Posted by Jim at May 12th, 2005

Taking courses in social psychology strongly affected my view of the world. How? Mostly by causing me to distrust (and test) my own perceptions of reality.

People tend to perceive what they already believe to be the case. Give someone an essay about abortion with an equal number of arguments for and against legal abortion and they are more likely to remember the arguments that support what they already believe. Not only has this experiment been done, but it’s been reproduced.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact I’d argue it might even be useful, helping people to stay on a particular course in life even against contradictory evidence. Contradictory evidence is sometimes merely the exception that proves the rule.

A practical result of this and other tendencies is that there is a “web of plausibility” for each of us, a collection of beliefs that we have that determine what we see in the world around us.

Thus Christians might see the hand of God in something ordinary and I suspect that an atheist might be able to find the ordinary even in an “obviously” supernatural event. I know that when confronted with stories of psychic phenomena or situations in which horoscopes seem to be accurate, I’m skeptical. Though a Christian, I don’t assume stories of supernatural events are true and tend to regard tales of psychic phenomena as improbable.

Politics provides all too many good examples of people’s willingness to believe what already fits in their worldview. Within the last few weeks, Matt Drudge linked to a story about a 17 million dollar, government funded homeless shelter that contained a movie room, gym, and hair salon.

Now if you happen to believe that the government is generally wasteful and spends too much money on the poor (whether or not you’re right about that), that story would fit into what you expect to be true about the world. You might even write a blog entry about it.

Trouble is, it turns out that it’s not government funded. It’s privately funded. The “salon” is 3 barber chairs, staffed by residents. Far from being “posh,” the floors are concrete. You can listen to a NPR reporter’s account of a night there. It’s not exactly a luxury hotel.

I’m not saying that conservatives are particularly prone to this. Everyone is. To the extent that the media is biased, I tend to imagine it as being biased one reporter at a time. Where editors share assumptions with reporters, those assumptions aren’t questioned as much as they might be. Reporters, like the rest of us, have only their own perceptions to guide them.

Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Too much doubt about your abilities and perceptions and you miss opportunities and insights that might have helped you. Too much confidence and you miss the fact that the world doesn’t fit your preconceptions, but at least you’re trying something–the good point about disaster is that it does sometimes point out where you’re wrong.

And sometimes people even learn from that.