Unconscious Assumptions Quotes

You cannot question an assumption you do not know you have made.

Assumptions are the things we don't know we're making.

Assumptions are what we don't know we are making

Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to assume that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies. It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

We leap to conclusions and remember those conclusions as fact. We react on our own prejudices but don't always recognize them as such.

We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience. Being aware of your mental models is key to being objective.

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

Man knows much more than he understands.

The hardest assumption to challenge is the one you don't even know you are making.

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis.

Without being aware of it, you take many things as being your identity: your body, your race, your beliefs, your thoughts.

Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

Human inertia makes the everyday environment, the furniture, as it were, appear to be a given.

Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open.

No matter how honest scientists think they are, they are still influenced by various unconscious assumptions that prevent them from attaining true objectivity. Expressed in a sentence, Fort 's principle goes something like this: People with a psychological need to believe in marvels are no more prejudiced and gullible than people with a psychological need not to believe in marvels.

There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

It's human nature to make the complex manageable and determine things that fit your conclusions. That's bias.

We are all captives of the picture in our head - our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles.

I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at.

We perceive through our senses a person, a situation or an event, and in an instant, we project our mental models - our fears, background and experiences - onto that perception. This often results in cognitive errors, which means we judge and respond incorrectly.