Why We See Things Differently
The Science of Disagreement in The Time of Conspiracy Theories PART I
Introduction
Some months ago, my mother sent me a picture of a door sign posted at a primary care medical office in Florida, which read:
“If we have to explain to you why you need to wear a mask in our medical office, a $75 fee will be added to your bill.”
Below that was a second sign:
“And if we have to listen to why you don’t think you need a mask, an additional $75 will be charged.”
“Can you put this up at your office?” she texted, jokingly.
For people living in what my mother refers to as the ‘real world,’ those signs were funny in a kind of cathartic way; something like, If you don’t yet know that we are in the midst of a pandemic caused by an airborne virus or if you really think that you understand infectious disease transmission better than doctors and scientists do, you must be either so ignorant or arrogant that you deserve a fine.
Indeed, anyone who would push back against a request to wear a protective mask in a medical setting today is almost certainly living in a kind of alternate reality formed of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiratorial thinking. One in which doctors, scientists, and public health experts all across the globe have been duped by (or worse, are in league with) an unholy alliance between so-called Big Pharma and an utterly corrupt U.S. government that seeks to constrain the liberty of not just its citizens but people all over the world.
That is a stunning conspiracy theory. If the pandemic that has effectively shuttered the planet is a hoax—a pernicious political narrative meant to broaden and deepen the powers of Big Government—then at least one whistleblower from among the literally millions of people working in science, medicine, Pharma, public health, or elsewhere within the federal government should have surfaced by now. It is difficult in my medical office of sixteen people to keep the ‘big news’ of a surprise birthday party under wraps; is it even conceivable that a secret so massive as a ‘fake pandemic’ could have been kept by so many for so long?
The answer is almost certainly ‘no’. But I am just as certain that, on the whole, people who have bought into that (or some similar) conspiracy theory are neither more ignorant nor more arrogant than those of us living in the so-called ‘real world.’ And my mother would be the first to say so. Many of her friends fall into this category, and she would not be proud of me if I hung signs on my office door meant to ridicule or humiliate them.
Rather, like many of us, she is baffled and frustrated by the expanding threat of a complex societal problem—one that is difficult to articulate in a satisfyingly accurate way. Humans have an inborn drive to make sense of things through language. Without the right words to capture and convey precisely what is happening, many of us are feeling chronically, vaguely anxious, and the more we grasp for understanding the worse it gets. “I don’t know what to say,” she offered recently in a rare tone of pessimistic dismay, “people just seem to have gone crazy.”
But that comment too—one I have heard recently from a lot of smart, well-meaning people on both sides of the political divide—like the joke about the sign, seems to graze the problem without quite hitting a meaningful target. It bleats a moment of steam from the stress kettle without removing it from the flame. We all know people who seem to be talking and thinking ‘crazy’ but whom we know are not, in fact, crazy. This is the wrinkle that begs to be smoothed and the subject of this series of briefings entitled “Why We See Things Differently.”
In this first installment, I will focus on the science of how our brains construct reality and how divergent constructs about the nature of reality itself—and not our actual politics or even our values—are what most divides us today. I will present compelling classical and current research demonstrating how our brain’s hardware is ideally suited to run conspiratorial software programs. Later, I will show how conspiracy theories, by stimulating the release of hormones like dopamine in the brain, can lead to a kind of addiction marked by compulsive conspiracy-seeking behavior similar to that seen with gambling, gaming, and other forms of behavioral dependency.
Ultimately, I will make the case that the reason we see things differently has nothing to do with differences in our intelligence, level of informational engagement, arrogance, patriotism, or whether or not we hold a sincere desire to do good, but is instead the predictable outcome of decades of two discrete and contrary information diets: one that has been intentionally curated to promote a false narrative about the uniquely pernicious nature of men and people of European descent in the context of a moral philosophy centered in ‘identity’ that frames virtually all societal problems in terms of a power structure between oppressed and oppressors; and one that, leveraging new brain science, harnesses the power of metaphor to promote conspiracy theories which, once embedded as beliefs, induce habits and of thought and structures of mind engineered to undermine faith and trust in the institutions of science, government, democracy, and the concept of an American community.
Each of the two dominant non-overlapping informational silos is complex, layered, and self-referential. Repeated engagement with them over a prolonged time induces in the brain region that functions to generate intuitive meaning, the formation of conceptual apparatuses that I refer to as belief constructs. The ‘congregants’ of an informational silo are induced to share many of the same belief constructs, which in turn form the basis of a shared understanding of reality that is conveyed mainly through storytelling and symbolism. Once installed, these stories, and the power of symbols to evoke them, are tenaciously resilient and generally impervious to the persuasive powers of logic, reason, or facts.
