I suppose it all started earlier this evening when Wilson, Kevin and I were going over our horoscopes, Capricorn, Cancer, and Scorpio, respectively. Wilson looked each of us up and went down the list of typical qualities of people born during these specific periods during the year. For the majority of the list, we found that many of the qualities were some of our own, albeit not all of them. At this point I explained the whole idea of “confirmation bias” which basically refers to the human tendency to gravitate towards things that they themselves agree with. Later this evening I was thinking about how my favorite color is red, and how my preference for the color red may have been a significant driving force behind the formation of many of my other interests as well. Can we maybe infer that confirmation bias is a major driving force behind personality development as people's individual behavior is met with positive reinforcement in social situations, or as we'll discuss, with other things in the environment? It certainly seems to play a large role in personality development and social interaction, but what about the ability to actively (or maybe even choose not to) interact with the environment, which itself can influence personality development?
The one tie in that I found most compelling came to me as I was showering. I thought about how my favorite color is red, and as a result, as a child, I tended to gravitate towards things that were red or related to the color red in some way. For example, cinnamon is my favorite spice. Why cinnamon? Well while it may not actually be red (it’s actually brownish), it’s commonly presented in parallel to the color red because cinnamon, being a spice, tends to taste hot, and the color which we most commonly associate with heat is red. Since I liked red so much, I in turn learned (strong emphasis on the use of the word “learned” here) to enjoy cinnamon, and anything even remotely related to it. Cinnabon is one of my favorite foods ever. You know that sweet dark cinnamon-sugar resin that gets left behind at the bottom of the Cinnabon container? When I was young, I loved that taste so much that I attempted to replicate it by putting some water into a small glass and adding a bunch of cinnamon (obviously it didn’t quite turn out as well as I had hoped). Additionally, I thoroughly enjoy Hot Tamales, my favorite candy. I was also quite fond of Cinnamon Tic-Tac when I was a kid, not to mention Big Red cinnamon gum (until I began to realize that it tended to kill my taste buds and cause significant xerostomia (the scientific term for dry mouth).
More generally, I can further imagine that my love for the color red influenced my attraction to apples (the fruit, but I’ve got an cute little pun for you guys later in this paragraph), which in turn led me to enjoy anything even remotely associated with apples. Candy apples, caramel apples, apple juice, apple sauce (mmm), apple cider, and here’s a nice one: apple pie, which contains apples AND cinnamon. Double win for me. And alright, here comes the joke I was thinking about (now that I think about it it just seems even more silly), Apple computers. lol. Some other fruits that I like are cherries, strawberries, and a couple of other ones that I can’t come up with at the moment. On another note, my phone is also red. My TIZ artist series shirt is a black Zeeb on a red shirt.
In short, since I liked the color red so much as a kid, I unknowingly began to associate my attraction to red with red objects, and objects associated with red. Is it possible that if I decided to pick some other color, like blue or orange, as my favorite color, I wouldn’t be nearly as interested in red things, like cinnamon, apples, and Apple computers? Then again, the fact that I’ve realized all of these micro-connections between my web on interests could be itself interpreted as a divulgence of my own natural tendency for confirmation bias…
You know one of my favorite things about writing is kind of forces me to really take a step back and really evaluate the ideas I’m trying to communicate, and in turn I learn a little bit more about myself, and get to streamline my thought processes as well as I rule out implausible ideas and theories. It's almost like AutoCross: you may not necessarily get the times you want, but you'll still learn a little something about how your car behaves in certain situations. Beautiful metaphor. Alright, I'm starting to digress a bit... Well for my readers, you may get a little entertainment out of reading some of my deep thought proposals as well, so it's a pretty good win-win situation when you think about it.
Feel free to add any comments or additional ideas. It's always nice to know that people read the things I write. Hopefully most of you aren't too intimidated by large blocks of text; I know I for one tend to be, that much I'll admit.
-nesqu!k
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