(2012) in short they show people protest videos and tell each that the protest is about something different. Depending on their ‘inherent biases’ they answer questions about said protest differently. Ergo a video cannot “speak for itself”
Questions, yes, but specifically questions about the facts in the video (not merely "what should happen to the protesters or police?").
"As one would expect, these differences in case-disposition judgments are mirrored in the subjects’ responses to the fact-perception items. Whereas only 39% of the hierarchical communitarians perceived that the protestors were blocking the pedestrians in the abortion clinic condition, for example, 74% of them saw blocking in the recruitment center condition. Only 45% of egalitarian individualists, in contrast, saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, whereas in the abortion clinic condition 76% of them did. Fully 83% of hierarchical individualists saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, up from 62% in the abortion clinic condition; a 56% majority of egalitarian communitarians saw blocking in that condition, yet only 35% saw such conduct in the recruitment center condition. Responses on other items--such as whether the protestors 'screamed in the face' of pedestrians--displayed similar patterns."
I think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago.
Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones.
Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor.
Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
My tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.
The abstract:
> “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’
group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con-
ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of
facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro-
tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration.
Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out-
side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those
who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.
I think this (from near the end) is also noteworthy (based on the two quotes from the late Justice Scalia at the beginning of the article):
>Still another point illustrated by Justice Scalia’s reactions is the ubiquity of cultural cognition. The disposition to form perceptions of fact congenial to one’s values isn’t a pathological personality trait or a style of reasoning integral to a distinctive, and distinctively malign, ideology. (Indeed, the appeal of those sorts of surmises could themselves be seen as evidence of the disposition to form culturally congenial perceptions of how the world works.) Precisely because cultural cognition doesn’t discriminate on the basis of worldview, members of all groups can anticipate that as a result of it they, like Justice Scalia, will likely find themselves members of a disappointed minority in some empirical or factual debates and a member of the incredulous majority in others.
The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
> The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
Yeah this seems political, and it is, but it's really about cognitive bias. Reframing the thing in terms of daily workplace dynamics is pretty easy: just convert "legally consequential facts" to "technically consequential facts" and convert "cultural outlook" to "preferred tech-stack". Now you're in a planning and architecture meeting which is theoretically easier to conduct but where everyone is still working hard to confirm their bias.
How to "fix" this in other people / society at large is a difficult question, but in principle you can imagine decision-systems (like data-driven policies and a kind of double-blind experimental politics) that's starting to chip away at the problem. Even assuming that was a tractable approach with a feasible transition plan, there's another question. What to do in the meanwhile?
IOW, assuming the existence of citizens/co-workers that have more persistent non-situational goals and stable values that are fairly unbothered by "group commitments".. how should they participate in group dynamics that are still going to basically be dominated by tribalism? There's really only a few strategies, including stuff like "check out completely", "become a single issue voter", or "give up all other goals and dedicate your entire life to educating others". All options seem quite bad for individuals and the whole. If group-commitment is fundamentally problematic, maybe a way to recognize a "good" faction is by looking for one that is implicitly dedicated to eliminating itself as well as the rival factions.
Brings to mind the Errol Morris investigation of a pair of historic photos in which the photographer may or may not have altered the scene to amp up the drama.
Can we really conclude that people "see" what they say they see? I think most people would not think twice about saying "protesters did not block the road" when in fact they know full well protesters blocked the road and they really mean "protesters blocked the road and that's good actually".
There's a strange pattern of die hard obstinence, even in the face of basic and common facts that we as as society until fairly recently all agreed upon. The reason is that works, if you admit fault/guilt then the usual consequences follow. If they remain obstinate, there's a chance they can project their crime on someone else which doesn't really work except it does retain for them a certain level of public support, from those who "see" what they want to see.
I think there's a real deficit in research on and understanding motivated cognition, and a lot of blurriness about attitudes versus belief versus perception. I don't just mean anything political, I mean things including physical pain and all sorts of things. When someone states something, it's very difficult to distinguish between "this is honestly what I saw or felt" versus "this is what I wanted to see or feel". When you get into the fact that consensus can be wrong, it leads to all sorts of issues.
It would be nice to have some kind of way to discriminate at what point in the percept -> attitude -> construal chain (which is probably more of a feedback loop) we are.
The tricky part is that people don't necessarily report what they see as what they see, and you can't really look inside their brains to get at what they meaningfully perceive.
A good example of this was the inauguration crowd size photos where people who were unfamiliar with the topic reported a unified perception on which crowd was bigger based purely on the photos. People who knew what the photos were of varied their conclusion based upon their political stance.
One conclusion you could draw from this is that their beliefs were altering their perception, but how would you distinguish that from people altering their expression of what they saw based upon their beliefs?
