Reality encompasses an infinite spectrum of possibilities. There are no limits to what we can experience. Yet we restrict reality to what we believe should and should not happen. These beliefs constitute our conscious and unconscious expectations of the past, present, and future. They are the lens through which we experience ourselves, our lives, and the world around us. In this article, we explore the role of expectations in shaping our reality.
What Are Expectations?
Expectations are assumptions about reality based on what we believe is possible or probable. Every moment has the potential to express infinite possibilities. As you’re reading these words now, there are infinite possibilities for what words you can read next. The possibilities for the thoughts, feelings, and other inner experiences you can have right now are boundless. Depending on where you are, many things can happen around you.
You can receive a call from an old friend, a bird could knock at your window, or a comet could suddenly hit the Earth. These are all possibilities that exist in potentia at this very moment. Yet, you have certain assumptions about the kind of possibilities that can actualize. For instance, you don’t expect to read about the eating habits of elephants. You don’t expect to experience feelings of intense joy, thoughts about lizards, or memories of your last vacation. Certainly, you don’t expect a comet to hit the Earth right now.
Expectations are essentially cognitive limitations that restrict the pool of possibilities available in our experience. They are our windows to the world. These limitations are formed based on probability or attachment. For instance, although I may very well write about the eating habits of elephants, it is highly unlikely given the title of this article. The possibility of writing about elephants exists in potentia, but the low probability of its actualization makes us dismiss it as a possibility. Expectations aren’t always the negation of unlikely possibilities, but can also be emotional attachments to certain possibilities in a situation. For instance, imagine you started dating someone.
There are countless possibilities for what could happen in your relationship, but you would naturally be attached to the more desirable possibilities and dismiss the less desirable ones. Forming expectations is a process of selecting, limiting, and filtering out the scope of what is possible, but can the possibilities we choose to believe shape the reality we experience?
How Do Expectations Shape our Sensory Perception?
Expectations shape our sensory perception by guiding our attention. First of all, expectations play an integral role in interpreting sensory information. According to the theory of predictive coding, our brains constantly generate and update a ‘mental model’ of the world around us. This model is based on our expectations, i.e. what we think is perceptually possible at any given moment. These expectations form a contextual bias that helps us interpret, recognize, and sort out the stream of sensory impressions we experience. According to this theory, sensory perception unfolds through the gradual reconciliation of what we expect to perceive and the actual sensory data we receive.
Representation neurons (R) “encode expectations about what is possible or likely in the coming sensory world” whereas Error neurons (E) modify these expectations when we receive an unexpected sensory input (Summerfield and Egner, 2009). The reconciliation of expectations and sensory reality is integral to every act of perception.
Attention is the prerequisite to any act of conscious perception. Naturally, you cannot consciously perceive what you’re not paying attention to. Expectations guide attention in so far as they determine what are the perceptual possibilities that are available for our attention, and which sensory stimuli are likely to be more relevant and important. This is particularly evident in the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, where individuals fail to consciously perceive an unexpected yet salient visual stimulus because they don’t pay attention to it. The most famous experiment on inattentional blindness, known as The Invisible Gorilla, was conducted by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris.
Researchers asked participants to watch a scene where two teams were playing basketball and gave them a visual task that made them pay attention to the ball. At some point, a person in a gorilla costume walked through the scene. When they asked participants if they noticed anything unusual in the scene, 50% of them did not see the gorilla.
Can Expectations Influence the Past and The Future?
Expectations can influence the past and the future in several ways. Of course, nothing can change something that has already happened. While the past cannot change, our memories can. Frederick Bartlett’s theory of reconstructive memory suggests that our recollection of past events is not free from error. Every memory recall is a reconstruction of the past that is prone to distortions based on our schemas, which are our preexisting expectations or mental representations of something.
According to Bartlett, we reconstruct the past based on how we expect it to be. On the other hand, expectations can determine future outcomes by influencing our present behaviors, attitudes, and decisions, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, if you expect a relationship to fail, you will probably not invest the time and effort necessary to maintain it. Our expectations determine our awareness of future possibilities. If we dismiss certain possibilities, we will not try to actualize them.
