4.9: Seeing What We Want to See

Perhaps expectations can affect our perceptions, but can our desires and emotions (which account for so much fallacious reasoning) have an impact on them? There is strong evidence that they can.

The Football Game

In a classic study from the 1950s, Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril examined biases and their effect on perception. In 1951, Dartmouth and Princeton met on the football field. The game was unusually rough, and there were several injuries and many penalties on both sides. After the game, partisans of both teams were upset. When Hastorf and Cantril asked two groups of students, one from each university, which team started the dirty play, the groups from the two universities gave quite different answers. Of course, they may have heard about the game from someone else, so to study the effects of actually watching the game, Hastorf and Cantril asked a group of boosters of each school to watch a film of the game and record each penalty they noticed. Princeton boosters saw many more Dartmouth penalties than Dartmouth boosters did. Here again, expectations influenced perception. But in this case, peoples’ expectations were influenced by the school with which school they identified.

The Biased Media

About ten years ago, several psychologists studied the way that voters viewed the media. It turned out that about a third of the respondents thought that the media had been biased in their coverage of Presidential candidates. There is nothing too surprising about this, but in 90% of the cases where people discerned a bias, they perceived it as a bias against their preferred candidate. This has become known as the hostile media phenomenon. Psychologists found this phenomenon regardless of the candidate involved. They also found similar outcomes when the issue was media bias in the presentation of other sorts of news events. Here, one’s values and desires play a role in what one sees or, at least, in how one interprets it.

Such things also happen closer to home. Most of us are prone to see “bad” officiating calls when they go against our team, but we don’t notice many that go against the opponent. After a game, people often complain that their team lost because of poor officiating, but few say that bad officiating gave their team the victory. One way to see the influence of this bias is to try to imagine how the officiating calls in a game would be viewed by one of the opposing team’s fans.

The influence of our desires on perception isn’t limited to the sports world. Many parents are unable to see what their children are doing (e.g, abusing drugs) because they can’t bring themselves to believe their child would do that. People in a relationship may be unable to see obvious flaws in the person they care about. Of course, not all biases lead us to think the best of someone else. If Wilbur is prone to jealousy, harmless and friendly behavior on his boyfriend’s part may look like flirting to him.

Person Perception

Our perceptions of other people are influenced by our perceptual set just as much as any of our other perceptions are. For example, our perceptual set may be influenced by stereotypes and biases that lead us to expect to see certain things, and sometimes this can lead us to see them in that way. We also have stereotypes about people who dress in certain ways, sport certain hair styles, have certain body types, and so on, and these also influence our perceptual set.

It is natural to wonder about the effects of over-simplified classifications, expectations fostered by parents or peer groups, and how biases and desires might affect our perception of people of different races or from opposing political groups. The topic is so important that we will reserve an entire chapter for it later in the textbook.

But it is important to note now that the things we have learned about in this chapter are not just about ambiguous figures. They turn up in all sorts of situations, including the social situations that matter most to us.

Perception as Inference

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that perception works a lot like inference that goes beyond the information that we have. In fact, one school of thought, beginning with German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1866, holds that perception is a species of inference. But for our purposes it is enough to realize that in one very important way perception is like inference. The input from the outside world, consisting of light rays and probably some less obvious things, is analogous to the premises of the inference. And the actual perceptual state we experience is analogous to the conclusion.

Seeing Shouldn’t be Believing

We will see over and over how biases, self-interest and wishful thinking lead to fallacious reasoning. And the fact that they can influence what we see, or at least how we see it, suggests that perception can be flawed for many of the same reasons that reasoning can. This is a serious problem, because we have a very strong tendency to think that our perception is accurate. Indeed, we even tend to put a lot of faith in what other people claim to see (eyewitness testimony carries great weight in the courtroom). But errors are very possible here, and so we often need to subject our perceptual beliefs to scrutiny.

Much of what we have learned about perception will turn up repeatedly in our study of reasoning. Here is a list of some of the key points we will meet on future occasions.

1. It is important to us to make sense of the world around us, to explain what happens and to fit it into a coherent and organized pattern. In perception, we strive to make sense of the things we see and hear. Memory and inference involve similar attempts to make sense of things.
2. Perception, memory, and inference are strongly affected by several factors, which often lead to errors. These factors include:
   1. Context
   2. Our beliefs and expectations
   3. Our wishes and desires
3. Our perceptions and reasoning can be influenced, even distorted, by these factors, but there are limits to their influence. If our beliefs and desires did completely determine what we saw, we wouldn’t be able to function on our own for even a day. Not all visual illusions involve ambiguous figures, and some of them actually demonstrate the limitations of perceptual set. Figure 4.9.1 is known as the Müller-Lyer illusion. The line with the out-going fins looks longer than the line with the in-going fins, but if you measure them, you will find that they are the same length. Even once you know this, however, your belief that they are the same length and even a strong desire to see them as having the same length are not enough to enable you to see them as having the same length.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Müller-Lyer Arrow Illusion

But although there are limits on how wrong we can be, we often do make mistakes, even in situations that matter greatly to us. Knowing about these pitfalls in perception is a first step in guarding against such errors.