Snap judgements are your energy saver mode
It’s not all your fault. Your mind is designed to be stingy with originality. Your brain is a thrifty energy broker and is much more efficient with unconscious thought so it applies a mental filter to limit choices based on what is most familiar and what is compatible with your self-concept.
Our minds are a threat to ourselves and others. This pattern-driven process keeps you from your own creativity, persuades you to block other’s ideas, and perpetuates a world of injustice.
By looking at the how our senses work, scientists have discovered that:
- Unconsciously, your brain can process 11 million pieces of information per second.
- Consciously, you brain can only process 40 pieces of information per second.
Even though you are able to see issues as complex and multi-faceted, analyzing information on a micro level takes massive mental power. So your brain has trained itself to filter a complex situation through internal frameworks to reduce its options and make quicker decisions.
Your brain works hard at keeping your body running. Every second it is helping sense, analyze and share information across your different biological systems. Because it must work so hard directing this living network, it tries to make its cognitive job easier. It is an energy drainer and an energy miser at the same time.
You aren’t consciously curating the information that your brain uses to develop these frameworks or formulas. Things you see, hear, experience, learn–particularly from memories surrounding intense feelings–become part of the filter that new information needs to squeeze through.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Bishop Oldham
Familiarity is the one of the easiest tests: what you are more familiar with gets a check; what is unique may chill you. You don’t need to approve of what is familiar, you only need to have it logged.
Ego is another gatekeeper. Your ego holds who you are–or how you understand who you are. It is also known as a bridge between conscious and unconscious thought. Generally, you are drawn to perspectives and actions that are compatible with your self-concept, values, beliefs (also known as what is ego-syntonic).
How you gained your unconscious biases is a matter of biology and an unfair world. What you do to challenge them is up to you.