to how society perceives certain kinds of action. Though coming out is thankfully more celebrated and acceptable than it previously was, the phrase “coming out” still bothers me. Coming out of a closet (or I guess anything else) sounds like something one would be ashamed to do—they must have gone to the closet to hide their shame from the people enjoying life outside. Even though we may not realize it, phrasings like the shameful “coming out” impart negative connotations on those who do it and our attitude towards homosexuality. If we wanted to empower those who are publicly announcing their orientation, as we should, we need to use an expression that does not carry negative connotations. Maybe our new word for that should be “sharing.” Yeah Johnny? He shared with me about two months ago. Sharing is something that is done on an even field—one person has information that they willingly choose to divulge with another. “Coming out” puts the person who is already vulnerable on a psychologically lower level than the rest of society even before they begin that often arduous process.

It doesn’t seem like it, but our perceptions play a bigger role in our lives than we realize. They shape our views of important issues and can dictate our beliefs. They can be easily manipulated, however, for good and for bad. I want to impart to you the power that perceptions play in our daily lives, and get you to think about how you once perceived something big in your life—and if you could have viewed for better or for worse.

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*I think this perception applies mainly to freshman who were incessantly told throughout high school that they need to attend the best schools, get the best degree, etc. I think that as people progress through college, they start to see how it is an all-around great opportunity regardless of where they went. I talked about this in a previous post: http://moderatelyunbiased.blogspot.com/2013/11/more-thoughts-on-education-our-culture.html

The Power of Shamelessness

You are about to give the most important speech of your life but you’re a wreck: you’re sweating, your hands are trembling, and your mouth is drier than a ball of cotton. You remember a good public-speaking tip you once heard: picture the audience in their underwear. You try it, and the speech goes…actually, I have no idea how it goes. I have never tried that approach with public speaking. What I instead rely on in situations like those is my shamelessness.

Shamelessness is an underrated tool in our personal arsenal. It isn’t something you do, it’s how you respond to your and others’ actions. For me, it is mainly brushing off the embarrassment I inevitably incur from freely expressing myself.

I’ve found that a big part of shamelessness is the ability to laugh at yourself after you’ve done something that, well, deserves it (like me walking into a tree branch the other day while I wasn’t texting…I’m still not entirely sure how that happened). Once you make fun of yourself, the stage is set—no one else can bring you down because you’ve already done that. When people laugh at themselves, they become more relatable in the eyes of others. Many comedians are successful because they know how to leverage this concept. Things happen to us all the time, dumb things that we are embarrassed about. But when we hear people sharing their own embarrassments, we relate to them.

I think this is a major reason why we also tend to laugh at the sufferings of others: it is an inconspicuous way to mask our own. With the attention focused on someone else, we aren’t reminded of the things that we would otherwise be shameful of.

I should mention that shamelessness alone does not grant these powers. It takes confidence to laugh at yourself, do stand-up, or speak in public. But most of society already understands the benefits of confidence. What I don’t think society knows is the potential of shamelessness. Confidence and shamelessness work together to empower people to try things they’ve never done before. You could be confident and share an idea you think is good, but then if people react badly to it and you are prone to shame, you could lose that confidence and become scared to offer your ideas or suggestions. If, however, you are less shameful, you could take that bad idea in stride, recognize that not every idea you put forth will be perfect, and move on.

So after considering our original scenario, I don’t think the best way to get over the fear of public speaking is to imagine everyone else in their underwear; I think the best way is for you to be in your underwear. If you can keep going after that, there won’t be a thing you can’t do: you’ve transformed a terrifying atmosphere into a casual, one where you can speak freely without worrying about messing up…it’s really strange how badly I want to try this at some point in my life.

So recognize that not all of your ideas and actions will be considered normal. It is likely that you’ll do or say something stupid that made more sense in your head. But when this happens, laugh at yourself! Embrace shame, that natural human feeling, and transcend it. It may surprise you how far you can go.

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And in reference to my initial point, is this really what you want to imagine?

More Thoughts on Education: Our Culture of Comparison

Two weeks ago I wrote about the potential of implementing flipped learning-style classroom models. While flipped learning, and especially Khan Academy’s approach, is drastically better than normal educational methods, there is another problem in our educational culture that may be even greater than than pitfalls of traditional teaching: the attitudes towards testing.

Testing has obvious benefits; it’s important to measure how good students are at something. With that information, we can target what students know and what needs to improve. The problem is that our attitude towards testing breeds comparison rather than emphasizing improvement. Teachers’ salaries are increasingly being determined by how well kids perform, which was the cause of the Chicago teachers’ strike. Students become competitive and care more about their grades rather than what they learn from the class. Especially for standardized testing, the need for comparison puts more emphasis on rote memorization and template completion than on the intellectual venture that is learning.

Testing should focus on improvement. Kids are bound to fail at things, but our scholastic culture leads those kids to believe that their failure is a sign that they are not smart enough for school. They learned at a young age that failure is not an option, and if they cannot get themselves out of a rut, they can ultimately become disinterested in school altogether. We need to encourage a culture where failure is acceptable because otherwise we will not be prepared for it when it will inevitably occur.

We’ve created a culture of comparison where students must not only pass their classes, but do so with flying colors. They face expectations from their peers, parents, teachers, and just about everyone else. This doesn’t prepare people for college and the real world. We aren’t teaching kids what it’s like to fail, and that’s a really important experience to go through. Think about how some college denials affect kids who’ve never experienced failure before. At least 25% of Harvard applicants with a 2400 SAT get rejected, and that was in 2007. The numbers of rejected 2400s have gone up drastically since then. This shows more than anything that the real world takes a dynamic, multi-dimensional approach in evaluating the capabilities and performances of students. Kids are not going to be able to cope with this sort of rejection because our culture teaches instills unhealthy values.

In this culture of comparison, we are punishing kids for failing when failing is how you learn. This is related to many things I’ve heard about innovation recently.

To foster an atmosphere conducive to innovation (which people are going crazy about these days), we should be encouraging fast failures. How quickly can you fail, pick yourself up, and fail again? If you keep on trying, one of those failures just might bring success. It is in our continued failures that we learn about ourselves and the world around us, why we failed and what we can do to prevent it from occurring again.

The other day I heard of a journalist who hung up every rejection letter he’d received from the companies he applied to. He used that wall as motivation and, because he never lost sight of his dream, eventually found employment.

I’m not sure how to tackle this problem—eliminating standardized testing and weighting students’ improvement over their numerical grades seems like a good start. I think an amazing way for students to learn would revolve around a lenient curriculum the students create for themselves. This way, they’re passionate about the material they’re learning and they wouldn’t have to worry about “performing to the grade;” they could express themselves and find out what they truly want to do.

Even if that idea is utopian, one thing’s for sure: students will not be prepared for their lives if they are bred in our unhealthy culture of comparison.