Really? Is everyone delusional? Variants of that phrase are the tiresome, simplistic MEGO bane of undergrad Phil101 and Phil102. For the truth-claim "there is no objective independent truth; everything is subjectively perceived," you run smack into a dispositive problem of pure logic.
Uhh... for the assertion to be "true," it must also be false.
Perhaps that paradox is good for some liberal arts yucks in Animal House, but little else beyond the fictional WTFC confines of Delta House and the bored professor played by Donald Sutherland.
The above graphic comes from the website "BIG THINK." And, yeah, I get the unstated nuance of their intended gist. But "Perception is an illusion" is a categorical assertion terminally afflicted with the "false dictotomy" problem.
Foregoing a long pedandic philo rant. I'll merely observe that the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge opened for traffic on May 27th 1937 in a highly active earthquake plate techtonics subduction zone—32,000+ days ago. I've sailed under that amazing bridge multiple times when I lived in SF
That aggregate engineering "independent objective truth" is good enough for this 80 yr old meat & potatoes washed-up guitar player.
OK, enough obtuse snark. It's been a ghastly week. One that doesn't portend better times drawing nigh. Iran? Cuba? Columbia? Panama? Mexico? Greenland? NATO writ large?
Below, from HuffPo:
In the hours following the aftermath of the fatal shooting of the unarmed Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minnesota on Wednesday, video footage of the incident has been watched, rewatched, slow-mo’d and analyzed from countless angles.DR. EMILY BALCETIS
Yet a starkly different interpretation has emerged, along partisan lines, about what exactly went down: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confidently told Americans “it was an act of domestic terrorism” on the part of Good.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded: “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit.”
The fallout from this fundamental disagreement over reality — and what our eyes are actually witnessing in the footage — is at the core of the dogfight we’re currently witnessing in the press and on social media.
But how can different people look at the same footage and tell themselves entirely different stories about what they’re seeing? And how can people cope with these discrepancies and share communities with one another when they can’t seem to share a reality? HuffPost spoke with experts in psychology and group behavior to gain a better understanding of what’s happening.
The Ways We Watch Video Plays A Part
The medium of video feels fundamentally black and white, and straightforward. However, that leaves out one important factor: Our eyes.
“Video feels like an infallible witness. It doesn’t seem subjective,” Emily Balcetis, an associate professor of psychology and faculty director of research at New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences, told HuffPost. “But just as our eyes can only see what they are pointed at, so too can the camera capturing the footage. By necessity some of the surrounding context, constraints or forces contributing to what is captured never appear on camera.”
Our attention — and what it is drawn to — plays a part as well, particularly in fast-paced footage with a lot going on at once: “Our visual attention is limited, leaving us unable to see all of what is present especially in complex visual scenes,” Balcetis said. “Simply put, when we are looking to the right we can’t see what is to the left. We may be unaware of what we are unaware of, complicating our ability to fully appreciate what it is we have seen and what we might not even know we have not.”
Balcetis also notes that “WHAT we look at is often not random.” That’s because our attention is more likely to land on things that are brightly colored, quick or moving unexpectedly — and because we as individuals are potentially more likely to look in some places than others.
“As a social psychologist, my research has found that who we are — and the types of people we think share aspects of our identity and values — guides who we spend more time looking at,” she said. “Which means we might see more of what they are doing and less of what someone else is doing. We are all missing some of what is happening when we’re watching video evidence.”
Citing a 2014 paper she previously published with Yael Granot, Balcetis also notes that the personal ways that an individual identifies with a social group (for example, if you feel that policing in the U.S. aligns with your values) can color where you are likely to look while “watching altercation footage that portrays ambiguous use of police force against a civilian.”
“Those who fixated more on a target they identified with exhibited stronger differences in how they judged culpability and punishment than those who looked less,” Balcetis explained. “Thus, identification doesn’t just bias opinions — it biases how people make sense of what they attend to in the first place.”
Balcetis does note that this is something people may not be aware of and that recognizing these behaviors and approach to video can help a viewer more accurately process the information they’re receiving — which that 2014 study found after asking individuals to reframe their attention.
“When we, in fact, asked people to try to allocate their attention equally among all the people when watching a video depicting potential police use of force, we did not change whether in fact they felt a sense of connection or felt supportive of police,” she said. “Instead, we changed what they looked at in the video.”
She said that the result did see “a shift in how they looked at the evidence,” “increased the accuracy of their understanding of the actual case facts” and “removed the polarizing effect of identifying with police on their judgments of the acceptability of officers’ use of force.”
“We did not nudge people into siding with or siding against officers. Instead looking differently and more inclusively at all targets changed their understanding of case facts for the better and removed the polarizing impact of their preexisting attitudes about the people involved,” she said...
ERRATUM
Re-watching NetFlix' "Borgen" tonight. Again timely.
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