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 office in Naples, 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 it was a second sign, reading:
“And if we have to listen to why you don’t you believe that 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 because they were cathartic; 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 you understand infectious disease transmission better than doctors and scientists do, then you must be either so stupid or so arrogant that you deserve to be fined.
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 of 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 big pharma and an utterly corrupted U.S. government seeking to constrain the liberty of people all over the world. That is a stunning conspiracy theory. One for which at least some credible evidence should have been uncovered by now. Given its global reach, at least one whistleblower from among the literally millions of people working in science, medicine, pharma, and public health who would have to have been holding such a massive secret should reasonably be expected to have surfaced…
But it is also just as certain that, on the whole, such people are neither less intelligent 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 actually want me to hang signs at my office meant to ridicule or humiliate them. Rather, like many of us, she is simply baffled and frustrated by the expanding depth and breadth of a complex societal problem that is difficult to articulate in a way that feels satisfying. We make sense of things through language and without the right words to capture exactly what is happening, many of us find ourselves feeling continuously vaguely anxious. “I don’t know what to say,” she offered recently in a rare tone of pessimistic dismay, “people just seem to have gone crazy.”
It is a sentiment that I hear a lot lately from smart, well-meaning people on both sides of the political divide. One that seems to graze the problem in our midst without quite hitting the intended target. Like her joke, it bleats a tiny amount of steam out of the stress kettle without removing it from the heat. We all know people who seem to be talking and thinking “crazy” but whom we know are in fact not crazy at all, and that is a wrinkle that begs smoothing...
This Health and Science Briefing is the first installment in a three-part series that focuses on the science of how our brains construct reality and how divergent constructs about the nature of reality itself – and not our actual politics – are what is most dividing us today. I will present compelling classical and current research demonstrating how our brain’s hardware is ideally suited to run conspiratorial software programs, and 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 addiction.
I will make the case that the reason we see things differently has nothing to do with intelligence, arrogance, or whether or not we hold a sincere desire to do good, but is in fact, the predictable outcome of decades of discrete and contradictory information diets, one of which harnesses the power of metaphor to promote conspiratorial disinformation narratives that have been scientifically engineered to create circuits of thought and conceptual apparatuses which I refer to as belief constructs, within an area of the brain that functions to construct meaning quickly and intuitively.
In a supplement to the final installment, I will propose a remedy for the problem of conspiratorial disinformation that is at the heart of our national divide and identify a possible exit ramp along the perilous road of civil unrest that we as Americans have been set upon by the mass consumption of mutually-exclusive information diets.
Yesterday and Today
I could not have imagined, in the 1960s of my childhood, that within my lifetime, ordinary people like me 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 at all times. I also could not have foreseen that the citizenry of this great country, politically and civically engaged as we were then, would ever allow the two major political parties, like the blades of a scissor, to shred the conceptual fabric of a cohesive society mightily straining to find its moral center.
Yet, here we are, unwitting participants in a mass experiment to see what happens when we invest more of our imagination in virtual realities and virtual communities and less in our real lives and neighbors; when there’s more profit in manipulating humanity’s most destructive emotions than in finding ways to improve our collective health, security, and happiness; when we allow our identities to be subtly split into real and online selves; when we invest more in tribal narratives of victimhood and retribution than in the broader narrative of an American community that transcends tribalism; when we receive more applause and admiration for taking for ourselves than for working to uplift others; when flouting the rules and norms that hold civil society together is cheered as courageous or patriotic; when faith in the institutions of science and government is framed as naive; when mean-spirited trolling passes for entertainment; when building one’s brand is prioritized over building one’s good reputation; when concepts like sacrifice, humility, respect, honor, and duty seem quaintly from another era; when lying and other forms of corruption become normalized; when our opinions of our political representatives drop so low that we expect almost nothing good from them; when vulgarity passes for authenticity; 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 are deeper than philosophy, race, or sex. Under the protective umbrella of free speech, a coherent, self-reinforcing, separate universe of disinformation and groundless conspiracy theories, advanced through the use of metaphor and carefully nurtured into existence by political actors, has become the touchstone of reality for a third or more 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 the American experiment of self-government than the steady, poisonous drip of politically motivated disinformation, engineered for the purpose of eroding confidence and trust in the pillars of liberal democratic society, including science, medicine, government, journalism, and, perhaps most importantly, each other.
