Going over my notes from class again, I was most surprised by the categorization factors that we spoke about in class. A great deal of categorization is done subconsciously. While I may have been subconsciously aware of it, I don't believe that I consciously knew I was doing it other than by instinct and intuition.
There have been times when my insights have led me astray. When I thought about it, I have a tendency to categorize people as "like-me", "popular", "friendly", and "do not approach." I have erroneously placed people into the wrong categories due to actions that I have observed. It has caused me some embarrassment in the past.
People often have wrong perceptions of me. A lot of my mother's friends think I'm the youngest child of the family, because I don't "act" the way a firstborn should act. Some of my ex-coworkers thought my name was Andy for the longest time. One of them said that I "look" like an Andy. To this day, I'm still not sure what he meant by that. To make matters even more confusing, there was another employee named Andy working in the same division as I was, although the incidents were not due to mistaken identity. Oddly enough, it's also not the first time I have been called Andy in my life. To date, I have been called Andy seven times by seven different people in completely separate environments. Maybe I should change my name.
It takes time to change people's perceptions. In the case of my mother's friends. I don't care enough to change it, since I usually don't see them very often and usually Mom corrects them anyway for me. However, in the case of my ex-coworkers, I told them time and time again that my name is Eric and not to attribute my work to Andy, which probably would have looked really bad on the performance reports if they had kept that up.
I still swear that those tables do not have the same surface area despite logic and geometry showing otherwise. That's part of the reason why I hate optical illusions. You can't trust your eyes.
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