What if the world didn’t think? What would happen if people didn’t take what they learned from past experiences, whether it had a negative or positive effect, and apply it to future situations. What would happen if people made decisions simply based on the fact that they wanted to fit in, without thinking about what consequences it could have on them. In the short story, “Abuela Invents the Zero” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, Constancia isn’t making the best decisions with her Abuela. In an excerpt from Little Women, the March sisters craved attention from their mother and had to make the difficult of helping others. Influence is the prime factor in the way choices are made. Things like past experiences, self relevance, and cognitive biases build up the influence in decisions. In “Abuela Invents the Zero” by Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Constancia makes a number of decisions that are influenced by cognitive biases, self-relevance, and past experiences. The text specifies this by saying, "I 'm so embarrassed that even though the woman next to me is shooting daggers at me with her eyes, I just can 't move to go get her" (Ortiz-Cofer para 14). Constancia and her grandmother were sitting in church and were being judged by the woman sitting next to them for the way Abuela was acting. Constancia’s choice was to let her grandmother roam around unattended, making an even greater fool of herself. Of course this action was wrong, to leave her grandmother alone in a church she’s never been to