In a supplement to the final installment, I will propose a remedy for the problem I believe to be at the heart of our national divide. There might still be time to pull ourselves back from the brink of widespread civil unrest (or worse). America needs a new story from which to shape a new, modern identity. And we are going to get one soon enough. But who will be its author? What ideas and feelings will it inspire? Will the new American story remind us that the steady march of humanity toward a more civilized and thoughtful way of living, with justice and the right to pursue happiness for all citizens as the goal, has always been powered by the collective wish to transcend the violence and tribalism of our baser nature? Or will it be a seductive story that argues slyly and cynically against civilization and its support structures of democracy, science, justice, and public trust—one that jettisons the norms holding civil society together and encourages us to unleash our destructive impulses?
Yesterday and Today
I could not have imagined, in the 1960s of my childhood, that within my lifetime, ordinary people would find themselves slavishly devoted to an endless stream of information organized for their consumption by unregulated profit-seeking entities on screens that they carry with them virtually all the time. I also could not have foreseen that the politically and civically engaged citizenry of this great country would stand idly by, entranced by their addictions and comforts, while the two major political parties, like the blades of a scissor, shredded the conceptual fabric of a society earnestly straining to cohere around its moral center.
Yet, here we are, unwitting participants in a mass experiment to see what happens when the hypnotic, addictive nature of our new technology and our respective information silos induce us into a state of mind in which we begin to invest more of our imagination and emotions in virtual realities and virtual communities and less in our real lives and neighbors; when there’s more profit in manipulating humanity’s destructive tendencies than in inspiring the better angels of our nature; when we are encouraged to feed tribal narratives and starve the broader narrative of an American community that transcends tribalism; when we can reliably garner more praise and admiration for gaming the system to accrue massive personal wealth with minimal effort than for working within the rules to strengthen the system for everyone; when flouting the norms that hold civil society together is cheered as courageous; when our faith in the institutions of science, journalism, and good government has been systematically eroded; when meanness passes as entertainment and vulgarity passes as authenticity; when building one’s brand is prioritized over building one’s reputation; when concepts like sacrifice, humility, respect, honor, and duty seem quaintly of another era; when lying and other forms of corruption become normalized; when our opinions of political representatives drop so low that we expect almost nothing good from them; and when we begin to view members of the other political party as our mortal enemies…
The unwinding of America, as George Packer has so aptly called it, is taking place before our eyes. Its roots run deeper than philosophy, race, or sex. Under the protective umbrella of free speech, coherent, self-reinforcing, separate universes of information, misinformation, disinformation, and baseless conspiracy theories, carefully nurtured into existence by political actors and business interests, have become the touchstones of reality for a large and growing share of Americans.
Today, we are divided along party lines not by debates over the size of government or the relative values of individualism vs. collectivism, but over the nature of reality itself. No external force could pose a greater threat to American unity or our experiment of self-governance than the steady drip of politically motivated disinformation engineered to poison our relationship with the pillars of a liberal democratic society, including science, medicine, government, journalism, and, perhaps most importantly, each other.
I. The Current State of Meaning
Living in Bubbles
At its foundational level, democracy is a mechanism of government by which progress is achieved through compromise. Democratic governments work best when no one gets what they want. Citizens in high-functioning democratic societies learn to be satisfied with progress, not perfection. Elected officials with differing views on how to advance the common good take turns steering the ship. When they lead us into calm waters with the wind at our collective back, they often get another turn to steer, but if they sail us into a storm, their tenure is likely to be cut short.
We learn to tolerate the disappointment of our preferred candidate or party losing elections without falling apart and to appreciate our victories without gloating. And, if we live long enough, democracy teaches us one of life’s most precious lessons: humility. Because, regardless of which party we identify with, in a healthy democracy we eventually find ourselves having to confront the fact that sometimes, we are wrong and the people on the other side see certain things more clearly and accurately than we do. In other words, democracy relies upon mature themes of humility, trust, acceptance, temperance, compromise, and respect for those with whom we disagree.
Such things cannot be legislated. They manifest not as laws but as expressions of cultural norms. And while they require painstaking work over long periods to establish, such norms can be torn down quickly. Democracy is powerful but it is also fragile, and its enemies know that.
Compromise (the Irreducible Unit of Democracy) Requires Robust Levels of Mutual Trust and Respect
I can meet you halfway if I believe that you are a rational, good-faith actor with a different life experience and perspective on how best to solve mutually agreed-upon problems. But where is the middle ground between a patient who is certain that his doctor is part of an elaborate plot to implant microchips into the arms of unsuspecting citizens and a doctor who is certain that his patient has gone off the deep end and is part of a conspiratorial cult? What happens if non-overlapping information silos cause our respective understanding of reality to become so divergent that we cannot agree on what the actual problems even are?
