Setting Healthy Boundaries - Interview with Anushly Sithamparam

During the summer of 2023, I got the opportunity to run a webinar on Setting Healthy Boundaries as part of a social conference on cognitive bias. Here is a pre-conference interview with my mentor and host, Anushly Sithamparam, where I talk about how the subject of boundaries has a has a strong relation with False Consensus, a cognitive bias.

False consensus occurs when people with whom we come into contact in our personal and professional lives, are often like us in some ways. We begin to make judgements about them either privately within our own thoughts or in conversations with others based on our own beliefs, opinions, experiences, and behaviors, setting us off to overestimate how much others are like us, in terms of sharing such things. Because such judgments are likely to influence additional thoughts about these people, as well as our behavior toward them, it could easily be the case that our beliefs about others are incorrect which possibly leads us to behave toward them in ways that are inappropriate.

If we become self-aware of our own bias, distance ourselves from it, understand others’ perspectives and how they are different from us, it is then that we can set boundaries to not take each other for granted. We have our own needs and expectations as others do, which must be removed from our beliefs and opinions to ensure we behave in a way that is agreed and acceptable to others.