People in life often indulge in focalism when they narrow down their vision and focus solely on one event or one aspect of an event. The complete ignorance of any other factors is strong and even accounting for any new factor cropping up is out of the question. This tendency is called focalism or focusing illusion. This thought process is observed when decisions are to be taken or judgments are to be made.
When other events or contributing information are ignored, people come to inaccurate conclusions which ultimately lead them to incorrect verdicts. On the 28th of May 2019 when a Hindu doctor allegedly wrapped a medicine for his patient in a paper that contained Quranic verses, he was charged under the blasphemy law. The people of the town failed to see anything other than the alleged action. They failed to notice that the doctor was just treating his patient. Nearby shops of Hindu owners were vandalized too and it was done by the public who were only focused on their anger and the event itself. They did not take into account that other Hindu shop owners had nothing to do with what the doctor had done. Lastly, they completely ignored all the other times when they might have mingled with the Hindu doctor and shop owners in the past as friends, instead, their focus was narrowed down to just this one event.
How It Operates
The evidence has come forward in two specific areas of life because of our different types of decision-making systems. The first one is the ability to rightly predict future emotions and related events. This ability is also called affective forecasting. What happens when a biased affective forecast takes place? The person operating under the influence of focalism would focus too much on the positive or negative events and their effect is overestimated when it comes to their happiness. The misjudgment is gross and this is often known as the impact bias. What is the cause behind this impact bias? It starts when a person has a laser focus on the focal event itself whilst completely sidelining the other related events that could eventually affect accompanying feelings and thoughts. The best example of affective forecasting is lottery potential winners. They think that if they end up winning the lottery, they will be the happiest person for the longest time, maybe even forever. They focus on the positive event and grossly blow up the length of time of their happiness. They do not take into account that many other events can happen right before or after their wins like a loved one dying, fights with a best friend, or many other things. Numerous events could take place that could negatively affect their joy but this thought does not even come into their mind.
One more common area where the work of focalism can be seen is in social comparison. We are all privy to comparing ourselves and our lives with those of other people, it is quite natural. Focalism in such situations happens when we overestimate the chances of positive events happening in our lives and think that people around us most probably will not get to experience similar events. Sadly, it is focalism that often makes human beings think that they do not have skills for difficult tasks and others do. Lastly, in regards to shared benefits, people tend to forget that they are not the only ones who will receive benefits in a certain scenario; others stand an equal chance for those benefits. For example, in gambling, people tend to think that only they will encounter all the beneficial hands but forget that their opponents could get them too. What happens then? Due to their misplaced optimism, people tend to place large bets. The winning or losing is up to fate which sometimes favors the individual but sometimes their opponents too.
Focusing Illusion Narrows the World
It has been found that focusing illusion can narrow down a person’s assessment abilities when it comes to any decision. This is often seen when new detectives or cold case investigators are at work. Such work does require giant leaps of connecting events and pieces of evidence and making up theories but sometimes the investigators get so attached to one line of thinking/one theory that they are blind to other information. For them, every little piece of data connects to their suspect when in reality; their poor suspect is some innocent person.
The best examples of this can be found in the I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara. The book is about the Golden State Killer where she identifies how she fell to focalism. She explained how enthusiastic investigators can get hooked on a certain portion of the data and work around it to try and get a suspect.
What happened when a pipe bomb exploded in 2000 in Germany? Right-wing groups were targeted, so much so that according to a national poll, they were considered to be one of the biggest problems that the country was facing. Before the bombing, the extremist right-wing group was not considered to be such a big problem but once the suspicions started, people clung onto them without any shred of evidence.
Keeping the Bigger Picture in Mind
Keeping in mind how focalism can only cloud our judgment but also lead us to make wrong predictions about our future happiness, one should focus on overcoming it. Despite how resilient this habit may be, there is a way to work around it. A simple yet clever solution is to train the mind to take in all bits of information and focus on them when making a decision or imagining future emotions.
Researchers have suggested that one way of making a judgment or decision that is free of bias and mostly correct is to not only take some time and analyze the data before coming to a decision but to also distract your mind for a while. They have found that when an individual can distract their mind with some unrelated task, they are better able to come to a beneficial decision. Read about boxing, is it a dying sport?
