In 1947 Bruner J. S. and Goodman C. C. two of the pioneers of cognitive psychology asked a group of children to estimate the size of US coins from their memory. What they found out was that poor children overestimated the coin size more than rich children did.
So they assumed that perception has both objective and subjective elements: a person’s interpretation of a “reality” is shaped not only by the nature of the “reality” itself but also by the perceiver’s expectations, needs and desires: the so-called confirmation bias.
When we act through our biases, we copy our long-ago conclusions and paste them in the current situation without realising that what we are doing is to look for evidence to support our findings rather than evidence to invalidate them. Instead of listening, we are just consolidating our pre-existing deductions, and if you are not listening, you are not entirely IN the conversation with all the ensuing consequences.
