CogBlog – A Cognitive Psychology Blog

I recently got into this Netflix original called 13 Reasons Why. It’s an adaptation of a book with the same name that was probably on your summer “to read” booklist in middle school. It tells a story of a high school girl named Hannah who commits suicide and releases a set of cassette tapes to the people who were “instrumental” to her death. I put instrumental in quotation marks because we don’t really know what happened and we all know that memory could be untrustworthy; but that’s for another blog (This link will take you to another blog that talks about Confabulation). The question is why is this relevant in a blog about cognitive psychology?

Hannah from 13 Reasons Why

Each episode details a character’s “contribution” to Hannah’s death. I found that a lot of the problems found in the story were ones of communication. Hannah thought that everyone in her school had easy access to her insecurities, fears, and feelings even though that’s probably not the case. This is similar to when a nervous performer onstage experiences stage fright and believes that everyone in the audience can notice their anxiety. This phenomenon is a cognitive bias called illusion of transparency. I would say that almost everyone has had this experience and as inherently social creatures we tend to let other people’s perceptions, whether they might be true or not, influence our behavior. Think back to a moment when you did or didn’t do something because you felt that people were watching and judging you. That moment was probably a result of illusion of transparency.

This could be you. People tend to feel more nervous than others perceive them to be.

By definition this phenomenon is when a person thinks that their internal states are more apparent to others even if that’s not actually the case (Gilovich, Savitsky, & Medvec, 1998). A study by Savitsky & Golovich (2003) looked at how this cognitive bias affected public speaking. More specifically, they looked at how speakers tend to overestimate how nervous they appear to be. They found exactly that, 67.75 % of the participants thought that they appeared more nervous than their partners. The researchers then looked further into the illusion and studied the relationship between knowing about the illusion of transparency, being metacognitive (thinking about your own thinking), and the alleviation of anxiety. They found that the speakers that knew of the illusion rated their speech more positively and thought that they were more relaxed before the speech and less nervous during, than ones in the other conditions. Observers also rated the speakers who knew about the cognitive bias to be more confident. These results reflect our tendency to overthink situations when we are being vulnerable like when speaking publicly. This bias unfortunately gives us unnecessary stress. The researchers, however, gave us a clue on how to combat that. I personally don’t think that it’s easy to stop thinking about what other people think of us. However, if we thought about how our own perceptions of how other people think of us are most likely skewed and biased, our nervousness could decrease and other people might also find us more relaxed and confident. Metacognition could be the key to living a stress-free/low stress life. If only high school students like Hannah knew of this bias, then maybe things would have not gotten out of hand.

From looking at this bias in terms of public speaking, it seems like anxiety and the illusion of transparency have a special relationship. When an individual’s expectations about themselves don’t match up with other people’s, there is a cognitive dissonance that arises that I contend is probably not healthy for that person. This happens in 13 Reasons Why where a lot of the characters seem to care so much about how other students might perceive them. They go to great lengths to make sure that their reputation is not tainted. The show portrays high school students as individuals that are self-conscious and hyper aware of what is happening around them. A study by Brown & Stopa (2007) actually used self-awareness as a measure of the cognitive bias. They looked at the relationship between how anxious the participant was and how likely the same participant would report experiencing the illusion of transparency. They manipulated the participants’ anxiety by telling one of the groups that professionals will be checking their test results on a memory test (high anxiety level) while the other group’s results will only be seen by the experimenter (lower anxiety).  Both groups were overtly video taped during the process. The researchers

Metacognition helps decrease anxiety felt when experiencing the Illusion of Transparency

found that across the two anxiety conditions, participants reported experiencing the illusion of transparency at very similar rates. This meant that someone’s level of anxiety does not affect how much you feel the cognitive bias. You essentially do not have not have to be in a stressful situation to feel like everyone can read or see through you. This is reassuring! It means that it is normal to feel this way and everyone around us probably feels the same. I think a lot of people think that they’re alone in feeling like their every decision is being judged by everyone around them. I think it is our responsibility, as people who now know that it is a normal phenomenon, to help others understand that they are not alone. Personally, whenever I feel like I am being judged or that I was in a situation where I “wore my heart on my sleeve”, I always tend to replay those moments in my head afterwards. I always feel like it is such a personal experience and that no one really understands how I feel. I am happier to know that that’s possibly not the case.