That basketball gorilla experiment seems like pretty solid evidence that people only notice what they expect to see and are primed to pay attention to, even in situations with no ideological component.
Do you think an officer who feared for this life would have used a casual stance with one hand on the gun and the other with a phone, then casually walked away, or would he have held the gun with two hands as trained to make sure he hit his mark?
Or maybe your point is simply that because dissenters exist that their critiques are valid?
There are also people who think the 2020 election was rigged simply because a loudmouth claims it to be. They’re wrong.
I don't think so, given the drastically different takes on something that seemed quite obvious to me after rewatching the video many times.
It was quite clear that many takes, on both sides, seemed to bypass the events in the video and jump straight to whatever ideologically-driven interpretation they needed to be true.
On the contrary, if I learned something from the Rittenhouse case is that there's a type of person who, when stuff like this happens, doesn't care about video at all, they just grab the narrative and go with it.
I'm as liberal as they come and when I watched all the Rittenhouse videos, I thought it was pretty clear that he defended himself in a reasonable fashion when he was being attacked by a mob
Except that if you poll any MAGA person, including basically anyone running the federal government right now, it seems that they see a video of a protester trying to run down an officer.
As a person who always identifies as an outsider to literally every group, I cringe all the time when I see all the own goals all groups make and then I cringe again when they double down.
I'm sorry, but it is deeply ironic for you of all people to be posting this given your statements on the ICE shooting not even 24 hours ago [1] [2]. You are quite literally the exact basis for this research in question.
This guy has made half a dozen comments saying her murder was justified, but some views seem to be immune to moderation on here. I've had dang or tomhow come at me for waaay less (and I'm not saying I was in the right).
In this particular instance I don't think he's wrong, The posts in the links could be considered evidence of how pervasive the outrage/blindness effect is.
(2012) in short they show people protest videos and tell each that the protest is about something different. Depending on their ‘inherent biases’ they answer questions about said protest differently. Ergo a video cannot “speak for itself”
Questions, yes, but specifically questions about the facts in the video (not merely "what should happen to the protesters or police?").
"As one would expect, these differences in case-disposition judgments are mirrored in the subjects’ responses to the fact-perception items. Whereas only 39% of the hierarchical communitarians perceived that the protestors were blocking the pedestrians in the abortion clinic condition, for example, 74% of them saw blocking in the recruitment center condition. Only 45% of egalitarian individualists, in contrast, saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, whereas in the abortion clinic condition 76% of them did. Fully 83% of hierarchical individualists saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, up from 62% in the abortion clinic condition; a 56% majority of egalitarian communitarians saw blocking in that condition, yet only 35% saw such conduct in the recruitment center condition. Responses on other items--such as whether the protestors 'screamed in the face' of pedestrians--displayed similar patterns."
I think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago.
Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones.
Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor.
Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
3 replies →
Is this why the same protest videos can be recycled multiple times for multiple different purposes
This is also why the era of pervasive videotaping of everything hasn’t ended disputes over basic facts of what happened.
13 replies →
My tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.
The abstract:
> “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con- ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro- tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out- side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.
I think this (from near the end) is also noteworthy (based on the two quotes from the late Justice Scalia at the beginning of the article):
>Still another point illustrated by Justice Scalia’s reactions is the ubiquity of cultural cognition. The disposition to form perceptions of fact congenial to one’s values isn’t a pathological personality trait or a style of reasoning integral to a distinctive, and distinctively malign, ideology. (Indeed, the appeal of those sorts of surmises could themselves be seen as evidence of the disposition to form culturally congenial perceptions of how the world works.) Precisely because cultural cognition doesn’t discriminate on the basis of worldview, members of all groups can anticipate that as a result of it they, like Justice Scalia, will likely find themselves members of a disappointed minority in some empirical or factual debates and a member of the incredulous majority in others.
The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
> The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
Yeah this seems political, and it is, but it's really about cognitive bias. Reframing the thing in terms of daily workplace dynamics is pretty easy: just convert "legally consequential facts" to "technically consequential facts" and convert "cultural outlook" to "preferred tech-stack". Now you're in a planning and architecture meeting which is theoretically easier to conduct but where everyone is still working hard to confirm their bias.
How to "fix" this in other people / society at large is a difficult question, but in principle you can imagine decision-systems (like data-driven policies and a kind of double-blind experimental politics) that's starting to chip away at the problem. Even assuming that was a tractable approach with a feasible transition plan, there's another question. What to do in the meanwhile?
