Patterns, Patterns Everywhere and not a Stop to Think

The street is crowded and all sorts of people are walking toward you. That man looks dangerous, so you keep a watchful eye on him. The woman over there is clearly in a bad mood, which is a shame because she looks like a nice person. Maybe she's in the middle of a relationship that's ending? Those two girls walking together are such good friends that they've even started to look alike. That kid's gonna have to marry rich because he's not getting a job any time soon (not until he loses the skateboard at least). That guy's way too busy for his own good; slow down man, try smelling the roses...

All that in the blink of an eye.

We are walking, talking pattern-matching machines. Our brains instantly assess and categorize who and what we see - instinctively looking for threats, opportunities, and so forth. All part of our survival programming.

Our senses sense and our brains make sense of what's sensed by looking through our storage banks, file-after-file, for similar patterns that can be quickly translated into meaning. We do it when we read. We do it when we watch movies and listen to music and eat. And we do it when we're strolling down the street looking at complete strangers and making instant judgements about them.

Nothing new or particularly insightful here, except that we tend not to pay attention to this particular aspect of our human experience. We just trust the processing we do and go about our days blinded to the impact it might be having on our moment-to-moment encounters with the world.

As we get older and experience more and more things (and books and movies and people) our storage banks become richer, the patterns become more firmly associated with meaning, and we become more and more trusting of and governed by the "wisdom" we've accumulated.

That's why we become so frustrated with our kids when they don't trust us and when they don't listen to us and when they challenge us and act as if they know and we don't. We expect that we can do the pattern-matching for them (don't date that loser, don't trust that "friend", don't hang out in that neighbourhood, ...) and they will implicitly have the faith in our experiences that we do.

And, of course, the frustration goes in the other direction as well: How would you know? You've never even met him! Things have changed since your were a kid. (Even more frustrating when your parent turns out to be right so often).

But here's what's wrong with the pattern-matching: We're programmed to do it fast. Survival often requires immediate decisions, after all. So our brain takes short cuts, filtering out the minutiae and paying attention to a finite set of cues to which we've ascribed meaning (...that growling sound reminds me of the time that a sabre tooth tiger ate Jimmy).

When it comes to people passing us on the street, our assessments come down to things like the cast of the eyes, the slope of the eyebrows, the way the hair is worn, the posture, the clothes, and of course the accompanying equipment (skateboard, designer purse, knock-off purse, abacus in the pocket, and so on). Furthermore, our brains are doing these assessments based on stimuli provided via imperfect sensory devices (sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations all filtered through input/output equipment that is limited by design) and a relatively small sample-size of experiences (our own and others' with which we have been programmed).

We're getting partial data, dismissing cues we don't recognize or pay attention to, and making instant judgements that we innately rely on. Of course, being the good people that we are, there's a layer of conscious judgement that overlays the more mechanical snap judgements and governs our responses so that we don't act on impulses in socially unacceptable ways (like running away from the mean-looking dude, or hugging the sad, but nice-looking woman.)

In the course of the work that I do, I meet many, many, many, many, many people from across North America (mainly), from different industries, different jobs, different hierarchical levels, different pay grades, different geographies, different demographics, and so on. Increasingly, I see patterns in people. I meet someone and find myself acting as if I know how they're going to sound and behave before we've even shaken hands. I'm actually reacting to the person of whom he/she has reminded me, but I'm often (suprisingly) bang-on accurate in the superficial pattern-match.

One of my psychology-student daughters tells me this is because we all reinforce the patterns we see, and society has made this new person in front of me just like the person I matched him to (he's big, so he's a jock, which means in a group he's treated this way, which means he responds that way, ...). I guess that means there are legitimate human archetypes that society develops and perpetuates and those are the patterns I'm picking up on. Which isn't a very good thing at all (even if it simplifies my job).

Pattern-matching fuels racism and ageism and sexism and other -isms. It makes us leap to conclusions about people and their actions based on what we've seen in the past. It drives us to shape people to meet our expectations. It blinds us to nuances about people and situations that are genuinely new but difficult to process in our pattern-matching heads. It makes us crotchety old people who think they know better than everyone else, especially as our senses decline and the only signals we can pick up on in our pattern-matching machines are the extreme ones. It's what and how we teach our kids about the world.

But...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana 

We need to remember past data points that may signal future dangers, or else we learn nothing from those experiences and should expect to see them repeat themselves time after time. That's wisdom.

And...

We need to recognize our own limitations as pattern-matching machines - let our survival instincts do their thing and save us from the occasional sabre-tooth, and then slow down and use our highly-evolved brains to consciously question our own assessments.

Just because our sensory equipment and pattern-matching processor has put us on alert to something or someone triggering a match, that's just a data point surfacing from a past experience. Wise to note it, and far wiser to then apply some real thought to what the trigger was, why it fired, what it matched, and all the many reasons why it's probably a false match. In that way, we don't act on and perpetuate the false signals as if they are reality.

That'll never be instantaneous, but how often is it a survival imperative to instantaneously judge a person, and when is it ever right?

----

P.S. Did your own personal pattern-matching processor catch a few words breaking the pattern of font usage throughout? Go back and re-read them in sequence, and you'll find a corollary to Santayana's famous quotation above.