Snap Judgments: A Look into the Subconscious Mind Essay examples

In this video, Mark discusses the interaction between our ‘primitive brain’ and our ‘neo-cortex’, explaining how the two work together to form opinions of other people. How does Mark’s explanation of this interaction between our primitive brain and neo-cortex help us to understand the following quotation from our course textbook? “Changing a buyer’s attitudes and beliefs is the most difficult challenge a salesperson faces.”

In the discourses of everyday human interaction, messages are crafted, communicated, received, and responded to. Social Judgement Theory argues that how the recipient of a message perceives and interprets a message, involves a process of judgment and effect that is based on the recipient’s ego (attitude) and anchoring position (opinion) about the topic. This process is key to the resulting assimilation, rejection, or persuasion of that message. Where does this theory come from and how does it work? This paper will explore how Social Judgement Theory was developed and is described, along with providing an evaluation and example of the theory in practice.

Before reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink I knew that we judged other individuals around us based off of personal criticism. It has become an adapted instinct of our lives that we may not even be aware of, but we do it all the time. I used to think that we judged people because of the way our mind reacts in an instant second of meeting somebody new. However, after reading this book I learned that our reactions are not only quick based on instinct, but based on personal experience in something that has already existed in our lives.

Snap judgments have been around forever. Whether or not you are aware, millions of thoughts go through your head when you lay your eyes on something for the first time. These small judgments seem unimportant at first, but what if “…our snap judgments could be educated and controlled” (Gladwell 15)?

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the best selling book Tipping Point, wrote Blink. Before being a staff writer for The New Yorker, he was a business and science reporter for the Washington Post. The connection between the cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology research will change the way you understand every decision you make. The book is about how we sum up all the data that is before us and in a split second make an informed decision-in the blink of an eye. It explains how we think without thinking and how we make choices that we can’t explain. At the beginning of the book Gladwell sets out three purposes of this book. Blink is a book that explains how we make decisions in everyday life, first impressions when meeting someone new or have to make decisions under stress.

“The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control.”

In The Invisible Gorilla, authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate how our intuition can falsely lead us to fallacy. The ability to understand surroundings immediately without conscious reasoning permits misinterpretations, false judgements, and unclearness without us even realizing. Through experiments done in psychology, Chabris and Simons reveal much more about how we actually see our world compared to how we think we see it. As so many of us believe against, it is exceptionally true that we do not know how our minds work and why we behave the way we do. Our minds actually fool us and get us to believe misconceptions as being the truth. The Invisible Gorilla focuses on the six everyday “illusions” people undergo that affect

Carl Gustav Jung was a famous Swiss psychiatrist that once simply said: “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge”. To clarify, we as humans have this constant need to know everything about everything; to understand something is to think in every aspect; who, what, when, when, where, and why. Consequently, people judge because making assumptions about who an individual is, is way more efficient than actually getting to know the person. It is said to never judge a book by its cover, but we often sway from that idea to gain any type of information. Like essays “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Dumpster Diving” by Lars Eighner, this idea is deflected. In both essays and through personal experience, it is evident that everyone is judged by the way we speak, act, and look thus affecting how we are approached.

When first seeing an individual I take into account their physical appearance to make inferences on where they are from, what race they are, what their religion might be, simply so I can try and define who they are for myself. It is human nature to make snap judgments such as these. Thus, everyone is bias, whether they like to believe so or not and whether it is a good thing or not, I do not believe we can live without these snap judgments. People make assumptions based on past experiences and personal encounters, these facts that we have gathered for ourselves are then used to make what we hope to be other facts. However many times the preconceived idea we carry out are linked to stereotypes and what we perceive as harmless thinking is really

The human brain is a powerful and complex system that controls every individual’s actions. In Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, the author, Steven Johnson discusses the brain’s role in everyday life. By integrating experiments and personal experiences with the neuroscience of everyday life, Stephen Johnson gives the reader a new understanding of the brain. The book begins with insight into the mind reading abilities humans possess. Johnson explains that humans have an instinctual ability to read the emotions of other people.

After reading the book, Think by Michael R. Legault I have a rather few ideas that I would like to spurt out about the particular argument Legault made in his book. So here are the next few things that you will be reading about as you continue reading my analysis. The first topic I am going to discuss is his connection he made to Blink within the book; secondly I want to discuss how your blink decisions can still be used for good and how our ideas actually relate in a sort of way. Then the last thing that I am going to touch base on is actually the support for Legault’s ideas and reasoning with his idea of thinking.

The human mind is a very fascinating subject. This is the place where tons of ideas are created, translated and then put into action. It is hard to fully understand it, as we still haven’t, yet it is a compelling subject to observe. We think about so much stuff and then transform those thoughts into an action and do so much without a second thought. It feels as though our minds are going a million miles per hour and we are always on our toes waiting for what is to come and expecting everything. We like to believe that we are aware of our surroundings and that we know everything that is going on. However according to many tests that are conducted, we are proving to be very clueless and unobservant to the things that surround us. Perhaps we are not clueless, instead maybe we are afraid to admit what we do see.

judgements, language and control our social behaviour is processed in the frontal lobe. Due to the

The Philosophical issue raised by the stimulus is human nature. Human nature is what specifically makes us all human. Every person on this planet contains a human nature, and while these versions or perceptions of it may be different, we all share this. Out of the many concepts of how the mind functions, and theories that prove our evolutionary traits, one of those concepts is irrationalism. Irrationalism is the theory that mankind derives their concepts through experience and prior knowledge. Therefore we can only perceive the world from our own interests solely from our own perceptions. For instance the way that I gain knowledge is from seeing the world around me. If I see a cat, I learn that that object is a cat, and then if I see a dog, I learn that that animal is a dog, and therefore everything that we see and learn about, comes from experience in which our brain stores. Coinciding with those views, a concept of man is that we are irrational animals. For example, we only act on strictly off of our own interest, and have no self control when it comes to decision making. Irrationalism promotes that the mankind is subjective. On the contrary, rationalism, the more popular theory of the mind and our behaviors, promotes a different view. Rationalism promotes the belief that we can control our actions, and we base our actions and decisions off of the logical outcome. For instance, if I could eat a candy bar, or an apple. My mind is able to tell me that I should eat the apple,

Human behavior has been a mystery to scientists and psychologists for years. What causes humans to act the way they do? Is it learned by experience, or inherited from prior generations? The human brain is a complex machine driven by numerous intangibles that influence our thinking process directly and indirectly.