The face forgives the mirror
Let’s try something for a second: Why don’t you think back on the story of your life. While you are thinking back, try to remember why you got to the job you did, the city you now live in, the neighborhood, the relationships, etc. Most likely you–and most people for that matter–took a long winding road to where you are now. It’s also likely that you can pinpoint a few critical decisions you made in the past that have really shaped who you are today, and what you did to get here.
We often construct these life narratives. (…) How true are these narratives really? Do we really know the two or three critical points in our lives that changed everything and made us the people we are today? Psychological science says no. (…)
Nisbett and Wilson concluded, based on this research, that we have strong motivations for prediction and control of our social environments. That is, we’re thinking creatures who want to know how stuff works, and as such, we are constantly constructing theories that could plausibly explain what is happening in our environments. The reality though is that these theories are never really tested or confirmed, and so they are often fabrications–based on our own beliefs about how the world works rather than on how the world actually works (which may be more chaotic than we’d like to admit).
