Perception and Experience: How Our Brains Distort Reality

How much can you trust your own perception of reality? What role do your personal experiences play in shaping your beliefs and decisions?

In You Are Not So Smart, David McRaney reveals how our brains create a distorted view of reality based on available information and external influences. The relationship between perception and experience affects everything from our buying decisions to our deeply held beliefs.

Keep reading to discover why your brain takes these mental shortcuts and learn practical ways to make better decisions.

Perception and Experience

McRaney explains that our brains aren’t as reliable as we think because our perceptions of reality aren’t complete and objective—they’re skewed by available information and external influences.

McRaney explains that our perceptions of reality are largely determined by our experiences. We’re more likely to believe an anecdote if we have even one example that proves it, we’re more likely to doubt things we haven’t experienced, and we’re likely to make judgments based on comparisons. This connection between perception and experience can be seen in psychological phenomena such as the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut that helps us make quick but often inaccurate assessments based on the information most accessible to us, and the anchoring effect, our tendency to make judgments based on one specific reference. These biases developed as an evolutionary advantage—they allow us to make quick decisions that will keep us safe.

For example, someone tells you that people with dark hair tend to read more than others—you believe this because your mom has dark hair and loves to read. However, if your mom had blonde hair, you’d be likely to doubt this anecdote because it doesn’t fit with your experience. Further, imagine you want to buy a new perfume but its $100 price is out of your $50 budget; however, next week there’s a two-for-one sale—the cost of the perfume is still over your budget, but you perceive this is a cheap price because you’re getting more for the original price.

(Shortform note: Our reliance on heuristics is so prevalent that it permeates every part of life—not just obvious areas such as deciding whether to buy something or believe someone. Developers take our reliance on heuristics into account when designing web pages and apps. For example, they place the search bar at the top of the screen because that’s how we think a web page should be set up based on our experience so far. If the search bar is at the bottom, we’re more likely to struggle to find it and judge the website as faulty because it doesn’t match our experience of a “good” website.)

While you can’t help the fact that your perception is easily influenced by experience, McRaney says you can gain a more realistic understanding of reality and make more effective decisions by practicing critical thinking and keeping an open mind. Always consider what you don’t know, how you might be wrong, whether the information is coming from a reliable source, and whether it represents the whole picture.