The other day, I found myself lost in a mean-spirited fantasy about my neighbor, who had been complaining that my dog was barking too much. (The audacity! For Coco can do no wrong.)

While I worked out a solution to help Coco with her barking, I couldn't shake the feeling that my neighbor was being unreasonable and had nothing better to do than make my life miserable. "The next time I see her," I thought. "I am going to give her a piece of my mind."

So, I silently rehearsed logical, well-reasoned (okay, emotionally charged) responses in my head.

Then one day while out walking my dog, I unexpectedly crossed paths with her.

To my surprise, her whole disposition had shifted. We had a lovely conversation, during which she opened up about vignettes from her life that showed me she is a peace-seeking human, just like me. The sharp words on the tip of my tongue melted.

I had machinated so much about how that conversation was going to unfold, and none of it transpired. My projections were rooted in assumptions that were driven more by my own fears and past experiences, data that was limited and wrongly interpreted, by which I had damned us to a perilous future as neighbors.

Are you aware of the stories you might be 'imposing' onto yourself and others? Onto your family and friends, colleagues, political and religious foes? What about the organization you're working with? The 'competition'?

How are your biases and interpretations of the world around (and within) you shaping the quality of your presence? Are your stories accurate reflections of what is actually going on, or only half-baked constructs?

And are they leading you to solve the problems you are facing, or are you perhaps creating - or at least adding to - the problems yourself?

This occasion reminded me of an experiment run in 1944 by two psychologists named Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, where they invited a small group of participants to watch a short animated film.

In this film, a number of objects - a rectangle, a small triangle, a big triangle, and a circle - moved slowly and at times zipped around the screen.

At the end of the film, Heider and Simmel asked the participants to share what they had seen. Their observations ranged from the wildest accusations about what the big triangle was doing to the small triangle to the most heartfelt empathy for the circle. One observation suggested the big triangle was an 'abusive husband,' and the circle his 'wife.' The small triangle, their 'child,' watched from outside an opening in the rectangle - 'a doorway' - as the large triangle 'hit' the circle again and again. Eventually, the small triangle came in to 'defend' his 'mother,' and the child and his mother managed to flee the big triangle, leaving him locked inside the rectangle or 'house’.

Heider and Simmel were absolutely fascinated by what the participants shared.

For what they had presented in the short animated film was not a story but instead a variety of shapes moving to and fro on a screen.

And so, they drew quite the conclusion from their experiment: Humans cannot help but impose stories, even where technically there are none.

Eighty years later, this leads me to wonder: How might this groundbreaking conclusion be of use to us today?

My colleague Dan Frey, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, finds himself impressed by what generative AI can do. But not in this area. Surfacing the stories we believe to test assumptions. He emphasizes that humans have a wonderful privilege and responsibility to do something machines cannot: critically think.

"Identifying implicit assumptions is becoming increasingly important, especially in the age of AI," Dan says. "The idea that intelligence based on data is objective is a dangerous assumption. If humans behaved in ways that AI is about to start behaving, you would think AI is as biased as humans have ever been."

How might you make a practice of testing the stories you believe about self and others to see whether they are really true before leaping to consequential judgments?