Is Somebody Not Texting You Back?

Fret not. Please don’t fall victim to Confirmation Bias.

It would always happen to me. If I messaged somebody and the messages remained unanswered, I would really get furious. My husband would try to explain to me how my thought process was quite wrong, however, I would never budge.

On my insistence, my new virtual friend (an author and a writing coach), offered to advise me on my write-ups. I eagerly sent her my work over email, with reminders on WhatsApp. To my agony, everything remained unread for more than a month. No email replies. No replies on WhatsApp. I got to thinking that she must have agreed to offer me guidance just because she could not turn down my request. As usual, my judgemental-self started playing devil’s advocate.

And one day, out of nowhere, I saw a message from her, apologizing for the late reply. She went on to explain how this horrible pandemic caused her pain and emotional turmoil and how the upheaval made her move to her home country winding up everything haphazardly in just fifteen days. Once again she expressed regret for not replying to me.

This was a huge epiphany for me. I felt shameful and guilty at having had those horrible thoughts about her but realized I had fallen prey to confirmation bias!

What is Confirmation bias?

As Rolf Dobelli writes in his wonderful book The Art of Thinking Clearly that the Confirmation bias is the mother of all misconceptions. It occurs when a person interprets a situation according to his own pre-existing beliefs. And when the Confirmation bias is at work, it prevents us from looking at situations objectively.

One thing I realized that day was that we must understand that we cannot always be on the top of the priority list of others.

We actually never know what people are dealing with in their personal lives. The best we can do in our position if we can’t help them is at least to stop judging them.