. . . and going back to picking our own friends

By El Gato Malo - April 1, 2026

There is an old adage: If everyone you meet all day is an asshole, the problem is not the world.

There is a phenomenal amount of truth to that.

I suspect it breaks down into two key components that wind up reinforcing one another:

1. Confirmation bias: we see what we expect to see

2. Response bias: the responses of others to us key off of how we behave toward them

Confirmation/expectation bias is so strong that it needs to be consciously removed from science for the science to have any validity. It’s why clinical trials have to be double, even triple blinded. The patient cannot know if they got drug or or sham for fear of a 2 sided placebo effect. The researcher cannot know either because they will (even if inadvertently) communicate outcome expectations to the patient. they do not need to say a word, just expectation driving decision making, voice, and body cues does it.

Pollsters (at least the good ones) are always incredibly wary of this. There have been dozens of experiments where just the act of telling the pollster making calls to expect a 70% positive or a 70% negative response rate skews the results into alignment with expectation. Women who went into interviews thinking they were wearing facially disfiguring scar makeup (but who were not) reported discrimination against them for being disfigured. We see what we expect and find what we look for. it’s wired at a neurological level. There’s no fixing it, humans are just like that.

We also get back what we put out into the world. most human communication is non-verbal. confidence, posture, smell, movement, speech speed and tone, mirroring, you name it . . . it all drives perception of like/dislike, friend/foe, ingroup/outgroup. This is not some flaw, it’s massively adaptive. “Hey, does this approaching human seem like a friend who wants to share berries or an enemy that wants to stab me in the liver with a pointy stick” is one of the more acutely critical discernments in reproductive fitness. Get it wrong, your genes are no longer with us.

It’s easy to see how this forms feedback loops from base perception:

If I convince you that “people like x hate you” you’ll see people like x and expect hatred. your bearing and tone, your words and even your smell will convey this and the person like x who you encounter will perceive it, sense your apprehension and possible hostility, and will become likely to grow hostile themselves.

You will then detect this (even if . . .

[SNIP]