My strong hunch is that this is true for almost any form of communication (internal and external) we receive: it conveys something we can extract value from if we are able to look past the surface (propositional content) of what we immediately infer.
And how difficult it is to remain open to the possibility that my first impression of a signal is “incorrect” (I got it wrong on my first attempt), given how frequently I have used my inference (first impression), and I am still alive (adaptive value of my past choice to not question my first impression)...
The best I can offer is to make it a regular but not constant practice to use, say, 15 to 30 minutes a day to go through some kind of “habitual though journal,” asking myself if and when some of my automatic inferences might have been wrong, mostly just to play with that possibility, so that those kinds of mental avenues become more readily available in the moment when I need them. It’s important to raise the stakes during that practice, so the more I can make it resemble the real deal (for instance by role playing situations with a conversational partner), the less “artificial” and more “transferable” does this learning become.
All in all an excellent primer on the issue and useful extensions!
My strong hunch is that this is true for almost any form of communication (internal and external) we receive: it conveys something we can extract value from if we are able to look past the surface (propositional content) of what we immediately infer.
And how difficult it is to remain open to the possibility that my first impression of a signal is “incorrect” (I got it wrong on my first attempt), given how frequently I have used my inference (first impression), and I am still alive (adaptive value of my past choice to not question my first impression)...
The best I can offer is to make it a regular but not constant practice to use, say, 15 to 30 minutes a day to go through some kind of “habitual though journal,” asking myself if and when some of my automatic inferences might have been wrong, mostly just to play with that possibility, so that those kinds of mental avenues become more readily available in the moment when I need them. It’s important to raise the stakes during that practice, so the more I can make it resemble the real deal (for instance by role playing situations with a conversational partner), the less “artificial” and more “transferable” does this learning become.
All in all an excellent primer on the issue and useful extensions!