For those who watched the many hours of the January 6 Congressional Hearings, there can be little doubt that a plot to gaslight the American public by denying that he lost the election had been the Trump team’s plan all along. They told us, without presenting a shred of evidence, that things had been “rigged” and asked us to “fight” for him well in advance of the election. The Committee presented live and video testimony of Trump’s closest advisers explaining how, in the days and weeks leading up to the election, when polls strongly favored Biden, it became clear that they were going to lose, but the Trump team had a plan. They would claim falsely that they had won, fire up an armed mob already primed by conspiratorial disinformation promoted by Trump himself, and direct them to exact vengeance at the US Capitol to create chaos that would delay the certification of the election.
Trump, still acting as president, would then leverage the mayhem along with his false claims of election fraud to invoke Marshall Law, calling in the military to seize voting machines in key states. Once enough voting machines had been sequestered, he would then dispatch hand-picked loyalists to conduct a sham recount that would ‘validate’ false claims of voter fraud while slates of sham electors in battleground states that had been trained ahead of time by Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s election campaign team, would engage in a kind of political cosplay, casting fake electoral college votes and pronounce Trump the winner. This is not a wild, baseless conspiracy theory hatched by Democratic fantasists, it was the sworn testimony of Trump’s closest Republican allies and advisors, including his own hand-picked Attorney General.
But to those whose only knowledge of the January 6 Committee’s Hearings came from recaps on Fox News or other media platforms within that informational silo, the Committee’s testimonial evidence and findings were brushed aside in favor of conspiracy theories that turned out to be mostly or completely baseless: agents of the Democratic Party had flooded collection boxes with fake ballots from illegal aliens and dead citizens; members of the so-called ‘deep state’ had been planted in key districts as vote counters to corruptly tip the vote to Biden; some of the voter ballots had been made using bamboo paper, proving they were made in China and, therefore, fraudulent; voting machines from the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems featured software designed to change votes from Trump to Biden, created "at the direction" of the deceased former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, whose family owns the company and has ties to the Clinton Foundation and Democratic mega-donor George Soros…
No evidence for any of those claims ever surfaced despite numerous investigations—including those led by openly pro-Trump Republicans. More than 60 separate lawsuits were filed alleging election interference/voter fraud but were thrown out for lack of standing when the plaintiffs bringing the suits were unable to produce any credible evidence for their claims.
For those of us whose understanding of reality had been shaped by the evidence produced by the bipartisan January 6 Committee, including the direct testimony provided by Republican insiders with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s plot to hold onto power by any means necessary, the video below shows a terrifying moment in American history—one in which the President of the United States directed an inflamed, disinformed mob to foment a coup.
But to those of us whose reality had been shaped by decades of conspiracy theories masquerading as news, the rejection of the Trump team’s lawsuits claiming voter fraud only validated belief in an unfolding international left-wing conspiracy to cheat President Trump and destroy American democracy, and those who participated in the attack on the nation’s capital were not a mob of disinformed insurrectionists but courageous patriots acting heroically to save the republic that we love.
Regardless of which side of the divide you call home, the following video is a painful watch; but I encourage you to see it from beginning to end, as I will refer back to it later as a prime example of how the human brain works to construct reality:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000007606996/capitol-riot-trump-supporters.html
How Democracies Become Dysfunctional
Today, Democrats and Republicans alike routinely describe members of the opposing party as delusional, living in a bubble, and fundamentally misinformed or disinformed about what is happening. And for democracy, that is the most dangerous thing of all. If we do not trust or respect each other, if we view one another as crazy or delusional, then compromise becomes nearly impossible. And without the ability to compromise, progress in a democracy grinds to a halt.
Lyndon Johnson, in less than two terms as president, won passage of a major tax cut, the Clean Air Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and amended Social Security to create Medicare and Medicaid. He presided over major increases in federal funding for education and reformed restrictive immigration laws. Richard Nixon, in his less than two terms as president, ended the draft, moved the US Military to an all-volunteer force, founded the EPA, oversaw the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Mammal Marine Protection Act, helped establish national cancer centers, helped pass Title IX, lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen, and oversaw the peaceful desegregation of southern schools.
