Have you ever walked into your house and realized something was wrong when your spouse did not greet you happily with a smile? Were you able to know without asking what happened? Our minds are wired as pattern recognition machines so we can compare a fragment of the pattern to pull from memory the whole pattern and potentially deduce what caused our spouse to be unhappy.
We see the world around us in terms of patterns, comparing them to stored memories of past experiences. Just like these random dots in the picture. This mental process is not a conscious process, residing in our intuitive thinking. We see patterns in situations and sequences of events. It is how we know what to do when a crosswalk signal starts flashing. We can draw conclusions about the road ahead when a police car goes screaming by with its flashing lights and siren, followed shortly after by a fire truck and ambulance.
How good are we at forming conclusions based on the patterns we see? This intuitive process is unconscious and our minds are not naturally objective. We become captivated by the potential pattern and feel good about arriving at a conclusion. Upon reaching that conclusion, we are disinclined to consider alternatives. So if we fall victim to a few mistakes in our pattern recognition, then what happens?
One pitfall we can avoid is understanding that random events can be perceived as being nonrandom, while no evidence actually exists to support such a pattern. We see this every day where initial news reports of an event happen and immediately conclusions are drawn to explain it as part of a systemic pattern. New media makes it worse when they want or expect to see a particular pattern. Not only do they take the event as confirmation, but they edit out any features or information that doesn’t fit the desired or expected conclusion.
Let’s say you are walking down a sidewalk and you see a young boy trying to ring the doorbell of a house you are passing by. No matter how much he stretches and reaches on tip-toes, he cannot push the button. You call out, “Here, let me help you.” You happily bound up to the front door and push the button to ring the bell. The kid says, “Thanks, now we run away!” Without engaging in some critical thinking on complex issues, faulty pattern recognition can lead us to some embarrassing conclusions. What are you going to say to the old geezer that yanked open the door to angrily confront you pulling the doorbell prank on him for the third time that day?
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