What Do You Mean?

When we say "Cognitive Accuracy", what do we mean?

Simply put, it refers to the relative difference between what we *suppose* will happen and what we actually observe. The smaller that difference, the more accurately we have evaluated events, and the less likely events will result in unexpected shocks.

For example, say it's Friday night and you don't have a date. You consider your possibilities. You could call the woman you went out with last week. Ask yourself: will she say yes? How do you decide whether to call or not?

Well, you could review your best features and skills and tell yourself that any woman would be lucky to spend time with you. You could recall the events of your last date with her--did she seem to enjoy herself? Did you? Did you part warmly?

Now, repeat that last set of questions and ask yourself whether you have *recalled* what happened accurately, or whether you have perhaps focused on favorable details and overlooked or "forgot" the negative moments. If you perhaps maybe did a bit of the latter, you are in good company, like, the whole human race.

Our brains have evolved to meet certain needs for survival--we base most of our decisions on two simple criteria--feels good, feels bad. To a large extent, our cultural upbringing largely defines for us which things we define as "good" and "bad", but we still have a basic bias towards things and actions that "feel good" and away from things and actions that "feel bad".

So what does this have to do with your dating decisions? Glad you asked.

You most probably grew up with certain cultural biases that deem mistakes as "bad". This can play out at least two ways. On one hand, when you recall last week's date, you might *automatically* overlook the things you might feel uncertain about, that you think might have been "mistakes"--did you laugh at the wrong moment, did you take her to the wrong restaurant, did you make the wrong move when you dropped her off? When you overlook these possible goofs, you feel a lot better about how the date went, right? This approach allows you to feel better about yourself despite your mistakes--in fact, you will tend to believe that you didn't really make any mistakes. If you discount your mistakes, or minimize them, you reduce the "feels bad" effect, which your brain *automatically* wants to do. However, you haven't really given yourself an accurate picture of what happened, have you?

On the other hand, when you recall last week's date, you might *automatically* overlook the things you might feel good about--sure you took her to a nice place, but it wasn't the *best* place, and yeah, she did seem interested in what you had to say about your work, but other people have more interesting jobs. And so on. In this scenario, your bias is still against what "feels bad", but paradoxically, it's your successes that you rate as potentially "bad". Psychologists generally view this as a fear of success, usually because you worry about being able to "keep it up" or that despite your best efforts, you "always" fail in the end. If you just assume you failed, you don't have to worry about the awful potential for it. But, if you overlook what you did right with this woman, you haven't really given yourself an accurate picture of what happened, have you?

Now imagine using either of these evaluations to decide whether to call her this week. In the first case, you might discover when you call that she really didn't enjoy your company and would rather stay home alone in the dark than go out with you again. What a shock! You didn't see THAT coming! You didn't think it went all that bad. In fact, you remember it being quite a fun time. What's her problem??

In the second case, you might simply decide not to call at all. You don't see any point in calling when you know the whole night must have disappointed her. But then suppose you see her a few days later, after not calling, and she makes it very clear that she would have liked to see you again, but some other guy called in the meantime. You missed out on a potentially great Friday night because you completely misread her experience of the last date.

Either way, what you *thought* would happen never did. In fact, what did happen didn't come close. Do you give up on dating because women are OBVIOUSLY impossible to understand? I hope not!

Consider this alternative. Imagine that you review that first date and say something like this to yourself: I enjoyed my time with her. We went to a pretty fair restaurant that met my finances, but still served decent food and had a nice atmosphere. I didn't expect her to be overly impressed by it, but I do recall her saying it reminded her of a good time she had with her folks when they went to Paris. That sounds like a positive thing. I might have laughed at the wrong moment when she was talking about her major, but when I apologized, she laughed it off and said she knew it was pretty odd for a girl to be studying sports psychology. We shared a nice quick kiss at her door. I would have liked more, but she didn't seem repulsed by it. So I think I'll give her a call and just see if she's busy.

See what you did this time? You kept your evaluations closer to the facts and farther from your biases--you considered possible negative aspects, but you granted yourself a few good moves too. You improved your chances for predicting what will happen if you call her, just like scientists improve their predictions by gathering facts ahead of time.

So that's what we mean by cognitive accuracy: gathering facts and trying to keep your "feels good/feels bad" sensors out of the picture.