Expectations Shape our Reality

The claim that everyone is insane is based on the premise that no one sees reality as it is. Our perceptions are heavily filtered by our beliefs, assumptions, preconceptions, and expectations before we become aware of them.

Evolutionary psychologists have theorized that the brain evolved to make assumptions about the future based on what we have experienced in the past. This is an efficient use of our brain’s resources because it helps us focus our attention on what is important to our survival.

For example, an animal might be attacked at a waterhole. It would then form the assumption that waterholes are a place where there is an increased chance of danger/predators. So the animal stays alert every time it’s at the waterhole and expects predators.

In his best-seller Incognito, David Eagleman says expectations are vital to our ability to see. He included an illustration that looked to me as if it was just random blobs of light and dark. Eagleman said most people see it that way: without any expectation for what we should see, our brains don’t see anything. On the next page he gives a clue about the image, and once I knew what to expect, when I looked at it again I instantly saw it. Days later when I looked again the image jumped out at me as if it were obvious. The brain, Eagleman writes, is constantly engaged in the activity of comparing our expectation of what we should see with the information coming from our senses: “What all this tells us is that perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions.”

Many years ago a fascinating experiment demonstrated the influence of expectations on our perception of reality. The study built on the “halo effect,” a well-known cognitive bias: people who are attractive are judged to be more competent and have better personalities than those who are less attractive. Mark Snyder, the lead scientist, called the study an “attempt to demonstrate that stereotypes [another word for expectations] may create their own social reality.”

The researchers recruited male and female subjects, 51 of each gender, who were told the research was about the process by which people get to know one another. The experiment involved one-on-one phone conversations between a man and a woman. The males received biographical info and a photo of the female they would talk to, while the females received nothing. However, the photo was not of the actual woman; the researchers chose two categories of photos, either attractive or unattractive, and randomly assigned them to the female participants.

The couple had a ten-minute conversation about anything they wanted, and this conversation was recorded. Afterwards, both men and women completed questionnaires about their impressions of their partner.

The men who had a partner with an attractive photo were more likely to assess that woman as sociable, interesting, and fun, while those with an unattractive partner rated her as awkward, serious, and socially inept. What became clear to the researchers was that the men who believed they had an attractive partner were more cordial, interesting, and engaged during the conversation. The women picked up on this interest and were more dynamic in return.

Then the researchers edited the recorded conversations so that only the female part of the conversation remained. Other subjects listened to the edited recordings and rated the women’s personalities—based solely on the women’s half of the conversations.

What is truly amazing is that this second group of subjects rated the women in a way that aligned with the fake photos. In other words, the expectations of the original men created an objective reality that was so clear that unbiased listeners formed the same reality in their minds. The researchers concluded:

“What initially had been reality in the minds of the men became reality in the behavior of the women….being thought of as beautiful made the women actually think of themselves as beautiful and exhibit ‘beauty’ in their conversations.”

This may in fact explain the halo effect:

“[T]he physically attractive may actually come to behave in a friendly, likable, sociable manner, not because they necessarily possess these dispositions, but because the behavior of others elicits and maintains behaviors taken to be manifestations of such traits.”

Click here to read a short essay by Snyder, the lead researcher. He ends it with a question: “Might not other important and widespread social stereotypes—particularly those concerning sex, race, social class, and ethnicity—also channel social interaction in ways that create their own social reality?” [Mark Snyder, “When Belief Creates Reality: The Self-Fulfilling Impact of First Impressions on Social Interactions.”]

As I was working on this essay I happened to see a cartoon by Keith Knight, about the social realities created by the stereotypes white people have of blacks. The cartoon was inspired by an interview Knight had seen with actor Donald Glover (a black man). Glover said in an interview: “We were in the airport and I was waiting in line at the ATM and there was a guy in front of me getting money…I came up and he got nervous so I went to the side and waited for him to finish…I don’t think white people know how much effort in my day is put into making them feel comfortable.”

The good news is that by altering our expectations we can improve our lives. The placebo effect is well-known—when people think they’re taking a medicine even when they aren’t, they often report feeling better. They expect it to help and it does.

 According to Chris Berdik, author of Mind over Mind:

[P]lacebo effects in medicine are just one example of how our expectations can bend reality. For instance, brain scans reveal that expectations about a wine's quality (based on price or a critic's review) actually change the level of activity in the brain's reward centers when a person takes a sip. Highly-trained weight lifters can out-do their personal bests when they believe they've taken a performance booster. People who wear taller, better-looking avatars in virtual reality behave in ways that taller and better-looking people tend to act. For example, they approach better-looking potential dates and they are more aggressive in negotiations, both in the virtual world and after the headgear is removed. In lab and field experiments, people who stand in powerful poses (think Superman) for a minute or two, have similar hormonal changes to people who are given actual power and authority over another person, and they exhibit the same sorts of behavioral changes…

For instance, many people worry that they're likely to choke under pressure. They look to coaches and elaborate training techniques to overcome this tendency. Or they just worry and bite their nails before important presentations or competitions. But in one study, researchers told some track athletes that what they thought of as pre-race jitters actually improved performance, while telling another group that this sort of arousal was usually detrimental. The athletes performed accordingly when the pressure was on.

Creating reality through expectations is the basis of a lot of comedy and magic. A comedian will set the audience up to have an expectation, and the joke involves showing how wrong the audience’s expectation-induced reality is. This is called the “incongruity theory of comedy,” and a lot of philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, have subscribed to it. At the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy you can read some of these philosopher’s jokes:

In the Rhetoric (3, 2), a handbook for speakers, Aristotle says that one way for a speaker to get a laugh is to create an expectation in the audience and then violate it. As an example, he cites this line from a comedy, “And as he walked, beneath his feet were—chilblains [sores on the feet].”

Kant’s joke: The heir of a rich relative wished to arrange for an imposing funeral, but he lamented that he could not properly succeed; ‘for’ (said he) ‘the more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more cheerful they look!’

Schopenhauer tells of the prison guards who allowed a convict to play cards with them, but when they caught him cheating, they kicked him out. He comments, “They let themselves be led by the general conception, ‘Bad companions are turned out,’ and forget that he is also a prisoner, i. e., one whom they ought to hold fast.”

Groucho Marx was famous for puns, which are all about exploiting an audience’s expectations. There are hundreds to choose from, here’s a couple:

“I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.”

“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, ‘Damn, that was fun'.”