Create 2024-09-08-seeing-others-in-data-but-not-ourselves.md

posts/2024-09-08-seeing-others-in-data-but-not-ourselves.md

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+# Seeing Others in Data, But Not Ourselves
+
+Stanford psychologist Emily Pronin and her colleagues came up with an interesting study in human behavior.
+
+Subjects were given incomplete words and asked to complete them with the first word that came to mind.
+
+For example, you’re given the fragments `B__T` and `CHE__` and you write `BOOT` and `CHESS`.
+
+Afterwards, subjects were asked to explain what they thought their responses revealed about themselves: their interests, motivations, and character.
+
+Then they were shown responses by other participants and asked the same question: what do these answers reveal about this person?
+
+What happened is fascinating and simultaneously not surprising. Here’s author Kathryn Schulz’s summary:[^1]
+
+> the same person who characterized her own choice of words as "happenstance" and felt that they revealed nothing about her inferred the following from another person's choices: ”I think this girl is on her period ... I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship.”
+
+People saw their own word choices as mere happenstance, while the word choices of others served as a kind of mirror reflecting the inner-most self of others.
+
+Looking at their own word choices, one participant said:
+
+> I don't agree with these word-stem completions as a measure of my personality.
+
+But looking at someone else’s, they surmised[^2]:
+
+> I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.
+
+I think this is a fascinating study of a trait that, to be quite honest, I know operates in my own mind.
+
+We believe other people can be known from the outside based on their words and deeds. However, we believe we can only be known from the inside — that’s how we know ourselves — and our words and deeds are not a fully accurate representation of who we are.
+
+I wonder how much this phenomenon operates in the software industry as we pour over troves of user data looking for patterns that can lead us to generalized statements about behavior — statements we would make about _others_ based on their outward behavior (as measured by data), but knowing inwardly we would never conclude the same thing about ourselves. 
+
+In other words: we believe data is a reflection of others, but not ourselves.
+
+For example:
+
+- _Seeing others:_ “They clicked on that banner ad, they must be interested in buying the product!”
+- _Seeing ourselves:_ “lol, look at this thing! Who would ever buy this? I gotta click to see how ridiculous it is…”
+
+Or:
+
+- _Seeing others:_ “When prompted to leave a review, they clicked 1 star, so they must not like our product!”
+- _Seeing ourselves:_ “I was too busy to leave a review when that thing popped up, so I just clicked 1 star because I couldn’t give a real assessment in good conscience and needed to get on with what I was doing.”
+
+Or:
+
+- _Seeing others:_ “They dismissed the banner offering them 50% off. They don’t like our sale!”
+- _Seeing ourselves:_ “This random banner popped up while I was simultaneously clicking somewhere else and it immediately disappeared, so I never actually read what it said.”
+
+I’m probably wandering too deep into the intersection of human psychology and science, so I’ll stop here. 
+
+But the general idea, as pointed out in _Being Wrong_, still stands: each of us live with our own intricate, internal reality. Our moods, emotions, and thoughts fluctuate in a complex way we ourselves don’t even understand. It’s easy to feel no one can draw conclusions about _our_ true nature without access to this inner world. But do we extend the same courtesy to others?
+
+Neither you nor I can be truly known by the data we leave behind.
+
+[^1]: This story comes from Kathryn Schulz’s book _Being Wrong_ which [I’ve been reading](https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/hedge-words-and-imaginative-thinking/) (shout out to [Mandy](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/toward-inquiry) for the recommendation).
+[^2]: Want to read how funny some of these contrasting characterizations are? [Check out my photo from the page in the book.](https://cdn.jim-nielsen.com/blog/2024/being-wrong-data.jpeg)