It is hardly imaginable in 2022 that Congresspersons, working with each other and the president through reasonable (if sometimes painful) compromise, could effect that kind of muscular progress. But that is exactly what we desperately need now. In the face of almost daily reports of mass shootings, the ever-widening economic gap between rich and poor, crumbling infrastructure, an insecure border, rising levels of systemic corruption, escalating incivility, inflation, and the prospect of AI and automation putting tens of millions of Americans out of work over the coming decade, we need Congress and the president to work together to write new laws, strengthen public trust in our democratic system of government, and return us to an agreed upon understanding of reality with a culturally shared ethos of fairness and civility—especially toward those with whom we disagree.
A dysfunctional system of government opens the door to alternative forms of government. And that is exactly what we see happening now as many Americans and Europeans on the political right are beginning to flirt with autocracy, and many (especially young) people on the left, outraged by the false narrative that things have never been worse for women and ethnic and racial minority groups in America, seem amenable to tearing the whole system down out of sheer frustration without any concrete plan to replace it.
We are not separated from one another based on our intelligence, our desire or efforts to be informed, a tendency toward arrogance, or the functional status of our respective moral compasses. And we are less segregated by race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation than we have ever been. The divide today is not between those who favor the dynamism of the free market and those who favor better regulation of markets to ensure a level playing field of competition, nor is it between those who want a segregated vs. integrated society based on race, religion, or ethnicity. In 2022, we are divided by separate and mutually exclusive narratives about the nature of reality itself.
II. The Science of Meaning
First Principles
Our ability to seamlessly perceive a coherent world, moment by moment, informs our chief state of consciousness in a way that enables us to experience life in real-time. Indeed, from the moment we open our eyes in the morning, we experience the people, objects, and events around us in a way that makes perfect sense without needing to think much. We do not deploy mental tools of memory or engage in deliberative processes to understand the meaning of toothpaste and toothbrush, we simply see-and-do with complete ease and total confidence.
This default state of awareness in which we understand the world around us coherently and effortlessly without having to think may be understood as existing above the level of unconscious information gathering and sorting (cells in our retina registering colors, for example) but below the level of consciously-directed thinking (carefully considering one’s words while composing a Health and Science Briefing on a complex topic, for example).
It is in this default state of awareness (something I refer to as my ‘robot mode’) that we experience most of our feelings and identify with most of our ideas, opinions, and beliefs. But we barely notice it, moving through our lives making the same jokes, repeating the same stories, and duplicating mechanical behaviors in ways that require little to no mental exertion. Sometimes, the things we say and do which seem to spring from us pre-formed, surprise even ourselves.
Homo Sapiens Are Storytellers
Language is the principal tool that we have for consolidating, organizing, and conveying meaning. It enables us to preserve and share knowledge and to create and build upon the received stories about reality that inform our belief systems. New science demonstrates that language is so important for humans that we begin to develop it within hours of being born.
Stories, as Yuval Noah Harari points out to stunning effect in his masterwork, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, form the infrastructure of mind around which our species became able to organize in large numbers—and that is our superpower. For millions of years of evolutionary time, homo Sapiens were not the fiercest, hardiest, or even the smartest animals on this planet. We did not have particularly acute senses of sight, hearing, or smell. Our reproductive process, including the extremely long gestational period, is complex, laborious, low-yield, and, until the last hundred or so years, precariously dangerous. It was our ability to organize in large numbers that gave us the power to dominate every other species of life on earth (including other kinds of humans), and it was our unique ability to tell stories that made such large-scale organization possible.
The sudden evolutionary breakthrough that enabled us to use language to construct imaginary concepts and stories around which large groups of people could organize took place around seventy thousand years ago (the blink of an eye in evolutionary time). The ability to describe the physical world helped us make better sense of it. And this in turn enabled us to ultimately gain control over it. It also gave birth to a brand new world—that of the imagination—where concepts like Gods, glory, nation, destiny, tribe, money, duty, honor, and loyalty exist. To create a civilization in the real (physical) world, we needed first to conceive of the structures needed to support it in the world of our collective imagination.
Before this game-changing evolutionary leap in language, human societies, including those of homo Sapiens, were limited in size to clans of around 100-150 people. Such clans tended to be organized hierarchically under a dominant leader—usually, an alpha male who could set and enforce the rules of the group and maintain order through charisma, violence, or the threat of violence (intimidation). Before the modern technological age, such personal skills were limited in their scope of influence as they required direct contact with every member of the tribe, keeping the size of human communities small.