I. The Current State of Meaning
Living in Bubbles
At the foundational level, democracy is a form of government in which progress is achieved through compromise. Democratic governments work best when no one quite gets what they want. Citizens in high-functioning representative democratic societies learn to be satisfied with progress, not perfection. Elected officials with differing and sometimes opposing 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 candidate or party losing without falling apart and 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 face-to-face with the fact that we and our party are wrong sometimes and the people on the other side see at least some 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 others. But such things cannot be legislated. They manifest not as laws but as expressions of societal norms. And while they require painstaking work over long periods of time to establish, such norms can be torn down quickly. Democracy is powerful but it is also fragile, and the enemies of democracy know it.
Compromise, the irreducible unit of democracy, requires robust levels of mutual trust and respect
I can meet you halfway if I trust that you are a rational, good-faith actor with a different life experience and a different perspective on how best to solve mutually agreed-upon problems. But where is the middle ground between a patient who is certain 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 conspiracy cult? What happens if living in bubbles causes our respective understanding of reality to become so divergent that we cannot agree on what the problems even are?
For those who watched the January 6 Congressional Hearings, there can be little doubt that a plot to gaslight the American public by denying that he had lost the election had been the Trump team’s plan all along. He told us that things had been rigged and asked us to fight for him well before the election had taken place without presenting any credible evidence to support that claim. The Committee showed video clips of several of Trump’s closest advisers explaining how, in the days and weeks before the election, when polls favored their opponent, it became clear that they were going to lose but Trump and his top legal and political advisors had a plan: they would simply claim that they had won, not lost, and then fire up an armed mob, already primed by conspiracy theories promoted by Trump himself, to create mayhem at the US Capitol to prevent the certification of the election through intimidation and violence. Trump, still acting as president, would then leverage the mayhem to invoke Marshall Law, calling in the military to seize voting machines in key states. He would then dispatch hand-picked loyalists to conduct a sham recount that would ‘validate’ non-existent voter fraud while slates of sham electors in battleground states, trained ahead of time by Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s election campaign, would engage in a kind of political cosplay acting as legitimate electors to pronounce Trump the winner. This is not a left-wing false conspiracy theory. It was the sworn testimony of several of Trump’s closest Republican allies.
But to those whose only knowledge of the January 6 Committee’s Hearings came from partisan recaps on Fox News or other conservative media platforms, news of the Committee’s work was dwarfed by a baseless story about rampant voter fraud. Democratic Party agents, they claimed, had flooded ballot boxes with fake ballots from illegal aliens and dead citizens. Members of the so-called ‘deep state’ had been planted as vote counters to tip districts where Trump won towards Biden. Some of the fake ballots had been made in China and printed on bamboo paper. Voting machines from the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems featured software created "at the direction" of deceased former President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, whose family partially owned the company, to rig his own election results, and the company, which also has ties to the Clinton Foundation and Democratic megadonor George Soros, had been instructed by them to similarly rig the US Presidential Election in favor of Biden… In short, there had been a vast, international left-wing conspiracy to steal the election from Trump, thereby putting an end to American democracy. No evidence for any of these claims was ever made public despite numerous investigations led by openly partisan pro-Trump Republicans.