IOW, assuming the existence of citizens/co-workers that have more persistent non-situational goals and stable values that are fairly unbothered by "group commitments".. how should they participate in group dynamics that are still going to basically be dominated by tribalism? There's really only a few strategies, including stuff like "check out completely", "become a single issue voter", or "give up all other goals and dedicate your entire life to educating others". All options seem quite bad for individuals and the whole. If group-commitment is fundamentally problematic, maybe a way to recognize a "good" faction is by looking for one that is implicitly dedicated to eliminating itself as well as the rival factions.
I have observed this effect at team retros
Brings to mind the Errol Morris investigation of a pair of historic photos in which the photographer may or may not have altered the scene to amp up the drama.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/roger-fenton-valle...
Some previous discussion:
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257799
Can we really conclude that people "see" what they say they see? I think most people would not think twice about saying "protesters did not block the road" when in fact they know full well protesters blocked the road and they really mean "protesters blocked the road and that's good actually".
There's a strange pattern of die hard obstinence, even in the face of basic and common facts that we as as society until fairly recently all agreed upon. The reason is that works, if you admit fault/guilt then the usual consequences follow. If they remain obstinate, there's a chance they can project their crime on someone else which doesn't really work except it does retain for them a certain level of public support, from those who "see" what they want to see.
It's devastating society.
I think there's a real deficit in research on and understanding motivated cognition, and a lot of blurriness about attitudes versus belief versus perception. I don't just mean anything political, I mean things including physical pain and all sorts of things. When someone states something, it's very difficult to distinguish between "this is honestly what I saw or felt" versus "this is what I wanted to see or feel". When you get into the fact that consensus can be wrong, it leads to all sorts of issues.
It would be nice to have some kind of way to discriminate at what point in the percept -> attitude -> construal chain (which is probably more of a feedback loop) we are.
1 reply →
The tricky part is that people don't necessarily report what they see as what they see, and you can't really look inside their brains to get at what they meaningfully perceive.
A good example of this was the inauguration crowd size photos where people who were unfamiliar with the topic reported a unified perception on which crowd was bigger based purely on the photos. People who knew what the photos were of varied their conclusion based upon their political stance.
One conclusion you could draw from this is that their beliefs were altering their perception, but how would you distinguish that from people altering their expression of what they saw based upon their beliefs?
That basketball gorilla experiment seems like pretty solid evidence that people only notice what they expect to see and are primed to pay attention to, even in situations with no ideological component.
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>speak for themselves.
You sure about that? It's not hard to find people using the same video to come to different conclusions.
https://xcancel.com/doranmaul/status/2009308798159097922
https://xcancel.com/NewDayForNJ/status/2009395703634698358
it's also not hard to find people who think fluoride in the water is turning the frogs gay. doesn't make it true
8 replies →
Do you think an officer who feared for this life would have used a casual stance with one hand on the gun and the other with a phone, then casually walked away, or would he have held the gun with two hands as trained to make sure he hit his mark?
Or maybe your point is simply that because dissenters exist that their critiques are valid? There are also people who think the 2020 election was rigged simply because a loudmouth claims it to be. They’re wrong.
I don't think so, given the drastically different takes on something that seemed quite obvious to me after rewatching the video many times.
It was quite clear that many takes, on both sides, seemed to bypass the events in the video and jump straight to whatever ideologically-driven interpretation they needed to be true.
I don't think it takes much ideological bias to understand that was an unprovoked murder of a citizen
1 reply →
On the contrary, if I learned something from the Rittenhouse case is that there's a type of person who, when stuff like this happens, doesn't care about video at all, they just grab the narrative and go with it.
I'm as liberal as they come and when I watched all the Rittenhouse videos, I thought it was pretty clear that he defended himself in a reasonable fashion when he was being attacked by a mob
how is that "contrary."
Except that if you poll any MAGA person, including basically anyone running the federal government right now, it seems that they see a video of a protester trying to run down an officer.
MAGAs struggle with reality.
When you attempt vehicular manslaughter of an armed federal agent lawfully performing their duties, you find out.
"the bitch had it coming"
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[flagged]
As a person who always identifies as an outsider to literally every group, I cringe all the time when I see all the own goals all groups make and then I cringe again when they double down.
I'm sorry, but it is deeply ironic for you of all people to be posting this given your statements on the ICE shooting not even 24 hours ago [1] [2]. You are quite literally the exact basis for this research in question.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546283
This guy has made half a dozen comments saying her murder was justified, but some views seem to be immune to moderation on here. I've had dang or tomhow come at me for waaay less (and I'm not saying I was in the right).
8 replies →
In this particular instance I don't think he's wrong, The posts in the links could be considered evidence of how pervasive the outrage/blindness effect is.
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I suggest getting rid of teams and the teams mentality.
Sounds like Counter-Strike
population dynamics