A few weeks ago, my partner put us on this fitness regime – I didn’t like it. Apart from the screaming and whooping that seemed to be involved in getting fit (judging by those on the video, who seemed to be living in a parallel, masochistic, universe), what I particularly didn’t like was being measured “in order to see our progress”.
And what I really, really didn’t like was being told that I my waist is four inches bigger than the jeans I’ve been happily buying (and comfortably wearing) for the last two years. It seems our clothes retailers might be telling a few ‘porkies’ when it comes to sizing us.
I remember a few years ago, before I got fitter (without the apparent calorific-burning qualities of a good whoop) a day when I went to the shops and couldn’t fit into 34” jeans for the first time. I’m sure that if I had tried the 36” jeans, I’d have discovered that they fit me perfectly. But, instead, I left the shop in disgust, appalled that their sizes were so, clearly WRONG!
This reminds me of a brilliant Horizon programme I watched earlier in the year about the way in which we make decisions. The bit that was really interesting to me was the way they demonstrated confirmation bias, which is the tendency to seek out and favour information that fits our pre-existing view of the world.
I would love to pick up a pair of jeans from, say 20 years ago and compare their actual size to the jeans I buy today. Are they really the same size I wonder, or have those sneaky retailers been secretly adding inches to their clothes to fit my belief that I’ve not expanded? If anyone knows the answer to this, I’d love to know. (Or, perhaps I wouldn’t!)
Confirmation bias isn’t really a joking matter though. It plays a big role in people’s prejudices – it’s the stuff that stereotypes feed on and sadly, it even influences the news that gets reported: Tabloids actively report the stories that their audience wants to read – the ones that will confirm their existing beliefs and map of the world. And what would happen if they didn’t? Well, the audience would probably go somewhere else, just as I went somewhere else for my jeans all those years ago.
Sometimes we just don’t want to learn that what we believe is wrong; it’s hard because it changes us, and we’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, resistant to change. This inbuilt resistance to learning is one of the challenges we face as learning and development professionals and one of the reasons I’m so passionate about making learning experiential, and fun. When you tell people they are wrong, they resist that knowledge. When you engage people in a new experience that helps them discover for themselves that their beliefs are flawed, you encourage self-development and true learning. It’s up to us to create those safe opportunities for learners to reassess their certainties.