It’s Okay to Be Biased in Your Personal Life

“Oh, you dated a construction worker? Oh, that’s right! — I forgot that they existed!” One of my friends blurted this out one day, years ago as we were sipping afternoon tea in my Cambridge apartment, with my Harvard professor-roommate’s diplomas and various accolades scattered about like they were nothing.

We were talking about dating, and our individual prerequisites for wanting to get to know someone further. However, this could really be applied to any life situation — you’re reading a data science blog on Medium, I don’t need to explain the power of confirmation or selection [or any other kind of] bias to you. A quick recap though — selection bias occurs when one actively seeks out samples that aren’t random, which can often be confused with confirmation bias [which is simply the act of only listening to resources/people that agree with our views, and ignoring everything else even if it’s legitimate].

It’s totally fine to have selection bias in our everyday lives. As long as you own it. While it doesn’t make sense for a professional experiment, in our personal lives we choose whose energy we would like to surround ourselves with. That rare combination of being picky as hell and incredibly self-aware of what you seek, is a beautiful thing.

A popular classic dating trend is to play “hard-to-get”. For some reason, some people subscribe to the school of thought that “if this person is difficult to get a hold of/get a date with, it must mean that they are quality”.

Let’s just unpack that, because there’s a ton of wrong with that.

I’m not a dating coach or therapist, nor do I ever want to become one, so I’m going to skip entirely the whole “know your self worth” and “be a priority, not an option” bit there.

Instead, I’m going to focus on the rationale of those who **intentionally** play hard-to-get, whether in dating, friendships, job interviews, etc. It’s easy to get into the mindset of wanting to appear busier or more in-demand than you actually are [**and with professional marketing campaigns for products, scarcity is definitely a thing], but it doesn’t track here. You aren’t a product. You’re a real person.

Just because you decide to become, or appear to become, much busier, does not mean you will suddenly appear much more attractive to your next potential date, friend, employer, etc.

The truth is that those who are naturally attractive, people that others clamor to be around and are inspired by, tend to organically be busier and have more things happening in their lives. This isn’t causation, it’s just correlation.

Something like this is easy to spot when done in a textbook example ie “more crimes occur when ice cream is served, but wait, outside temperature might be a confounding variable!”; however, spotting these correlation fallacies are arguably even more important in everyday real life.

All this is to say — heightened awareness of the assumptions you are making, and the reasons why, is key to most social situations, more so than most people take time to reflect on.

What sorts of assumptions do you think have shaped some of your perspectives and experiences in life?

I encourage you to take a bias/assumption inventory and refresh it every once in a while.

This also goes the other way too — if one decides they are spending too much time with those who are too similar to them, they may decide to surround themselves with those drastically different from them. But where do we draw the line between pushing ourselves with those so, so different from us in important spectrums, and maintaining our natural instincts of being around those more similar to us? They’re both important.

Regardless of wherever you fall on that line, own it.

Example: I’m an outgoing person who tends to get along better with, and befriend, those who are also outgoing/outwardly expressive. Recently I’ve been actively making an effort to befriend new people who are on the more introverted end of the “introversion/ambiversion/extroversion” spectrum, in order to get out of my own bubble, and have really enjoyed getting to know some new perspectives. That being said, it’s made me wonder — what is it about those who are less outwardly expressive/talkative in social settings, that makes me tend away from them naturally?

I realized it was because of my inability to read them or get quicker feedback from them — both of which feed into my inability to have any sort of patience. That happens to be something I’m actively working on improving — patience in general — but if it wasn’t? I don’t know if I’d be as motivated to keep pursuing those friendships, given the personal hurdle involved, and the intensity with which fellow outgoing persons fuel me with and make me feel like my best self.

**Those who can get incredibly granular with their reasons within reasons for doing — or not doing — something, are better equipped to make more informed, everyday decisions. It’s kind of like taking shortcuts in a middle school math class — completely acceptable, but only if you understand all the steps you’re skipping.

Not everyone will agree with this, and unexpected connections are one of my favorite things — but you shouldn’t do something so out of character simply to collect a token on your bucket list just to say you did it, but rather because you genuinely want to explore what you might be missing out on.

My friend in the beginning of this article probably sounds like an awful person to some observers — who forgets construction workers exist? — but she wasn’t talking about forgetting about them as humans or insulting them, she was talking about forgetting about them existing in her intimate dating/close friendship/professional pool. And that’s okay.

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