For those of us whose understanding of reality was shaped by evidence including the direct testimony provided by Republican insiders with first-hand knowledge of Trump’s desperate plot to hold onto power by any means necessary, the video below shows a terrifying moment in American history – one in which the president directed a deluded, disinformed mob to foment a coup. But to those of us whose reality had been shaped by decades of conspiratorial disinformation narratives masquerading as news, the existence of an international left-wing conspiracy to cheat President Trump validates and vindicates the actions of those who participated in the attack on the nation’s capital, and the video below documents a moment of national pride in which courageous patriots put their lives on the line for their country. It’s a tough watch but I encourage you to see this video through to the end:
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 really happening in the world. 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 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 compromise, could effect that kind of muscular progress. But that is exactly what we desperately need today. 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, reinstitute trust in the system, and return us to an agreed upon understanding of reality and an ethos of fairness and civility. A dysfunctional democracy opens the door to alternative forms of government. And that is exactly what we see happening now as many Americans and Europeans are giving autocracy a second look.
We are not separated from one another based on our intelligence, our desire 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. In 2022, we are divided by separate and mutually exclusive narratives about the nature of reality itself. To understand how we got here, we must begin our discussion with the science of meaning:
II. The Science of Meaning
First Principles
Our capacity to effortlessly and seamlessly perceive a coherent world, moment by moment informs our chief state of consciousness, enabling 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 sense without the need for much thought. We do not deploy mental tools of memory or engage in deliberative processes to understand the meaning of our toothpaste and toothbrush – we simply see and do with complete ease and 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 nonconscious information gathering and processing (cells in our retina registering colors, for example, or reflexively withdrawing a hand from a hot stove) but below the level of effortful, consciously-directed thinking (carefully considering one’s words while composing a Health and Science Briefing, for example).
It is in this default state of awareness that we experience most of our feelings, ideas, opinions, and beliefs. It is also the state in which we conduct most of our speech and behavior. We barely notice the way that we move through our lives making the same jokes, repeating the same stories, and duplicating mechanical behaviors in a highly stereotypical way that requires almost no mental exertion. Most of what we say and do seems rather to spring from us pre-formed (if, all too often, imperfectly articulated) with hardly any effort at all.
Homo Sapiens Are Storytellers
Language is the principal tool that we have for consolidating, organizing, and conveying meaning. Words enable us to preserve and share our 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 to humans that we begin to develop it within hours of having been born.
Stories, as Yuval Noah Harari points out to stunning effect in his masterwork, Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, create the infrastructure of beliefs around which we (homo Sapiens) are able to organize in large numbers, and this ability is our superpower. For millions of years of evolutionary time, we were not the fiercest, smartest, hardiest animals alive on this planet. We did not have the most acute senses of sight or hearing. Human reproduction is painstaking, complex, slow, and until the last hundred or so years, dangerous. It was our ability to organize in large numbers that gave homo Sapiens the ability to dominate every other species of life on earth – including other kinds of humans, and storytelling, an ability that is unique to us and came into being during a very recent chapter in our history as a species, was the transformative evolutionary step that enabled mass cooperation.
The sudden evolutionary breakthrough in our capacity to use language to construct imaginary concepts and engage in storytelling took place a mere seventy thousand years or so ago (the blink of an eye in evolutionary time). Stories helped us to better describe, make sense of, and ultimately gain control over the physical world. At the same time, it gave birth to a brand new one – the world of the imagination – where concepts like corporations, Gods, glory, destiny, tribe, money, duty, honor, and loyalty were born. To create a civilization in the real (physical) world, we needed first to conceive of the structures that support it in the world of our collective imagination, the currency of which is storytelling.
Before this evolutionary leap of language that gave birth to the collective imagination, homo Sapiens and other human societies were limited in size to groups of around 150 people. Such groups tended to be organized hierarchically under a dominant leader, usually an alpha male, who could enforce the rules of the group and maintain order through charisma, violence, or the threat of violence (intimidation). Before the age of technology, such tools were limited in their scope of influence by the necessity of direct interpersonal contact which kept the size of human communities small.
The imagination changed that for homo Sapiens who were not the strongest or the most clever among the many different humans that once coexisted contemporaneously (if quite non-peaceably) on Earth for more than a hundred millennia. They were also not the best adapted to the cold or heat. They didn’t have the best tools or the biggest brains. Our success as a species came rather thanks to the organizing effects of imaginary concepts like tribe and territory under which increasingly larger groups of homo Sapiens began to form.
