Have you seen someone jump to a conclusion and end up being totally wrong? This may be why it happens—and what we can do about it, explains glenngeher
In the processing of social information, people will often take partial information and develop complete narratives.We can understand someone being "railroaded" as someone who has been judged unfairly based on only partial information.show. After the mandatory initial scene with the victim dead on the floor, covered in blood, the detectives start to discuss motive. They quickly find that the victim's live-in boyfriend and the victim had been having major problems of late.
Why do we do this? Why do our minds fill in blanks based on partial information and, so often, jump to conclusions?How often in everyday life do people jump to conclusions in this way?Going all the way back to the 1940s, social psychologists have documented, in various ways, the fact that the human mind seems to be fully primed to make attributions about all kinds of outcomes .
When a colleague is late to a meeting, other colleagues will try to figure out if this tardiness is some idiosyncratic detail of the situation or, rather, if it is some character flaw of the tardy colleague. Given our natural tendencies toward creating coherent narratives in our minds, based on our strong tendencies to make attributions about our worlds, it is easy to fall into the trap of hearing a complaint from one party, filling in the blanks with any relevant information that you might have, and coming up with a judgment. One reason that this process is problematic is that once people come up with judgments, changing our minds tends to be famously difficult .
This leads to the idea of being"railroaded" which, as I see it, happens when some belief or perception about someone, even if based only on partial information, gains enough momentum that it becomes essentially unstoppable. Interestingly, someone who is being"railroaded" may well actually have a whole other side to the story that others don't know or don't even want to hear. The person being railroaded might, in fact, be largely in the right.
But, as explicated above, our tendencies to think like scientists in understanding our social world is often deeply flawed and even problematic. I would say that this issue is one of the core features of the human lived experience.
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