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.
(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
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.
I hope that you’re young or something… impeding a citizen is violence against the state, as the state gets his power from the work of it, citizens.. which is basically in the western world this describes most protests. Being granted the right to protest by your government is meaningless because if you took away the right to protest, then your people would just protest. The states options to quell unrest are: violent repression or negotiation. over the last 5000 years. We’ve determined that the best way to keep people in their place and the rulers in power is a mix of the two, hegemony look it up.
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.
This may be related to your point, but I think another problem is that we focus on isolated events instead of applying systems thinking. Any large scale government system will result in accidental deaths. Amtrak has killed almost 600 people in the last four years. (This is not unique to Amtrak. It’s inherent in any rail system that has crossings at grade: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-w....) But as a society we accept that a certain number of bystanders being killed is an acceptable consequence for performance of an important government function.
Law enforcement similarly is inherently dangerous. You can enforce various standards, but fundamentally you have to pick where the set the slider bar on the scale from maximizing law enforcement effectiveness to minimizing accidental casualties.
We do know that it’s been a longstanding policy of DHS for officers not to stand in front of cars on purpose just so they’d have an excuse to fire upon the driver. There was an internal audit in 2014 that called out this exact behavior.
The in-progress community notes are a shit show too.
I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.
To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.
For reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos.
The ICE agents WANTED to use guns, they just put themselves in a position where a seemingly trivial action by the driver could be twisted to be perceived as enough of a threat to justify pulling a gun out and shooting them multiple times in the head. Murderers with a badge.
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.
Before getting to research, I think a more honest attitude towards admitting motivated cognition in oneself and others is appropriate. I may give a spur-of-the-moment remark on a political situation, but at least if someone presses me, I will readily provide more insight on my biases and values. When I take the time to contemplate, I usually try to modify my eventual response to avoid undue bias altogether. Being reminded that motivated cognition is pervasive in all of us should reduce the unintentional-but-convenient faults in our cognition.
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.
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.
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
(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
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.
There seems to be an assumption that there's a right to an effective protest.
That said, impeding a college student who wants to walk through part of a college campus isn't "violence against the state."
I hope that you’re young or something… impeding a citizen is violence against the state, as the state gets his power from the work of it, citizens.. which is basically in the western world this describes most protests. Being granted the right to protest by your government is meaningless because if you took away the right to protest, then your people would just protest. The states options to quell unrest are: violent repression or negotiation. over the last 5000 years. We’ve determined that the best way to keep people in their place and the rulers in power is a mix of the two, hegemony look it up.
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.
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.
This may be related to your point, but I think another problem is that we focus on isolated events instead of applying systems thinking. Any large scale government system will result in accidental deaths. Amtrak has killed almost 600 people in the last four years. (This is not unique to Amtrak. It’s inherent in any rail system that has crossings at grade: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-w....) But as a society we accept that a certain number of bystanders being killed is an acceptable consequence for performance of an important government function.
Law enforcement similarly is inherently dangerous. You can enforce various standards, but fundamentally you have to pick where the set the slider bar on the scale from maximizing law enforcement effectiveness to minimizing accidental casualties.
We do know that it’s been a longstanding policy of DHS for officers not to stand in front of cars on purpose just so they’d have an excuse to fire upon the driver. There was an internal audit in 2014 that called out this exact behavior.
only because half the people watching the video are spitefully ignoring the basic facts.
Yes, and now we have billionaires arguing in public about such basic facts:
X link: https://x.com/paulg/status/2008989862725341658
Screenshot: https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1q6zgq5/theres_someth...
The in-progress community notes are a shit show too.
I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.
To me, the shooting probably wasn't justified, I don't believe that guy genuinely feared for his life, but she definitely escalated the situation by plainly trying to avoid arrest and being reckless in the process. My take of both sides doing wrong (and neither wrong canceling out the other) has gotten everybody riled up at me today. Oh well, the best I can do is go off what I see, flawed as that is.
For reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos.
[1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gb_IkGVK7WvsTAXfMvQU...
The ICE agents WANTED to use guns, they just put themselves in a position where a seemingly trivial action by the driver could be twisted to be perceived as enough of a threat to justify pulling a gun out and shooting them multiple times in the head. Murderers with a badge.
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.
Before getting to research, I think a more honest attitude towards admitting motivated cognition in oneself and others is appropriate. I may give a spur-of-the-moment remark on a political situation, but at least if someone presses me, I will readily provide more insight on my biases and values. When I take the time to contemplate, I usually try to modify my eventual response to avoid undue bias altogether. Being reminded that motivated cognition is pervasive in all of us should reduce the unintentional-but-convenient faults in our cognition.
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.
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