It also seems as though those instances are very salient parts of my memory. In fact, some researchers explained that the illusion of transparency could be explained in terms of memory. A study by Golovich, Savistky, et. Medvec (1998) described the bias as a “curse of knowledge”. They meant that people who experience this illusion tend to have a hard time making correct judgments of how others would react to a similar stimulus. This is because all their decisions are based or filtered through their personal experiences. People then tend to assume that others have had the same experiences as they’ve had . This supports the idea that this cognitive bias is based on memory. When making decisions or appraisals, like thinking about how other people might perceive our behavior, we use prior experiences and information that have been encoded in out long term memory store. It our way of filtering that we information to decide the most plausible outcome given the circumstances of our situation. A study by Anderson & Pichert (1978) explains this phenomenon. Participants were either given the role of a robber or a house buyer. Then they were asked to read a story about a house. After a few minutes of buffer time they were asked to do a free-recall of details about the story. The researchers found that the participants recalled details about the story based on the role given to them. Or more likely, participants recalled events based on what they thought their given roles would recall. The results reflect the fact that people tend to recall details based on their past experiences. The participants were primed to think like their roles when they were given them in the beginning of the experiment. So it would not be surprising if high school students, who were bullied, process information based on their negative experiences. This mindset was probably what caused Hannah and the other people in the show to feel these negative emotions. There are definitely a lot more factors to suicide than this blog is talking about. I know that I would not be able to conceptualize such a subjective experience for everyone, but I think this blog is a good start. Thinking about how priming can powerfully affect people’s memories and knowing that the illusion of transparency could be explained as a memory induced bias, we now have a task at hand.

People remember and make decisions based on our experiences and the primed roles around us.

Unfortunately, this bias seems more negative than positive, especially in the context of this show. When we experience it we tend to have a self-focused view of the world and go through unnecessary anxiety thinking about how others might perceive us. Our lives are all aggregates of our experiences and these experiences affect our decisions, behavior, and even what we remember. Because this bias is such a selfish experience, in that in essence it’s you having a hard time placing yourself in someone else’s shoes, it is never easy to know when someone is feeling judged or vulnerable around us. I know that it’s too late for Hannah now. No one really reached out to make sure she’s okay and she never really let people in because of her fear of being judged. She did not know that it was normal to feel that everyone had access to her deepest emotions. She also did not know that her negative experiences, being bullied, could subconsciously place her into a cycle of negative thoughts and decisions. Most importantly, no one around her recognized just how severe her anxiety was to her. The first study showed that people tend to rate their own nervousness much higher than other people’s around them. Who are we to say that the anxiety others feel is not real for them. I personally thought that I was good at reading people and being “empathetic”. It is a shame that we are less likely to notice other people’s negative feelings as easily as we think we do. Maybe we should take it upon ourselves to be more sensitive and aware of others around us. We never really know who is having a bad day. So I challenge you to go up to a random person and greet them with a smile. A smile might not do anything for them and they might find you weird, but for that one person who was having a rough time, a quick smile could make their day.

After reading other blogs I found similar cognitive biases that could help you understand my cognitive bias more and apply it to more situations that you might face. 

The Fat Lady is Singing, but Nobody is Listening: The Spotlight Effect

What Do High School Musical and the 2016 Election Have in Common? Status Quo Bias.

References

Anderson, R. C., & Pichert, J. W. (1978). Recall of previously unrecallable information following a shift in perspective. Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior, 17(1), 1-12. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(78)90485-1

Brown, M. A., & Stopa, L. (2007). The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency in social anxiety. Journal of Anxiety Disorders,21(6), 804-819. doi:10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.11.006

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,75(2), 332-346. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.75.2.332

Heald, S. L., & Nusbaum, H. C. (2014). Speech perception as an active cognitive process. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience,8. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2014.00035

Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,39(6), 618-625. doi:10.1016/s0022-1031(03)00056-8