The birth of the imagination changed everything for homo Sapiens who didn’t have the best tools, the strongest muscles, or the biggest brains. Our success as a species came instead thanks to the organizing effects of imaginary concepts like tribe and territory, under which increasingly larger groups of homo Sapiens began to form and organize. These larger groups, working cooperatively in the service of shared aspirational concepts conveyed through stories, became an unstoppable force. A hundred and fifty of the toughest homo Neanderthalenses or the most clever homo Ergasters were no match for thirty-five hundred well-organized homo Sapiens working in common cause under the story of tribal expansion. This is a critical point that we will come back to. Our species’ superpower lies not so much in our intellectual prowess as in our ability to organize in large numbers and act cooperatively.
How We Create Meaning: The Gestalt Cortex
New science shows that mental acts of meaning that are coherent and effortless—the sort of sensemaking that we engage in most of the time—originate in an area of the brain called the gestalt cortex (GC), located more or less between the ears. The GC receives input from several other regions of the brain including those that mediate vision, hearing, language, and memory.
We do not construct new meanings from the ground up, moment by moment, all day long, out of the countless individual sensations flooding into our minds through our senses. Rather, the GC attaches incoming sensory information to preexisting abstract structures of mind—our beliefs. Beliefs are compound constructs of meaning (hereafter referred to as belief constructs) that can be assembled from and transmitted through stories that evolve as we expand our experience and education.
At the heart of the GC is an area called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) from which most of our conscious knowing derives. The TPJ lights up, for example, on functional MRI, when we see a stranger’s face, to inform us instantaneously about issues of safety or danger, attraction or repulsion, etc. We usually know right away upon greeting someone if they are happy, frightened, upset, or angry. We generally know, too, almost without thinking, whether we like or dislike them, trust or distrust them.
Such calculations are made in the GC by organizing and attaching what we see and hear to preexisting belief constructs. Some are primal (innate), part of our evolutionary history, while other belief constructs are adaptive (learned), cobbled together out of our own life experiences. Collectively, these belief constructs shape the meaning of what we experience in real-time to conform to what we (and our evolutionary predecessors) have come to believe in the past.
This kind of instant knowing, generated in the GC by brain activity in and around the TPJ, occurs so quickly and seamlessly that it feels more like apprehending reality than making calculated interpretations about it. And for the most part, that serves us quite well. Another person’s eyes, nose, chin, and mouth present themselves to us not as separate objects whose meaning requires effortful organization and deliberation but as a coherent whole—as a face. Consider how much time and effort the GC saves us in that regard. And most of the time, when we bump into an old friend (let’s call her Anne), we don’t need to scroll laboriously through a massive memory trove of remembered faces to determine who it is we are looking at. We know instantly who it is. What’s more, from the spontaneous smile that flashes on her face at the moment of encounter, we also know, without having to think, that she is happy to see us.
We take it for granted, but the fact that we can instantly, effortlessly, and confidently be certain, based on facial features and the patterns of their contortion, that we have bumped into our old friend Anne (objective physical reality) and that she is happy to see us (another person’s subjective emotional state) is quite remarkable. Only a select group of mammals can make such calculated understandings. And, like dogs and cats who also possess GCs, we experience these perceptual understandings as factual observations of reality, not as intuitive construals that might (or might not) be correct...
Naive Realism
The phenomenon known as naive realism happens all the time. We move through the world confronting information and the GC makes sense of it for us, filling in (sometimes substantial) blind spots with preconceived belief constructs to create our sense of reality. Take, for example, the following image, which is a small area of a larger photograph:
If asked, What color(s) do you see in this picture? you would be able to note without much mental effort that it is mostly shades of gray with some black circles, specs of white, and a few specs of light blue. You would understand that answer to be more-or-less a factual account—an objective observation of reality—and, as such, have a high degree of confidence in its correctness.
On the other hand, if asked, What specific object is the subject of this picture? the answer would likely come more slowly and require more effort. There are clues like the colors, shapes, dimpled texture, and glossy surface. Go ahead and gather those clues now. Are you able to feel the work of effortful deliberation as you formulate a guess? Do you feel a little less confident in your answer compared to the previous question about which colors are contained in the picture?
Formulating that guess takes place in a different part of the brain—not the GC, but an area behind the forehead called the prefrontal cortex (PC). The PC does not conduct its work instantaneously or intuitively the way the GC does. It processes information more slowly, through deliberation, using logic, reason, and argument. In other words, the PC is the area where we conduct thinking, while the GC is the area where intuiting happens.
We can sense the differing degrees of effort required to perform deliberative thinking (in the PC) compared to intuitive knowing (in the GC) as we do them. Solving a long division problem, for example, feels like much harder work than adding two plus two. Similarly, knowing that a photo contains gray, black, white, and blue comes to us automatically, but formulating a hypothesis as to what the dimpled glossy structure might be requires effortful deliberation.