These larger groups, working together in the service of imaginary stories whose meaning extended beyond themselves 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 imaginary construct of tribal expansion. This is a critical point that we will come back to. Our superpower lies not merely in our intellectual power and certainly not in our physical prowess, but rather in our ability to organize in large numbers and act cooperatively under the rubric of imaginary concepts, such as destiny, revenge, nation, and tribe, disseminated through the act of storytelling.
How We Create Meaning: The Gestalt Cortex
New science shows that mental acts of meaning that are coherent and effortless 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 in through the 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 are assembled from and transmitted through stories that evolve as we expand our experience and education.
At the heart of the GC is the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). It is from here that most of our conscious knowing derives. The TPJ lights up, for example, when we see another person’s face, informing us instantaneously about issues of safety (or danger), attraction (or repulsion), etc. We know right away upon seeing someone’s face if they are happy, frightened, upset, or angry. We generally know too, almost instantaneously, whether we like or dislike them, trust or distrust them. Such calculations are made in the GC by organizing and attaching what we see to the belief constructs cobbled together from what we have seen before, shaping the meaning of images, words, and events in the present time to conform to what they have meant to us in the past.
This kind of instant knowing, generated by brain activity in and around the TPJ, happens so quickly and seamlessly that it feels more like apprehending reality than making calculated interpretations about it based on our past experiences. And for the most part, this serves us quite well. Another person’s eyes, nose, chin, and mouth present themselves to us not as separate objects whose meaning requires organization and deliberation but as a coherent whole – as a face. And most of the time, when we bump into an old friend (let’s call her Anne) at a party, we don’t need to scroll effortfully through a massive memory trove of remembered faces to determine who it is we are looking at. Luckily, most of the time we know in an instant that it’s Anne. And, from her spontaneous smile, we also know without having to think that she is happy to see us. That is to say, we are as quickly and confidently certain, based on her pattern of facial muscular contraction that Anne is happy to see us (another person’s subjective emotional state) as we are of the fact that she is our old friend, Anne (an objective physical reality). We experience our perceptions, created instantaneously for us by the GC, as factual representations of reality rather than as intuitive construals. And we do so without giving it the slightest thought.
Naive Realism
This phenomenon, known as naive realism, happens all the time. We confront data and the gestalt cortex makes sense of it for us, filling in (sometimes substantial) blind spots with preconceived belief constructs about 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? we are likely to respond effortlessly: it is dark gray with black circles, specs of white, and a few specs of light blue in the central area. We understand this to be an objective observation of reality and as such, have a high degree of confidence in our answer.
On the other hand, if asked, What is it that you are looking at in this picture? our answer would likely be a little less instantaneous and effortless. There are clues such as the colors, shapes, dimpled texture, and glossy surface. We would have to gather those clues and, through a process of effortful deliberation, formulate a guess.
The mental process of formulating such a guess takes place in a different brain area behind the forehead called the prefrontal cortex (PC). The PC does not conduct its work instantaneously or effortlessly the way the GC does. It requires time and demands that we make mental exertion. We can sense the differing degrees of processing resources required to perform different mental tasks as we are doing them. Performing long division in one’s head, for example, feels like harder work than choosing what to eat from a familiar menu. Knowing that the face we are seeing belongs to our old friend comes to us automatically while hazarding a guess as to what the dimpled glossy structure might be requires engaged, effortful calculation. Through a consciously directed process of evaluating colors, shapes, and textures, and employing working memory, a reasonable person might ultimately arrive at the subjective interpretation that what we are looking at in the previous photo is a golf ball viewed by moonlight. An aesthetician friend of mine guessed that she was looking at facial skin pores in a close-up. Perhaps you saw some other object.
But if we were shown the complete photograph from which the image was taken (see below) and asked the same question, we would undoubtedly have an entirely different conscious experience:
From the complete image, we know instantly, effortlessly, and with a high degree of certainty that we are looking at a strawberry tart.
