Dr. Shadé Zahrai

Now, that in itself would have been a really interesting experiment on prejudice and discrimination.

Or perception of.

Or perception of, exactly.

And that's where we get to the interesting piece.

Because if I pause right now and I take you back, right before these people were sent into these conversations, so they've just seen themselves in the mirror, right?

Right before they're sent into it, the researcher said, okay, I'm going to apply some moisturizing cream to the scar to set it so it doesn't crack.

Okay.

What was done, though, was the scar was removed entirely.

Whoa.

There was no scar.

These people went into these conversations believing they had a scar.

And they didn't.

They didn't.

And that led them to have an expectation about how people would treat them.

which then led them to pay attention to things that objectively did not exist.

It changed how they showed up.

They created the reality they expected.

And this is called expectation bias.

We don't see the world as it is.

We see the world as we expect it to be.