Through a consciously directed process of associating the visible colors, shapes, and textures with known objects, deploying working memory, a reasonable person might ultimately decide that he/she is looking at a photograph of a golf ball viewed by moonlight. A dermatologist friend of mine guessed that she was looking at a skin lesion in a close-up. Perhaps you saw some other object.
But if you were shown the complete photograph from which the image was taken (see below) and asked the same question (what is the subject of the photograph?), you would undoubtedly have a very different subjective conscious experience. The colors contained in this next image are not altered in any way; the photo is simply blown up to (almost) its original size:
Looking at the complete image, we know instantly and with a high degree of certainty that we are looking at a strawberry tart. We know this before we can even register the words to describe what we see.
The GC makes sense of the world around us by integrating thousands of distinct sensory input elements into a meaningful, coherent whole. Looking at the (nearly) complete photograph, we do not bother to painstakingly run through options to decide whether these are golf balls, skin pores, strawberries, or other things that share physical features. We apprehend the tart much in the way that we do our old friend Anne: we see and know.
Scroll back up and compare the two images again, noting how the area that is objectively gray in the partial image can only be seen as objectively pinkish-red when viewed as part of the complete image. Amazingly, when looking at the complete photograph, the colors that (we know from working memory) attend to strawberries are filled in for us by brain activity in and around the TPJ. A belief construct about reality (strawberries are red) informs what we see.
As Jonathan Gottschall points out in his illuminating book, The Storytelling Animal; How Stories Make Us Human, the amount of data flooding into our minds through the senses is enormous and would be experienced as overwhelmingly chaotic to our higher, slower-processing thinking center, the PC, without some sort of pre-thought mechanism to filter and organize all that data into more manageable, recognizable forms.
The GC provides that organizational filter, instantly aggregating incoming big data into competing nascent construals of meaning and then adjusting the internal tension caused by that competition downward through a recurring decision-making process that progressively favors one preexisting construal over the others. If the GC is unable to make fast sense of data in this way, it defaults to the slower-acting, labor-intensive PC to conduct its non-intuitive deliberative work of thinking and reasoning.
When looking at the full image, sensory information from the retina was quickly associated with a preexisting construct of a strawberry tart that quickly gained support. Evidence validating that construal, including the pinkish-red tone that was hardly apparent in the first photograph, was deployed to validate it, while data that would have favored competing construals were inhibited. This process, known as constraint satisfaction, proceeded until the GC converged decisively upon a single coherent interpretation (it’s a strawberry tart viewed by the blue light of a refrigerator, for example), and, with no further adjustments required to reduce internal tension, we experienced the familiar conscious knowing that we tend to think of as simply observing reality.
In a nutshell, as the gestalt cortex pursues constraint satisfaction, culminating in convergence upon a single coherent interpretation of reality from information flooding in through the senses, a process takes place in which impressions that conform to preexisting constructs of belief are favored while alternative interpretations are suppressed. In other words, constraint satisfaction, the mechanism by which the GC decides what we see as reality, begins, in a sense, ‘scientifically’, with data gathering and aggregation into competing hypothetical construals, but very quickly ends up being directed toward one preexisting belief construct or another by the hand of confirmation bias.
Comfortable but Not Always Correct
So, the GC prioritizes reducing internal system tension by working intuitively toward coherence. Luckily for us, it also happens to get things right most of the time. It is unlikely that Anne is not Anne or that the strawberry tart is not a tart. Its belief constructs act as heuristics (mental shortcuts) that enable us to comfortably experience the world around us in real time without being overwhelmed. But constraint satisfaction, which prioritizes speed and ease over truth and accuracy, can be unreliable when it deploys faulty belief constructs or takes over work that would be better suited to the PC. We will discuss this later in some depth but for now, let’s tuck away the observation that the GC operates intuitively, not rationally, making fast, impulsive associations rather than slow, effortful deliberations which can sometimes cause us to ‘see’ things wrongly.
What’s more, because we tend to experience the GC’s intuitive construals not as best guesses but as observations of reality, we also tend to have higher confidence in its construals than we do in those arrived at through the laborious thinking conducted in the PC. If you have ever experienced how difficult it can sometimes be to accept factual evidence that contradicts some deeply held belief, you know what I mean. In the battle between the intuitive construals of the GC and the rational deliberations of the PC, the former often wins. We will discuss this too in-depth in the next installment, but for now, consider the following: you may not have seen a pinkish-red tone in the first photograph, but you can’t help but see it in the second one.
