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Comment by bethekidyouwant

16 days ago

(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”

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bethekidyouwant

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pcaharrier  16 days ago

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."

  • baumy  16 days ago

    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

    • bethekidyouwant  15 days ago

      I’m not sure what peoples feelings about have much to do with anything. A protest is not effective unless it impacts some kind of ‘violence against the state’. Usually, this is blocking roads at its lightest.

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deadbabe  16 days ago

Is this why the same protest videos can be recycled multiple times for multiple different purposes

  • rayiner  16 days ago

    This is also why the era of pervasive videotaping of everything hasn’t ended disputes over basic facts of what happened.

    • derbOac  16 days ago

      I'm not sure how this intersects with the point of the paper, but part of the problem with the Renee Good case (or things like it) in my opinion is that the focus too often is on the actual events at a particular moment, and not what is surrounding it.

      I can see some argument, for example, that goes something like "Jonathan Ross was afraid he was going to get hit by a car and misperceived her as trying to ram him when was trying to turn right, so he fired in self-defense." Then there's a subsequent argument about whether it was reasonable for him to think that she was going to ram him, etc.

      However, what's missing from this is a broader discussion about whether or not an officer should be putting himself in that position near a car at all, when it might be anticipated that there might be misperceptions about what is happening. Whether the officer is competent enough to perceive the difference between someone turning their car versus trying to ram them (especially at that speed). Whether they should have let medical personnel help afterward.

      When you frame a discussion about perceptions of facts at a particular moment, you kind of get into a frameset of thinking that everything was passively happening, and start overlooking how a particular moment came to be and whether or not the real problems are a set of things that happened minutes, days, or weeks beforehand, and what happened in the time period afterward. E.g., instead of asking "did Jonathan Ross murder Renee Good?" you can ask "were Jonathan Ross and his colleagues competent enough to avoid a situation where they might feel justified in shooting someone innocent?"

      I guess I feel like this "cultural perception" question often sidesteps more important questions about whether or not what came to be could have been avoided. This gets more deeply into the underlying attitudes or assumptions driving the perceptions one way or another and lets them be addressed more directly.

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