A moment becomes a thought, which brews into an observation, and eventually settles into an assumption.
This is, more or less, how we interpret life.
As a creative, I watch the world closely for inspiration, and it has occurred to me more than once that assumptions are how we make sense of everything.
Sense of things within our own context. Assumptions are, after all, cousins of bias.
They are handy, though. We often make suppositions about people, places, and things that we encounter and don’t know well. They give us something to barter with—a starting point. And bartering is what we essentially do in every conversation, experience, and activity.
Eventually, those assumptions morph into facts.
Well-defined morsels of information that are hard to challenge.
That’s how minds work, I suppose.
But when assumptions become facts without real experience or knowledge, that can be dangerous. They slip into common parlance and masquerade as ubiquitous truth.
Take, for example, the phrase, ‘to have the memory of a goldfish'. It means being highly forgetful and having a poor memory. This saying is not only derogatory to the unfortunate fish, but it’s also completely inaccurate.
Scientists have debunked this myth time and time again, but we refuse to retire it from our vocabulary. It turns out goldfish can remember things for months or even years, and can be trained to recognise colours, recall human faces, and navigate mazes. This myth might have stuck because we observed goldfish swimming in circles and associated that behaviour with forgetfulness; they might have just been reacting to light or food expectation, following cues, or simply exploring.
This phrase doesn’t do much harm, but serious assumptions that become bold ‘facts’ can. This myth shows us how easily repetition becomes reality. We hear something often enough, and it starts to feel true. We say it often enough, and it becomes cultural glue.
I’m sure you can think of an example or two from your own experiences.
(Although it is mildly alarming to me that we won’t defer to science and abandon this idiom from future conversation. What other presumptions are we clinging to?)
Hunches aren’t the issue, though.
When I design, I make assumptions each time I approach a problem. It’s a useful place to begin; I think of them as experiments that need to be validated with tests and feedback. I conduct research, explore ideas, draw parallels, speak to as many people as I can, and in the end decide if any of my hypotheses deserve to become facts. And even then, facts can be challenged.
While I can scrutinise my assumptions audaciously at work, it’s much harder in real life. Keeping an open mind can be unsettling if we’re fond of our assumptions. And the trickiest bit? We’re often unaware that our inferences or guesses have become hard truths in our heads. We all wish to be unbiased and believe in the breadth of our intellect, but we also make up our minds easily.
And somehow, the advent of AI is both a foe and a friend in this regard. The technology can either reinforce your beliefs with a single search or open up multiple perspectives at once. But hey, you can always talk to the humans around you, too.
We’ve made assumptions about some pretty important things — climate change, war, entire cultures. And we see influential people act on these theories without logic, conversation, experience, or wisdom. The consequences can be tragic.
While we can’t change everything about the world, we can change our minds when presented with genuine information. Now, I believe that we should make assumptions; how else would we even begin anything?
But before they become gospel, we should let them fly.
Give them a chance to stretch their wings by engaging with conversation, perspectives, and evidence.
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Assumption is the mother of all mistakes.