Finally, because the GC works, in a sense, backward to validate pre-held beliefs, it is easier to form a new intuitive construal than it is to change one that has already been formed. This means that early information has a more impactful influence on our beliefs than does subsequent information, even if the latter is of a clearly higher truth value. The first time we read or hear a new story, its narrative sinks in hooks that make it resistant to facts or the rational deliberations of the PC that might come later. This makes pre-held beliefs very difficult to overturn—even in the face of compelling new evidence.
Most of what we take as observable reality, we simply see and know. We watch a video clip of the events that took place at the Capitol on January 6, and whole worlds of imagination held together by stories based on belief constructs are instantly and effortlessly activated, giving us the feeling that we are observing those events objectively. This is the neurophysiology of naive realism. We all suffer from an irrational sense of confidence in the accuracy of our GC-based perceptions of reality. Naive realism helps explain why we find it surprising (sometimes upsetting) when others see things differently from how we do.
Seeing is Believing
You may recall the controversy over ‘The Dress’ that was a brief internet phenomenon. Here is the picture that started it all:
The above photograph is of a blue and black horizontally striped dress, backlit, taken in the late afternoon. The GC is constantly engaged in a process known as color correction, recalibrating itself on an ongoing basis to adjust to different wavelengths of light and maintain color constancy–the ability to preserve our perception of color identity in the face of changing kinds (natural v. artificial, etc.) and degrees (time of day, sun v. shade, etc.) of light.
Backlighting and shade both have the effect of elongating light’s wavelength, tinting our perception of white to look more blue and of gold to look more black. And it turns out that artificial (incandescent) light, which consists of longer wavelengths similar to shade or backlighting, has the same effect of making white appear blue and gold appear black.
We can tell the dress is backlit but the fact that this picture was taken in the late afternoon is not implicit in the image. Those of us who tend to wake up and go to bed early (larks) experience the world predominantly by bright, natural (shorter wavelength) blue light. The gestalt cortex of such people (I am one of them) would be expected to account for the dress’ colors by favoring the effects of shorter wavelength daylight and discounting the effects of longer wavelength artificial lighting that makes a blue and black striped dress look gold and white when backlit at the end of the day. But to do that, we would have to know that the picture was taken at that time. Because the time of day was not implicit in the photograph, most larks (myself included) assumed the dress was backlit but illuminated by natural daylight. As such, we failed to make the appropriate correction and saw the dress as gold and white. We did not do so consciously, through effortful deliberation. Our GCs did it for us and we simply saw what our GCs told us to see.
Others, like my wife, who tend to spend more waking hours at night (owls), experience more of the world in artificial (incandescent) light which, like the longer wavelength of light at dusk, tends to be more orange or red. We would expect the GCs of such people, without knowing that the picture was taken at dusk, to favor the effects of artificial light and discount the effects of shorter-wavelength natural daylight, thereby making the proper adjustments that would construe the dress as blue and black (which it is).
In other words, larks have been exposed to more bluish sunlight while owls have been exposed to more reddish incandescent light, and our past experiences inform the fast calculations made in the GC. This, it turns out, is what split the perceptions of the internet community resulting in the debate over ‘The Dress.’
Critically for the sake of this discussion, and typical of my group of larks, I not only saw the dress as gold and white but am still to this day unable to make myself see it as blue and black, even though I know the truth. My wife, equally locked into seeing it the other way around, was unable to see either white or gold no matter how hard she squinted to try to see things my way. “Come on,” she said, “you’re crazy, it’s obviously blue and black,” and I felt the same way in reverse.
Our subjective reality is instantly, effortlessly, and coherently assembled for us by the GC, the construals of which are substantially informed by our education and past experiences through a process designed not to seek the truth necessarily, but to reduce internal system tension. We believe what we see and what we see is not easily altered by data, nor by the arguments based on that data.
Things do not fall faster because they weigh more but it feels intuitively like they ought to. Each time someone flips a coin, we know that there is a 50% chance it will come up tails but if someone gets heads five times in a row, it intuitively feels like the odds of the coin coming up heads again on the next flip is a little higher than 50% (there’s a trend here…). And while larks like me may acknowledge that the dress is blue and black, we cannot see it that way no matter how many times we look at the photograph. In terms of what feels real, the construals of the GC which, once formed, are resistant to logic and data, consistently override the rational construals of our thinking center (the PC) to inform our subjective experience of reality.
We are often surprised when others see things differently because we tend to experience what we see as objectively true rather than as subjective, intuitive construals. It can provoke feelings of disbelief, suspiscion, sometimes even anger. When we feel that we are witnessing reality objectively, we cannot help but assume that something must be wrong—perceptually or morally—with those who fail to see the world as we do.
