Connecting the Dots

Imagine yourself in an everyday situation where you’re trying to understand somebody’s behavior.

For example, maybe you’re at the grocery store waiting in an awkwardly crowded spot while the checkout line is backed up, and someone walks into the line ahead of you rather than going to the back.

Or as another example, maybe you’re at a gathering with friends trying to catch up for the first time since before COVID, and your friend seems to not be paying attention to what you’re saying.

How do you explain this behavior to yourself?

Since our brains are predictive rather than reactive, your brain is already seeing the situation through the lens of past experiences and throwing out predictive explanations.

Maybe with the person in the grocery store, you think “Can’t they see that there’s a line? People just don’t have respect for each other anymore”, or “What’s wrong with me that people never seem to see me?”

Or maybe with your friend not paying attention to what you’re saying, you think “Am I really so boring that they can’t listen to me for five minutes?” or “Everyone has such a short attention span these days thanks to smartphones and Youtube”.

Each of these thoughts popping up has a belief implicit within it, sometimes easier to spot and sometimes hidden within a question we’re asking ourselves.

Any situation is in reality full of so many variables, factors, and interacting components that we can’t possibly notice or take into account all of it. 

Some information will simply be inaccessible to us. We can’t know, for example, what’s happening inside another person’s head.

But even with the information available to us, there’s too much to comprehend. So part of what our brain does to make it more manageable is to leave out most of the information. We just don’t notice it at all. We don’t even see it. We can’t.

Another way our brain makes the information manageable is to use concepts from past experience to create narratives making our experience meaningful. Our narratives are like constellations we draw on the stars of the complex situation.

Going back to our earlier example from the gathering with friends, we connect the dots of I’m-talking with My-friend-not-paying-attention using the narrative of “I’m so boring no one will listen to me”. But there may be countless other dots that we are not seeing and not including in our constellation.

On the one hand, the narratives by which we connect the dots and make sense of things are so understandable. They come from our past experiences and the concepts we’ve learned along the way to organize those experiences.

On the other hand, there may be good reason to take our own narratives with a grain of salt.

One of my favorite illustrations of this is from a story told by social psychologist Dr. Roy Baumeister.

A woman is rushing to get to her flight at the airport. She’s anxious, flustered, and hungry as she hasn’t eaten all day. She quickly buys a bag of chips and a drink in the airport as she luckily has a few minutes to spare. Finding no open tables in the small cafeteria area, she sits down at a table where a middle-aged man in a suit is reading a paper, figuring he won’t mind. He doesn’t seem to mind, nods politely, and goes back to reading.

The woman begins to sip on her drink, and then reaches for a chip. As soon as she crunches down on it, the man lowers his paper and begins to stare at her angrily, intently, and in a way that almost feels dangerous to her. He then reaches out without breaking eye contact, sticks his hand into the bag of chips, pulls one out, and eats it.

She wonders “What kind of person is this? Something must be wrong with this person! Who just takes a stranger’s food in an airport while glaring at them?”

This awkward, tense, and confusing situation continues as the woman and the man stare at each other. She tries to establish some kind of normalcy by continuing to eat the chips and looking at him with confusion, while he continues to glare at her angrily and take chips out of the bag as well.

Finally the woman gets up to leave and rushes to her gate, glad to get away from such a confusing, unsettling, and somewhat disturbing situation. She gets in line to board her plane, reaches inside her bag for her ticket, and finds there…her unopened bag of chips.

As it turns out, in her hurry, anxiety, and hunger, she had managed to put the chips she had bought in her bag without thinking about it. She had then apparently sat down and begun helping herself to the chips of the man reading the newspaper, all the while looking right at him.

Ironically, she was the kind of person who just takes a stranger’s food at the airport while looking right at them.

The woman’s initial narrative for explaining the man’s behavior was “There is something wrong with this person, and they are acting completely inappropriately and are possibly dangerous.” Given the information she is aware of in the moment and her own past experiences, this narrative is so completely understandable.

And, she is leaving out a piece of information, as we all inevitably do in every situation we are in. It just so happens to be a crucial piece of information that completely reverses her understanding of the situation, and her explanation for another person’s behavior.

What this story illustrates so well is that no matter the situation, we will inevitably miss information. There will always be information we don’t have access to, in addition to which our past history and current state inevitably lead us to filter out certain information and focus on other information. 

By remembering that even one piece of additional information can change our entire experience, we can learn to take our own narratives with a grain of salt. We can learn to see our current explanations as just our best guesses in the moment based on what we’ve got so far, but always subject to potentially drastic change with new information.

No matter what constellation we draw on an experience, there will always be innumerable stars we’ve left out.

Or as I’ve heard it put before: “Don’t believe everything you think.”

To learn more about Existential Psychotherapy, sign up to get email updates on new blog posts.

To learn more about what it means to use Existential Psychotherapy in your own life, sign up to get weekly Existential Psychotherapy reflections by email.