Imagine you're at a football game when this obnoxious guy sits next to you.
He's loud, he spills his drink on you, and he makes fun of your team.
Days later, you're walking in the park when suddenly it starts to pour rain.
Who should show up at your side to offer you an umbrella?
The same guy from the football game.
Do you change your mind about him based on this second encounter, or do you go with your first impression and write him off?
Research in social psychology suggests that we're quick to form lasting impressions of others based on their behaviors.
We manage to do this with little effort, inferring stable character traits from a single behavior, like a harsh word or a clumsy step.
Using our impressions as guides, we can accurately predict how people are going to behave in the future.
Armed with the knowledge the guy from the football game was a jerk the first time you met him, you might expect more of the same down the road.
If so, you might choose to avoid him the next time you see him.
That said, we can change our impressions in light of new information.
Behavioral researchers have identified consistent patterns that seem to guide this process of impression updating.
On one hand, learning very negative, highly immoral information about someone typically has a stronger impact than learning very positive, highly moral information.
So, unfortunately for our new friend from the football game, his bad behavior at the game might outweigh his good behavior at the park.
Research suggests that this bias occurs because immoral behaviors are more diagnostic, or revealing, of a person's true character.
Okay, so by this logic, bad is always stronger than good when it comes to updating.
Well, not necessarily.
Certain types of learning don't seem to lead to this sort of negativity bias.
When learning about another person's abilities and competencies, for instance, this bias flips.
It's actually the positive information that gets weighted more heavily.
Let's go back to that football game.
If a player scores a goal, it ultimately has a stronger impact on your impression of their skills than if they miss the net.
The two sides of the updating story are ultimately quite consistent.
Overall, behaviors that are perceived as being less frequent are also the ones that people tend to weigh more heavily when forming and updating impressions, highly immoral actions and highly competent actions.
So, what's happening at the level of the brain when we're updating our impressions?
Using fMRI, or functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, researchers have identified an extended network of brain regions that respond to new information that's inconsistent with initial impressions.
These include areas typically associated with social cognition, attention, and cognitive control.
Moreover, when updating impressions based on people's behaviors, activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus correlates with perceptions of how frequently those behaviors occur in daily life.
In other words, the brain seems to be tracking low-level, statistical properties of behavior in order to make complex decisions regarding other people's character.
It needs to decide is this person's behavior typical or is it out of the ordinary?
In the situation with the obnoxious-football-fan-turned-good-samaritan, your brain says, "Well, in my experience, pretty much anyone would lend someone their umbrella, but the way this guy acted at the football game, that was unusual."
And so, you decide to go with your first impression.
There's a good moral in this data: your brain, and by extension you, might care more about the very negative, immoral things another person has done compared to the very positive, moral things, but it's a direct result of the comparative rarity of those bad behaviors.
We're more used to people being basically good, like taking time to help a stranger in need.
In this context, bad might be stronger than good, but only because good is more plentiful.
Think about the last time you judged someone based on their behavior, especially a time when you really feel like you changed your mind about someone.
Was the behavior that caused you to update your impression something you'd expect anyone to do, or was it something totally out of the ordinary?
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends."
As a teacher, I've internalized this message.
Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war.
In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry.
We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame.
In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.
And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth.
And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so.
So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity.
I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between.
But one year, I gave up speaking.
I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago.
I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence.
When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice.
I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing.
I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one.
When the woman at the fundraising gala said "I'm so proud of you.
It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids," I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity.
We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't.
Silence is the residue of fear.
It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue.
It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs.
Silence is Rwandan genocide.
Silence is Katrina.
It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left.
It is the sound after the noose is already tied.
It is charring.
It is chains.
It is privilege.
It is pain.
There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you.
I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision.
I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance.
I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human.
I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids.
So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition.
Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice?
Thank you.
(Applause)