Preliminary analysis

Judging people is never easy. Yet, your brain often jumps to conclusions using half-data. A quick preliminary analysis using stereotypes and probability. 

This ability of our brain is not a bad thing. 

For instance, we were interviewing our country manager ( and ex-finance minister of the philippines) today. He was talking about his biggest take-away from Harvard Business school other than the network he developed - How to make decisions using partial information. It is an important skill to have because in the real world, our information is hardly going to be complete. We usually have information with varying degrees of accuracy, reliability and completeness. Yet we need to take a call with what you have! If we wait for the full information, the decision might become irrelevant. 

A popular example:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

False information - yet we understand. The brain sees, it spots patterns.. if there are holes, it fills it with patterns it already knows and tries to make sense of it. Sometimes this might be easy and sometimes hard. 

But the key point to note is that, in doing so, you face the risk that these fillings your brain does are wrong. Sometimes it does these fillings without us being consciously aware of it..  Ofcourse, it is less likely to make mistakes if has had more experience / patterns in its repository. But it can still go wrong. You cant know every pattern there is to know. Every now and then you are going to come against something new, and there is a good chance you will be wrong.

So, how can we expect our snapshot of a person (a very complex entity) in 5 minutes to be accurate? It months of interaction to even begin to understand a person.. there are so many variables and each person is unique. Unique DNA. Unique pattern. So, there is nothing for your brain to match against.. it just uses trends from people you have already met, and stereotypes that have been programmed into you plus knowledge you have gathered to fill in the missing pieces of a person when you meet them.

Now, this is good to get a feel of the person, but we frequently base key decisions on this rough picture our brain puts together. We judge a person, predict their behaviour, stereotype them, all based on this approximation. We use this as "knowledge" while it just a conjecture. So much so that it is often hard to change this "first impression" once created.. without significant effort. 

Maybe it is practically necessary in today's world. But it is good to be aware that it is so. That we are upgrading conjectures to knowledgebase. And using those conjectures to make even more conjectures.