Are you believing what you’re seeing?

What value does believing bring you?

It must have one or else we’d spend more time questioning and seeing all sides before deciding. We see things not as they are but how they appear to us: As they say, seeing is believing. However, seeing and believing do not validate a reality anywhere but in the seer’s mind. It’s referred to as an Appearance Bias and part of our programmed mind working alongside our ego in search of justification and the desire for conviction.

We like to be right. It makes us feel better about our position as a human. Our perception can also be manipulated by the fact that on the other side, the things and people we are looking at, are only showing us what they want us to see. Not the whole picture.

For instance, good-looking people are more apt to be trusted and admired. Now, with the advent of appearance-altering software, this power move is being manipulated. There’s also a “halo effect” where individuals are positioned in the process of doing good deeds to create the illusion they are angels from heaven. We see this in politics and it works well in campaigns.

The truth? Well, who knows. Until we know.

So we are encouraged to understand this process of manipulation, identify with empathy that we do it too but then check the facts by looking at the up and downside of things and see if you are impressed by both. In fact these days, we see people gaining trust more for exposing their downside and weakness as a tactic of establishing commonality and a sense of humble realness. At the end of the day, it’s hard to process it all and we’re best to just recognize that the process exists.