If there’s an aspect of the whole thing that annoys me, it’s that it’s hard to get that innocence back, once you even start thinking about whether you’re independent of someone.
Your brain remembers which “simple” predictor best described your decision [. . .]
Your brain learns to predict other peoples’ judgments by learning which systems of predictive categories other people count as “natural”. If you have to predict other peoples’ judgments a lot, your brain starts to count their predictive categories as “natural”. The effect can be viral [. . .] and it can change how you think about yourself.
Cross-referencing my comment on a different post for a related idea: