What's the Trouble?

This was a really great story though I was a little frightened at times. But I do understand the problem that this article poses: we all make judgements based on our experiences and conditioned biases. When I took intro psychology, we learned about this phenomenon. People unconsciously make judgements about people based on attractiveness, gender and race. I remember seeing Dateline or 20/20 do a study on this same phenomenon. They sent two women, one with a blond wig and the other with her natural brown hair, to collect donation door-to-door. The blond girl got more donations.

People judge others on first impressions and these first impressions are tough to overcome do matter what the previous behavior is. I know my neighbor has for years refused to convert their home heating to gas, as the rest of the street has, because as a child she was burned by the stove. This relates to the evidence about the businessman who won't make a business deal based on past failures rather than the data that is presented to him.

I think the important lesson from this article is to have other people voice their opinions. In two of the cases, serious errors were saved because another person, who was not as conditioned as the first doctor, made a different diagnoses. For our purposes, to establish if something is true, we could have multiple people check sources. This reduces the chances that conditioned responses will influence our decision making.