The GC makes sense of the world around us by integrating various distinct sensory input elements into a meaningful, singular whole. Looking at the complete photograph, we do not painstakingly run through options comparing whether these are golf balls, skin pores, strawberries, or some other thing that shares certain physical features. We just see the tart much in the way that we see our old friend Anne. Viewing the complete photograph, the colors that we know from experience attend to strawberries are filled in for us by brain activity in and around the TPJ. Scroll back up and note how the part of the image that seemed objectively gray and black in the partial image can now only be seen as objectively pinkish-red when viewed as part of the complete image.
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 perceived as chaotic and overwhelming to our higher, slower-processing, thinking center, the PC. We need a powerful filter through which to organize all that data and the GC is that organizational filter, managing incoming big data by instantly aggregating it into competing, primitive construals of meaning and then adjusting the internal tension created by that competition downward through a recurring decision-making process that progressively favors the validation of preexisting construals over the formulation of new beliefs. If the GC is unable to make instantaneous sense of data, it defaults to the slower-acting, labor-intensive PC for deliberation. You may have experienced this when you looked at the first picture. However, the GC does not like to defer to the PC and will often jump to conclusions even when it has less-than-perfect data.
When viewing the full image, incoming sensory information from the retina might initially be slightly more consistent with one or another competing interpretation (a golf ball, a strawberry…) but as one interpretation that better aligns with preexisting constructs emerges, it quickly gains support and data that validate it are reinforced while evidence for competing interpretations is inhibited. This process, known as constraint satisfaction, proceeds until no further adjustments are required to reduce internal tension, at which point the GC, having effectively converged upon a single coherent construal, provides us with the conscious experience that we tend to think of as simply observing ‘reality’ (this is a picture of a strawberry tart). This point bears repeating: as the gestalt cortex pursues constraint satisfaction, culminating in convergence upon a single coherent interpretation of reality from information flooding in from the senses, a process takes place in which impressions (and stories) that conform to preexisting constructs of belief are favored while alternative interpretations are suppressed.
In other words, constraint satisfaction may begin scientifically with data gathering and unbiased aggregation into competing hypothetical construals but it ends up being directed by the hand of confirmation bias. The GC seeks to lower internal system tension as it works toward coherence. By instantly constructing meaning this way, the GC helps us to avoid feeling anxious and overwhelmed. However, while constraint satisfaction is effective at reducing internal stress, it does not solve for or prioritize the truth or accuracy of its construals the way that slow, rational deliberative processing in the PC does. As a result, the belief constructs generated by the GC tend to be less reliable. Ironically, however, because the GC conducts its work so seamlessly and effortlessly, we tend to feel more confident in its construals of reality than we do in those arrived at through slow, deliberative, rational thought conducted in the PC. This is important as we will see later.
Additionally, because the GC works, in a sense, backward, to validate pre-held beliefs, it is easier to form an initial subjective 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 higher truth value. Initial construals sink in hooks that can sometimes be impervious to the more effortful rational deliberations of the prefrontal cortex that might come later, making pre-held beliefs resistant to being overturned by new information or facts.
Above the level of pre-conscious reflex but below the level of laborious, consciously directed thought is where we spend most of our waking time. This state of effortless coherent experiencing is our home base. It is here that most of the stories that inform our lives with meaning reside. And those stories are the source of most of our ideas, opinions, and beliefs.
This is how we understand most of what we take to be reality. We just see and know, believing that we are observing the world objectively. I am describing here the neurophysiology of naive realism–an irrational sense of confidence in our perception of reality that makes us resistant to challenging our beliefs even when strong contradictory evidence is presented to us. Naive realism is also what causes us to register surprise when others see things in ways other than we do. It is irrational because, as the previous example of the strawberry tart demonstrates, what seems like objective reality (gray and black) isn’t always so (pinkish red).
Seeing is Believing
You may recall the controversy over ‘The Dress’ that was a brief internet phenomenon:
The above photograph is of a blue and black striped dress, backlit, taken in the late afternoon just as dusk was beginning to descend. 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 (and object) identity in the face of changing types (natural v. artificial, etc.) and degrees of light (time of day, sun v. shade, etc.).