Seeing is Not Limited to Vision
A) Psychological ‘seeing’
In the previous section, I presented some examples of how visual perception is routinely (if not always correctly) construed by the GC as objective reality. I also introduced a second kind of ‘seeing’ in the form of psychological perception: I can ‘see’ that my old friend Anne is happy to see me by the smile on her face.
Creating a theoretical construct about the internal psychological state of others, referred to in psychology as Theory of Mind or, more specifically in this case, social attribution interpretation, is a skill that humans develop in childhood, usually at around age four.
Some people with autism spectrum disorder lack the ability to develop Theory of Mind/social attribution interpretation which can hinder their ability to experience empathy and cause them difficulty in navigating social interactions.
We engage in social attribution interpretation or psychological ‘seeing’ all the time without thinking about it, generating meaning from the interactions we have with others. It occurs with much the same instantaneous and effortless coherence as visual seeing. Anne is happy to see me feels more like observing a fact (something akin to looking at a strawberry tart, for example) than constructing an interpretation of reality through deliberative processes (something akin to formulating a guess about whether the subject matter of photographic image is a golf ball, pores of the skin, a strawberry, or, something else).
We engage in psychological ‘seeing’ all the time, attributing motivations, feelings, ideas, and myriad personal qualities to those around us via real-time construals conducted automatically in the GC. As mentioned above, this is important for our psycho-emotional well-being. But instant, effortless sensemaking also has another important function: self-preservation. The ability to instantly detect danger by ‘seeing’ anger and/or aggression in others is a critical skill needed for survival. The sooner we are able to sense the presence of a threat, the more time we have to get away, prepare for self-defense, or formulate some other self-protective strategy. The construals of the GC are there, in part, to enable us to make the kind of quick decisions that help us to survive.
But because each of our educations and lived experiences are different from everyone else’s, we don’t all ‘see’ the same story or detect the same threats when observing a person, situation, or event. Take, for example, the following short video, created in 1944 by social psychologists Heider and Simmel (please double-click on the image and watch the video before proceeding):
When research subjects made to watch this video were asked to describe what they saw taking place, they almost invariably (more than 95% of the time) ascribed anthropomorphic feelings and agency (Theory of Mind) to the video’s simple geometric figures, referring to them as though they were people, with motives and emotions. They told stories rich with drama and meaning.
There were some common elements to the stories the subjects ‘saw’. For example, most ‘saw’ the triangles as males and the circle as a female. That construal conforms to a societal convention often seen on the doors of public restrooms which likely served as an unconscious experiential primer (more about primers in Part III of this series). But while some subjects ‘saw’ a love triangle gone wrong, culminating in violence borne of rage and despair, others ‘saw’ friends sticking together to fend off a bully. Still, others ‘witnessed’ an elaborate tale about a cuckolded husband pushed to defend the only thing he had left after having been dumped: his house. The stories that we ‘see’ when observing events, it seems, as with colors, depend significantly upon our past experiences, education, and, as it turns out, our fears (more about this as well in PART III).
The construals of the GC have profound effects on how we organize our lives. At this point, it probably would not surprise you to learn that when the study subjects who ‘saw’ a jilted husband defending his home were introduced to those who ‘saw’ friends sticking together to fend off a bully, a kind of tribal discord between them ensued. And, of course, the effects of discordant psychological ‘seeing’ reverberate well beyond differing interpretations of an old silent cartoon...
We routinely ‘see’ events in highly idiosyncratic ways, creating stories about others, including our pets, imbued with motives and emotions. The stories created in the GC help shape our understanding of reality, including our politics. It is the tendency of the GC, especially when witnessing violent or tumultuous events, to construct stories rich with moralistic meaning, often featuring villains and heroes, in a manner consistent with mythological archetypes. The use of symbolism and the consistent presence of recurring archetypical motifs provide structure and coherence to the chaos, reducing internal stress and making the experience more tolerable. Remember, the GC wants to be right but that is not its goal; the GC’s highest priority is to get a fast answer that reduces internal conflict.
As evidenced by the varied interpretations of the Heider-Simmel film and the debate over ‘The Dress’, that construal process often splits the world into camps. In the US, many who watched the January 6 attack on the Capital unfold on video ‘saw’ the police acting as heroes and the rioters as villains but others ‘saw’ the police acting as villains and the rioters as heroes. I will explore this further in Part II of this series and examine other forms of ‘seeing.’ Until then, if you watched the first video in this series with anxiety and outrage directed at the rioters, it might be of value to familiarize yourself with the ‘deep state’ conspiracy theory which can help you to understand why others were outraged by the police; and if you watched the first video with admiration for the rioters, it might be of value to watch the following three and a half minute video which can help you to understand why others were outraged by the rioters:
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