What We Tell Ourselves Creates Our Reality
The unconscious mental processes that lock in our reality
Welcome to the Gazebo! Grab a cup of coffee and join me for some tips to help you succeed at the intersection of management, communication, and technology.
This Week’s Summary:
This week continues the topic of creating future realities.
Visualization is a powerful tool for achieving our goals.
Visualization can work for us or against us.
Priming, reciprocal priming, and confirmation bias reinforce each other to create our perceived reality.
Understanding this powerful cycle is the first step toward catching it when it is working against us.
The wisdom of “Don’t Let the Old Man In.”
Last week I introduced the idea that what we visualize today through reading books or watching movies creates an image in our minds that may set our expectations for tomorrow. This issue becomes particularly problematic if we believe that today’s dystopian movies and books, such as The Hunger Games or The Walking Dead can affect the minds of the young people who will become the leaders of tomorrow. What if watching these movies creates a belief, or even worse an expectation, in their minds that tomorrow will be dystopian, just as reflected in the movies? If you believe that something you visualize is more likely to happen, then this prospect should give you strong reason for concern.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
There are some who believe that visualization taps into a greater force that helps to manifest our goals around us. This may be true but I don’t know how to prove or disprove it. Instead, I tend to look at the success of visualization as being derived from the power of focus. Focus helps us to recognize and seize upon opportunities that, without focus, may have passed us by. Have you ever noticed that when you buy a new car you tend to see the same car all over the place? It is not that everyone went out and bought the same car last night? The cars were already there. Your focus is now tuned (primed) to see those cars based on your new purchase where yesterday you would have passed them by without a second thought.
I believe that business opportunities are similar. When we are clear on our objectives, we are more likely to work towards those goals, and to recognize when coincident opportunities appear that can aid us in achieving our goals.
We see what our awareness allows us to see.
Visualization may be a form of priming, and for over 40 years I have been using this positive aspect of priming without knowing it. You may recall from my December 11, 2023 and January 8, 2024 posts that priming is a mental characteristic whereby a previous exposure to something can not only unconsciously influence how we act but also shape our interpretation of what happens afterward. By consciously creating a detailed image in my mind of what I intended to accomplish, I primed my unconscious to have me move and act in ways that made me more likely to succeed.
Unbeknownst to me, the ideomotor effect may have helped in all of this as well. Daniel Kahneman talked about the ideomotor effect in his Thinking Fast and Slow book. In it, he presented a study in which one group of college students were exposed to words such as Florida, forgetful, bald, gray, and wrinkled (which are easily associated with the elderly) and then timed how long it took for them to perform a subsequent task like walking down the hall. Another control group was not exposed to these words. The students who were exposed to the words showed a significant (a statistical term for not due to chance) tendency to perform the task more slowly when compared to the control group. I found this remarkable as did Kahneman when he wrote, “All this happens without any awareness. … The idea of old age had not come to their conscious awareness, but their actions had changed nevertheless.”
Now, let’s close the circle by looking at what Kahneman calls reciprocal priming. If we assume that someone had a priming idea related to old age and subsequently acted old due to the ideomotor effect, then the original thought of old age will be reinforced by their actions. To state it another way, if we think we are a certain way, then we are more likely to act that way, and if we act a certain way, we are more likely to believe we are that way. Oh boy. As I get older, I wrestle with this one all time.
I am starting to believe that Clint Eastwood and Toby Keith were right. “Don’t Let the Old Man In.” Once you let him in, priming and reciprocal priming can make you an “old man” way before your time. The years of mileage on my body will handle the ideomotor effect on its own. Sigh.
Image created by Ed Paulson using Copilot in Windows.
Moving back to creating our future, my guess is that you probably see where I am going with all of this. If someone reads books and watches movies about a dystopian future and there isn’t any counterbalance, they may start to believe it can become reality. This realization may prompt them to act more in their own self-interest to protect themselves from that future. As they act more selfishly, they are more likely to believe that a dystopian future is coming, and the self-reinforcing circle closes. Over time this can become a self fulfilling prophecy where we all lose.
If we add confirmation bias to this process the cycle grows stronger. Confirmation bias is a mental process whereby we easily believe information that we are already primed to believe and tend to reject things that don’t comply with our beliefs. For more details on confirmation bias and communication filters, check out my October 9, 2023 post.
When you put these pieces together it becomes a little frightening, and we may be watching this cycle play out in our daily lives. As people expose themselves to a set of ideas, they start to act in accordance with those ideas. The more they act in accordance with those ideas, the more they believe them to be true. The more they believe their ideas to be true, the more likely they are to only accept information that confirms their viewpoint and reject information to the contrary. Sound familiar?
This cycle may explain why so many past business leaders have ignored the marketplace signs around them that were screaming for change and instead doubled down on what they had done previously. Instead of adapting to a changing environment, they maintained their current path and may have even dismissed those who appeared non-supportive of doubling down on the status quo. Some say that a definition of insanity is doing the same thing that didn’t work before, expecting a different result. The more I understand this cycle, the less I think of it as insanity, and the more I think it may be the negative result of lack of awareness about these unconscious aspects of our mental processes.
This is a long way of saying that I think Kathryn Murdoch is onto something when she expresses worry about the amount of dystopia our children are seeing in movies and books. There are benefits to be derived from looking for ways to expose our children, the leaders of tomorrow, to non-dystopian future information. It is important to do this before a dystopian self-reinforcing mental cycle takes ahold of their thinking.
This brings me back to my questions from last week.
1. Can you think of any movies that project a positive view of the future?
2. What type of negative and positive exposure are you (and your children) seeing related to what the future will look like?
3. How do we balance the fun of watching a great dystopia movie with the need to create a more positive image of future possibilities?
4. Is this “much ado about nothing” as Shakespeare would say? Do you perceive that this is a problem, like Kathryn Murdoch, or not?
5. What are some of the things that you are already doing, or could be doing, to leave the world better than you found it?
I value your thoughts and hope you will tell us what you think about all of this.
Have a great week and thanks for stopping by! ☮
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Excellent, thought-provoking post, Ed. The conspicuous absence of critical thinking adds to the problems you discuss. It appears that the masses have become accustomed to learning "what to think" rather than "how to think." Ironically, at the same time, there is a diminished understanding of the correlation between cause and effect. The entertainment industry is targeted at shaping our culture rather than reflecting it. This holds true whether we are examining the dystopian movies that young people are watching or the propaganda pushed by several mainstream news broadcasts.
On average, we could use a lot more discretion in what we expose our minds to. The subconscious mind retains everything that we've ever seen, heard, or experienced, and it ALL becomes part of our individual reality.