For example, 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 at near dusk 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 effect of longer wavelength artificial lighting that makes a blue and black striped dress look gold and white when backlit at dusk – but only if that was implicit in the image, which it was not. Most larks (myself included) therefore, 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 see what the GC tells us that we 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 past experience informs the fast calculations made in the GC which, 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 unable to make myself see it as blue and black, even now that I know the truth. And 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 in an effort 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.
I recall us confronting the image together and disagreeing (which caused an unpleasant sensation in my stomach and tension in my upper shoulders and neck). Then, my PC took over: Tricia (my wife) is widely acknowledged as a talented interior designer and a color expert. Perhaps, I deliberated effortfully, there is something wrong with how I’m seeing this. Do I suffer from some measure of color blindness as my father did? I wondered.
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 stories that we subsequently generate from that data in the PC through effortful thinking.
My mode of thinking is scientific. I am used to accepting as facts things that do not seem to be true. Things do not fall faster because they weigh more, even though it feels intuitively like they ought to. Each time someone flips a coin, I 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 tails on the next flip is a little less than that. And I acknowledge that the dress is blue and black but I cannot see it that way when I look at the photograph. In terms of what seems real to me, the construals of my GC which, once formed, are resistant to logic and data, consistently override the rational construals of my thinking center (the PC).
Moreover, as my wife’s and my mutual disbelief at the other’s respective perceptual interpretation demonstrated, because we tend to experience what we see as objective perceptions rather than subjective construals, we are often surprised by (and even, at times, suspicious of) others who see things differently. When we believe that we are witnessing reality objectively, we cannot help but assume 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 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 ‘see’ that my old friend Anne is happy to see.
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.
As an interesting aside, people with autism often lack the capacity to develop Theory of Mind/social attribution interpretation–something that can cause difficulty appropriately navigating social interactions.
We engage in social attribution interpretation or psychological ‘seeing’ all the time without thinking about it. It is what enables us to create meaning from the interactions we have with others. And 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 an image of a glossy, dimpled, grey and black object with specs of blue and white is a golf ball, pores of the skin, or, something else).
We ‘see’ psychologically all the time, attributing motivations, feelings, ideas, and other personal qualities to those around us via real-time construals conducted automatically by the GC. As mentioned above, this is important for our psycho-emotional well-being but instant, effortless sensemaking also has another important function. Being able to detect danger is a time-sensitive matter and identifying anger and/or aggression coming from others is a critical skill needed for self-protection. The sooner we can sense the presence of a threat, the more time we have to get away, prepare ourselves for self-defense, or formulate some other self-protection 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 our education and experiences are each a little different from everyone else’s, we don’t always ‘see’ the same story when observing a person, situation, or event as others do. 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 were asked to describe what they saw taking place in this video, they almost invariably (more than 95% of the time) ascribed anthropomorphic feelings and agency to the video’s simple geometric figures, referring to them as though they were people with goals, motives, and emotions. They told stories rich with drama and meaning.
There were some common elements to these stories. 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 constructed an elaborate tale about domestic violence or a cuckolded husband pushed to the brink. The stories we ‘see’ when observing events, it seems, as with colors and objects, depend significantly upon our past experiences, education, fears, and individual tendencies toward different modes of thinking (more about this as well in PART III).
This has profound effects on how we organize our lives. At this point, it probably would not surprise you to learn that when the subjects who ‘saw’ a love triangle gone wrong were introduced to those who ‘saw’ friends sticking together to fend off a bully, discord 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 and tumultuous events, to construct stories rich with moralistic meaning, often featuring villains and heroes, providing structure and coherence to the chaos, thereby reducing internal stress and making the experience more tolerable.
However, as with 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 three-part series with anxiety and outrage, it might be of value to familiarize yourself with the ‘deep state’ conspiracy theory; and if you watched it with admiration, you may benefit from watching this Three and a half minute video:
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