An Enquiry Concerning Human Psychology.

        We tend to reduce all the situational behavior of someone to our perception of them. We often try to create a narrative that explain the causal connection between a person outward behavior and his internal intentions, the causative affiliation. This is because they provide a coherence and a flow that we can read and interpret, rather than the messy and veneer randomness of our behavior. Why we love reading and writing, or at least we like them better than spontaneous talking, why ? Its because they represent our organized thoughts, and they are the most effective method of sharing knowledge that capable to surpass the barrier of spacetime since ancient history .We knows that scattered reasonings block our understanding, no body likes to not understand. Our yearn for understanding of the events around us force our mind into narrative fallacy. If someone is making a fuss over an accidental spill of coffee, we relate in to intolerance and bad-temper , but, perhaps he was just having a bad day and the coffee incident break his overbearing patience.

       When I was small, there was a lot I could not understand when I watch English movies. You know how complicated their conflict could be. When stumble with a confusion, I force myself into a narrative to give me a sense of clarity , most of the time, they divert from the original course of the story. I followed the fallacious narrative ( I didnt know it was wrong at that time) because it makes the story so much easier to understand. Without understanding, the movie will only be gibberish to me and a waste of 2 hours, so I forced connection between events in the movies to create an understanding, and that is an example of narrative fallacy.

       Often wonder why first impression are so important? It is actually an importance borne out of our flawed perception. Our first appearance of ourselves to someone new might well establish the lasting perception of ourselves for them. Take for example an employee who forgot to bring his urgent file to the meeting, his boss will immediately mark this bad circumstance as a consequent of his forgetfulness. This flawed perception leads to the same conclusion in subsequent incidents. Any other mistakes the employee made in the future will be linked to his first. From a forgetful person , he will be labelled as reckless, from reckless becomes unreliable, and in the end it takes a toll over all his frailities. Simple mistakes that often goes unnoticed and pardoned when somebody else do it, will now be something that is forever linked to his attitude. And this effect is called the halo effect. This effect can takes a variety of context, positive or negative, as long as they stands out above the other, everything else will be judge in central relation to them. 

        Ancient philosophy  describe that our reaction are not the response to an event, but rather to our interpretation of the event. This is why some can laugh at a joke, and others take umbrage. Everybody have a different neural connection that made them unique, even identical twins who shared exact dna constituents have far contrasting neural connection. That is why we cannot expect everyone to perceive our actions as sincere, one's man priest can be another's charlattan. Look at our democratic leaders,  they are continuously in a derisive fight, accusing one another as charlattan just to win public's support. Sometimes they stand on the notion that is spectacularly idiot in our perspective, but they seems to be very assuring in their arguments when asked of the stance.

       This also can be observed in the intellectual circles. A lot of intellectual luminaries have diversified opinions concerning just one issue. You think Einstein couldn't be wrong? He argued with Neil Bohr over the randomness of the quantum world, and that's when he quipped the now famous quote ," God doesn't roll a dice". But time had proven him wrong, the microworld is in fact dictates by indeterminism and probability, a place where reality breaks apart and our common sense looses its grip ; two particles can be in two state at the same time.

Why some can so ardently defend Israeli, while we here so blatantly despise Israel's violence ? Because our neural connection tells each of us a different story, this is called cognitive biases. Nobody escapes biases. All of us was nurtured with a certain beliefs that we readily, and innocently accept as general truth without any proper dose of skepticism . We approach the world with this preconceived mindset , and they form all of our judgements of the events occuring in our small milieu, when its needed, we extend the scenario to include global events. But of course this cognitive biases can be overcome by rational syllogism. That is why Socrates invented elenchus, an argumentative debate to eliminates as much individual biases as possible and to reach closer to the objective truth.

       But we are also a creature of habits and most of our daily interaction are founded on our idiosyncracy. For instance, look at the words you talk in a day, and where certain sentences are repeated over and over again. We repeat the same curse words when we are sad in those when we are angry. Its because we have idiosychronize our speech. When we are angry, a sequence of reaction emerge, we might shout, throw stuff and breaks fragile things, or our face will turn grumpy. Habits governed our daily experience. We have unconsciously adopt certain automatic response for our daily interaction, and it makes a lot of things easier for our brain, to reduce big task into fixed response. We might want to think that we are a rational being  driven by a conscious soul that are in control of every decision we made, but the truth is most of our daily action and conversation are reactionary, and predetermined by our previous encounter of that particular situation.

     Try to be more mindful to your daily activities and you will be surprised, you are controlled by your habits more than you think. The way you walk, the way you run, in what way you usually goes up the stairs ; run or walk or running and jumping two steps at a time ; switching through tv channels, exploding your knuckles, listen to music, and watch movies. All of these activities do not requires your critical faculty to examine them and decide, rather you have been activated by impulse to do them, and most of them are effortless. Activities that are subjected to our habits will be registered to our conscious mind as cognitive ease. Conversely you will experience cognitive strain when you engage yourself with unfamiliar robust activity, they demand increase attention and focus. Consequently, our eyes will dilate and our heartbeat will increase blood flow to the needed organs.

    We truly are exceptional beings. Our ability to create habits allows us to spend less time doing unimportant activities. If we are aware of every things our body and mind are processing, it will be sluggish and it will subsequently consumes unnecessary amount of time. Habits give us the opportunity to neglect certain task as it can be done unconsciously, while the conscious mind are focused at a more subtle task.