Things are complicated out there. You may or may not be aware that your nervous system filters out the massive amount of data that your senses are exposed to. As a matter of conservation of energy (real and metaphorical) you are attending to very little of your environment based on your history and the current value you have for some segment of it.
Let me frame this for your consideration…
Due to our complexity as humans, when things are not there, we sometimes see things. (No, it is not the 60’s.) What’s more, when things are there in front of us and available for our experience, we don’t see them.
Two Experiments to consider…
1. In a recent paper in Science, Whitson and Galinsky (2008) found when individuals are unable to gain a sense of control objectively they will gain it perceptually through illusory pattern perception meaning they will identify “stuff” among a stimuli in their environment that don’t really exist. They are not hallucinating in the usual sense of the word. They are generating information to provide continuity linking what they can just as is sensory data is generated in sensory deprivation experiments.
Whitson, et.al, empirically found that people generate pattern perceptions to make sense of the events in their environment when they experience lack of control of the environmental events they are experiencing.
Now, consider what that means…
- It means we don’t see the flaws in people we are connected to or that we see the flaws where none exist
- it means that we see a conspiracy from a new boss when we don’t yet exist to the new boss
- it means we identify objects in random noise images where there are none
- it means we see mechanistic cause and effect relationships where no links exist
- it means we see correlations in economic markets in companies we like
- it means we don’t see how our behavior is like the behavior of someone we don’t like
- it means we can’t tell why people like us or dislike us when they do
- it means that we can’t see the flaws in our children as they lie dead with a needle in their arm
- it means that we can be more than one kind of person every day of our lives
- it means that people not like us are suspicious and people like us are allies
Staggering, isn’t it!
Examples of superstitious behavior in the modern world are countless – sports super heroes involved in astrology, learned rituals so complex that someone once referred to a baseball player as “his own seventh inning stretch” due to the time he took to address each pitch. Religion, prayer, sacrificial rituals, appeasements, holidays, traditions, incantations, etc. all come from making relationships where none exist. Gasuntheit!
When you are uncertain about your environment and don’t perceive you have control, know what is going on, etc., it is disconcerting. In terms of how we learn, not perceiving you have control is an aversive stimulus equal to shock, rejection, pain, or other punishers. Faced with uncertainty, lack of control, people look for patterns [ah, the value of search] in their environments to re-establish control. When it is not there empirically, we try to establish it perceptually with vision playing the lead role.
With the dearth of information and conflicting data sets it is a constant challenge to understand what is related and what isn’t. In an election year the conspiracies exist for those that most not understanding why their candidate is losing since they see the relationships between them and the agenda as a citizen. The media, the polls, the moderators, the economy, the Jews, the youth, the women…etc. are all plotting to undo the trailing candidate.
2. The following video is based on research by Simons and Chabris from Indiana University. It is very interesting for several reasons, all of which you’ll see if you FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS OF THE PRESENTER EXACTLY.
After you see it spend some time thinking how that affects what your life is like, how research is done and how the world works. After all that, come back write or respond with what you think the implications are of the research.
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The lesson here isn’t simple. If we were to want a society free from magical thoughts, then we need expand the tolerance for people to live in ambiguity in some areas, educate people on how feelings and emotions are the exhaust of perceived contingencies and how the environment comes to control behavior via consequences.
J. A. Whitson, A. D. Galinsky (2008). Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception Science, 322 (5898), 115-117 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845
So, thanks to this research, we now know:
– People can be subjective
– People can be irrational
– And they are more likely to be this way, in absence of information or logical understanding
Didn’t we know that already????
At any given time, it’s impossible to have everyone on the same page…same info, same perspective, same understanding.
I think that’s part of the appeal of a democracy…it’s the wisdom of crowds thing…an understanding that any one of us can be flawed, but when our judgment is pooled together collectively, we’re more likely to come up with the “right” or “best” answer.
I’d like to see the video, but the link generates a 404 error…
Video is processing for encoding.
thanks for finding.
In response to your response…
How we are subjective and irrational and different and magical, etc. etc. is very important to understand for certain strategies of improving public policy, managing your life better, coming up with the “best answer”.
If you simply brush the research aside and say we know this already, that’s ok too. You might already have the details down and/or you might not need this info to do what you want.
