Reality as an Illusion Flashcards
(36 cards)
Your mind is limited
Can only actively perceive one thing at a time - You are only perceiving a tiny fraction of what’s going on
Your mind is deceptive
You perceive things that aren’t there - You can’t always tell the difference between what your mind perceived and what your mind creates
Perception is a combination of…
bottom-up and top-down processing
Bottom-up
Raw Sensory Data
Top-Down
Expectations learned through previous experience
You never see “sort of duck” or “sort of rabbit”
It is a duck, or it is a rabbit
We never see reality as it is…
only as we interpret it
Individual perception of a social interaction
“they were fighting”…“no, they were joking”
Individual perception of a person
“her crying was fake”…“no, it wasn’t”
Individual perception of themselves
Do other people see you the same way that you see yourself?
The Kuleshov Effect
A man’s neutral expression interpreted as… multiple different emotions depending on the context of the images
The Kuleshov Effect occurs because the viewer….
“fills in the blanks” and makes an interpretation consistent with the context
Rashomon Effect
Contradictory descriptions of the same event by different people
Eyewitness Testimony
One of the most convincing types of evidence to a jury, one of the most flawed types of evidence
Eyewitness testimony is flawed because…
accuracy requires attention, perception, and memory - errors and biases are possible at every step
Why are eyewitnesses so unreliable?
- Can’t remember what you never paid attention to
- Fear and stress can impact attention
- Attention narrows (“tunnel vision”)
- Attention fixates (gets stuck on one thing)
- But, attention may fixate on small details that aren’t helpful for making a correct identification
Source Misattributions
A familiar person may be falsely identified as a perpetrator - “familiar” in this case doesn’t mean they knew person ahead of time, just that they may have seen the person before
Wells and Bradfield (1998)
- Participants view videotape with gunman in view for 8 seconds
- Participant then given photos of different suspects
Asked to identify a suspect - Everyone made an identification- But, the actual gunman’s picture was not present
- Misidentification because gunman was expected to be present
- Choose suspect who most closely resembles the gunman they saw
Perception is an active process..
- Attention
- Limited and selective
- Encoding
- Assigns perceptual “meaning”
- Memory
- Constructive
- Remember things as they were expected to be
- Constructive
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to pay attention to and interpret information in ways that confirm your original expectations
Positive Testing
Only asking questions in way that to would confirm an expectation
- Not asking questions that could disconfirm expectations
Self-fulfilling prophecies
Behaving in such a way that leads people to act in the way that you expected
Illusory Correlation
An illusory correlation is perceived relationship that does not actually exist
Redelmeier and Tversky (1996)
- 18 arthritis patients observed over 15 months
- The weather also recorded
- Most patients were certain their arthritis pain was correlated with the weather
- The actual correlation was almost zero
