Can psychology explain conflicting views on the Minnesota tragedy?

The exact circumstances surrounding the death in Minneapolis The story of Renee Nicole Goode is still hotly debated around the world, with very different interpretations of the horrific images.

Millions of people check the exact same video stream, yet many of them insist on opposite conclusions.

How is this possible?

Is it just policy? Do we only see what we want? Or there could be a deeper psychological problem Showing?

Our visual perception is actually much less reliable than we realize. Could this solve the dilemma of how we can all see the same matter, but actually see completely different things?

Psychology experiments reveal how perception is viewed

Psychologists’ experiments surprise and challenge us, revealing a dangerous overconfidence in what we think we have seen.

In one famous early study, participants watched movies about car crashes and were then asked what they witnessed, just as people now wonder what they saw in Minnesota.

But if the investigation is put forward as such “About how fast cars went when they were Destroy In each other? This resulted in a much higher perception of speed in answers than when the question was phrased as “About how fast cars were going when they were He hits each other?” In the retest one week later, these people were asked Crashed cars were more likely to answer “yes” to the question “Did you see any broken glass?” Although there was no broken glass in the accident.

Changing just one word in a seemingly innocent question dramatically changes what witnesses think they see. We are very suggestible and can be manipulated into believing we have seen something that was not there at all, with surprising ease.

This exact psychological effect may be happening right now, in newsroom studios across the country, where this issue is being hotly debated using emotional language.

Our focus is more selective than we realize

But not only can we be profoundly influenced by how we see the world in ways below our conscious awareness, but our focus can also be more selective than we realize, meaning we can still miss an event or thing entirely, even if it’s very distinct and right in front of us.

We think the various participants in the Minnesota incident must have seen some obvious things, but did they?

For example, in another now-famous experiment, you watch a video in which a group of actors play a ball-throwing game, and you are asked to count the number of times the players throw the ball.

But you become so focused on counting passes that you completely miss a variety of strange events that also occur, such as a hard hit in the middle of the game, and thus directly in your field of vision.

In one version of the experiment, about 50% of participants completely missed an actor dressed as a gorilla walking into the middle of a scene, walked toward viewers, hit him on the chest, and then left.

In another study, pedestrians did not notice money hanging from a tree directly in their path, even when they had to change their route to walk around the money.

Participants even miss an organized fight taking place in plain sight within 10 yards of them.

In another scientific demonstration, a primary experimenter approaches a participant on the street and looks up directions to a nearby location. During the conversation, two other experimenters were holding a door and rudely butting heads between the first experimenter and the participant. While the participant’s view becomes briefly obscured, one experimenter holding the door switches places with the experimenter who initiated the conversation, and stays behind to complete it, thus completely exchanging subjects.

In this experiment, 50% of participants failed to detect the substitution of one conversation partner for another.

Our visual attention It seems strongly eclectic. Much more than we realize, our awareness at any given moment is actually a specific, and often very limited, part of the visible world.

The role of unconscious transference and change blindness

However, there may be other psychological processes beyond the highly selective focus in the Minnesota incident, one of which is referred to as “Unconscious transfer“This involves a widespread tendency for confusion about who is guilty and who is innocent if both parties are mixed up in the same scene.

These studies include videos of shoplifting incidents: innocent people browsing products in the liquor aisle of a supermarket disappear behind a tall stack of boxes, but then a different person, the actual perpetrator, emerges from behind the pile and likewise browses the products for a few minutes before brazenly stealing a bottle of wine and wandering off-screen. The camera view changes to show the perpetrator exiting the store.

After watching the video, participants were asked to identify the perpetrator from a list of six people, including the perpetrator, innocent parties from the video, and three other people.

Most participants failed to spot the change behind the stack of boxes, developing what is referred to as “change blindness,” resulting in an innocent person being incorrectly identified in the post-video list. The misidentified participants tended to choose one of the innocent parties from the video, showing “unconscious transference.”

This may be relevant to law enforcement officials arriving at a setting with both “guilty” and “innocent” participants.

This brings us to another direct psychological challenge represented by the various videos of the Minneapolis incident, which is beyond what we see: what about the point of view of the participants who were there at the actual scene, such as the victim and those responsible?

The role of metacognition

Most people involved in the debate about what exactly happened also seem to be making basic assumptions about what the video viewers are experiencing now and also what those at the actual scene were aware of at the time.

For example, while we can see the entire car, the street, or several officers or pedestrians, in different clips, and we get the chance to see the clips over and over again, what were the actual participants involved aware themselves, for fractions of seconds, of what was happening around and in front of them?

The psychology of perception teaches us that what we are convinced we have seen often does not actually happen as we think.

But also beyond our own perspective, what we think others should have considered obvious is often not what they actually experienced.

This is referred to in the field as “Metacognition“, which is what we think others are thinking.

But we suffer from a strong tendency to project our own perceptions onto the world and others without considering the wide discrepancy that exists between different people’s viewpoints.

Perhaps this should be an integral part of firearms training, and perhaps even serve as reasonable guidance for politicians.