The idea that we are subjective is slightly different than the idea that we fill in details that fit nicely into our history is a pretty big deal. It’s probably why John McCain can legitimately justify Fight, Fight, Fight and Barack Obama can legitimately justify “Community Organizing”… that’s a trite example. I’m sure you can come up with more personal and more detailed examples.
the wisdom of the crowds under false data isn’t that appealing to me.
yes, wisdom of crowds, being driven by false data, is never wise. garbage in, garbage out.
i suppose if you ask a crowd, how many jellybeans are in the jar, and they can all see a jar with jellybeans to assess general size/dimensions, etc. you’ll get a decent estimate. that’s very different from telling the crowd that there is a jar of jellybeans in another room, and they have to guess how many are in it without seeing it.
so…in our time, we have more data than we can click a mouse at. no lack of jellybean jars…more jellybean jars than we have time to look at.
without some way to narrow down the data, the crowd would have the have a similar “blindness” problem to that of a hidden jellybean jar…so many jars, so much noise, that people start taking wild/superstitious non-logical guesses.
however, we always seem to gravitate toward some kind of media filter that gets the masses generally in the same place. during the print era, there were newspaper headlines…radio and TV had national networks that served as the watercooler…today, we have Google / Yahoo to help sift through the overwhelming amount of data to come to some kind of common ground.
it’s true that no one reads every search listing in Google on any topic…that’s impossible. but do they need to? doesn’t the “best” (and I say this knowing that “best” is a loose term for most commonly agreed upon best search result…) information rise to the top…getting everyone close to the same playing field when it comes to the jellybean jar in question?
looking forward for more information about this. thanks for sharing. Eugene
Lane….
Thanks for responding. I apologize for the broken link….sometimes technology is not my friend.
I don’t know how this came across as the wisdom of crowds. Also, this is less about what is and is not subjective and what is and is not OBJECTIVE. We take our senses as our connection to the outside world that lets us do all the zillions of things that any one individual does in their 28,500 days. This post was a post showing that those very same senses can be managed so as to NOT see what is there and PERCEIVE what is not there. Thus, in my references, it is more about the rules we have about how the world works and contingencies operating than tricks or “group think” or what is subjective.
Yes, we have a lot of data to deal with. No problem. It is the rate of data change and the rules made about the data changing that affects what we ‘believe’ is real. Boinggggg. That is major.
It is not, as you suggest, that we need to narrow down the data per se. This is about what giving the data value as meaningful or not. ‘Blindness’ is a consequence of a rule(s) that primed you to attend visually to one set of data and ignore other data not mentioned in the rule. It is the same thing teachers do to students, bosses do to workers, parents do to children, etc. The rules, stated or not, ‘bias’ what the children, employees, students, etc., see. There is no noise. It is all just data. We make it ‘noise’ by giving it a value that we’ve learned…in this case from rules of the instructor. We make it valuable by abiding by some rules we’ve learned. ‘Which is which’ is based on past conditioning -learned stuff – and current exposure to contingencies.
You don’t abide by Islamic law because of that… and Kiyomars El Beizaei doesn’t abide by Christian laws for the same reasons…because of sets of things differentially conditioning in the different cultures.
There is a media filter… and a Lane filter… and a FOX News filter and a Weatherman Underground filter, etc. To that very point, when there is a lack of data about how anything works and no one know what the heck is going on “out there,” things that don’t really exist, get created. That and similar absence of links generates superstitions to explain the economic crisis, finding the lost balloonist in the desert, losing the World Series, – a zillion things linked erroneously to another zillion things, all with the value of just trying to figure out ‘what’s going on out there’.
Your Google search result value question is a good one… if you remember you asked, “do they need to?”[read all the entries listed] The consequences of doing a search have resulted in us learning the relationship between where a result item falls on the list of hits and its acceptability, usability, etc. For most, that is enough – 1) if the search was on target, 2) if the answer is present in the top few pages and 3) if there were positive consequences for accesses what the searcher was focused on finding. THE RESEARCHER MAY BE BLIND TO ALL THE OTHER INFORMATION SEEN THERE DUE TO THE QUESTION THEY ASKED. The end of the world is coming… bird flu has jumped to humans…next Tuesday California is going to join Hawaii, etc. All these are missed because of the ‘blindness’ issue.
If there is any ‘beauty’ in all of this, it is that we are all so bodaciously different that while we enjoy the differences we need to continue to look for what we have in common; principles that we all are subject to or that none of us are subject to, etc. What’s more, our differences are not flaws, sins, idiocy, stupidity or insanity. They are differences and they got there in very specific ways from environmental contingencies acting on a genetic entity.
Could anything be more exciting than getting rid of superstition and mysticism and replacing it with empirical principals of understanding of the natives in Guiana, prisoners in Guantanamo, or farmers in Georgia? (Either version of Georgia…)
I hope this helps you as much as it helped me describe what was important in contrasting the two experiments.
Let me know if you still need to see the video….