Blog Entry 1

    Its the summer before my freshman year of college and I have just received an email about who my roommate was going to be.  I decided to do random assignment.  So I got her name, and did what every other freshman does, look them up on Facebook.  I have to admit, that I am very quick to judge someone, which is not such a great thing.  I start to explore her page and gain some basic information.  I started with the music, not too bad, but some country which I am NOT a fan of.  Next I move on down to books.  Harry Potter, Shakespeare, and books that I had to read for school, not for pleasure in the least bit.  Then came the movies, once again not too bad, just a few that I thought were a little weird.  The last category was TV.  The list was never ending.  Now I don't watch a lot of TV, I have my few shows that I watch but definitely not multiple ones every night.  There were a lot of crime shows along with various teen soap operas.  Now out of a list of probably twenty shows, we did not have one in common.  Great.  After looking through her interests, I automatically thought of the words geeky and boring.  I know, very mean of me, but its what came to mind.  Then came the hometown, pretty much "Amish Country."    The last thing  that I looked at were her pictures.  There seemed to be a lot of pictures of her in costumes or on stage.  Now here I used the representative heuristic, the way she was dressed triggered "theatre geek."  There is nothing wrong with that at all, I was just never really friends with any of them in high school and her pictures seemed to fit my perception.

    So after viewing what I could on her profile, I did start to freak out a bit.  Yes, I was forming judgements and being VERY stereotypical, based on the little information that was available.  We became friends on Facebook, and started to exchange further information.  August came, and it was time to move in, time to meet my roommate.  Now I was expecting a very nice girl who was a little geeky/weird, we did not have much in common, and liked to watch A LOT of television and movies.  Freshman year came, and went, and I tried to connect with her and develop interests that we had in common, but it was not working out.

    My Freshman year roommate experience was an example of the confirmation bias.  She was a very nice, intelligent girl, but we barely had anything to share with eachother.  I could have maybe tried a bit harder to form a stronger relationship and pay less attention to actions that were supporting the original judgements I had made, but the more I got to know her, I came across evidence that was confirming my belief; My belief that I had formed when I looked her up on Facebook and of the first few times we met.  What I wrote may seem a little mean, but I was just telling it how it was when it was going through my mind.  She is a nice girl, but things just didn't work out.