On today’s conference call, we talked how our perceptions of reality differ, and what the implications of that are.
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Lisa: Today there was a mass optical illusion that is seemingly silly, but has also become a metaphor for our times.
It is about a dress that some people think is black and blue, and some people think is gold and white.
Here’s my take:
We want to believe that the way other people process information is the same way we process information.
We want to believe that that is what unites us as humans—that we physically see the same images, hear the same sounds, recognize a fact as a fact—and it is simply not true. Sometimes it is true—and we feel connected. And sometimes what we are experiencing, sometimes the way we are processing information is not the same as other people are processing that same information. And all of a sudden those people become “the other”.
As an example, my family was all at the Boston Marathon the year that two bombs went off. A couple of weeks later, my teen-aged daughter was at a coffee shop. And a guy in line with her said, “You heard about the news about the Boston Marathon, right” and she said “yeah, I was there.” And he said, “no, but did you hear about the fact that it was all a fake? It was set up by the government. They set it all up. An explosion went off, and people were waiting in the doorways of restaurants with their blood costumes on. And as the smoke cleared, these actors, these fakers, walked out with their costumes on and pretended to be hurt.” My daughter mumbled something and walked away. But–I have to tell you—you can call guy crazy, or what have you, but as someone who was there, at the scene of the bombing—that was exactly it felt like. It felt like nothing was real. I saw the smoke clearing and nothing made sense and it was almost impossible to tell what was reality.
And that is the same phenomena with the “Is the dress black or blue, gold or white?” — people can’t trust their own sense of reality and then jump into one of two camps. And they try to convince the other camp that their reality was the “more real.”
Let’s open up the discussion:
Dave Kanegis: We all perceive things through are own reality. For the day we are born our perception shifts about how we experience things differently.
Jed Diamond: I forget who said this great quote: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as WE are.”
David Shechtman: There is something called “Bounded Rationality”…that there is no objective definition of reality but that it is the sum total of our experiences and beliefs. We are bounded by what we have access to. It’s why we can’t win people over with logic. The Good Men Project brings stories together to create new shared meaning. Unless people have shared experiences they can’t shift their mental model.
Mark Sherman: When people think of psychology they think of people in therapy. But it’s really trying to understand things like perception, or to understand the psychology of language. What is a shared reality? What is shared language? Studies have shown that if you hear someone talking and you expect them to say a particular word, that is the word you will hear. You fill in the blanks with your own expectations.
Jed Diamond: The story about the dress was even on a sports news radio show. They admitted it wasn’t a Sports story, but it is a story now. The sportscaster said that maybe it was because people were seeing it on different devices. But both him and his wife then looked at it on an iphone and couldn’t agree. I wonder if there is a difference in the way the genders see it.
Kozo Hattori: The challenge is to recognize that nothing is the truth. The truth is bigger than what we can see.
Lisa Hickey: I can accept the fact that there are ten different realities. Or a hundred. Or an infinite. But what makes less logical sense to me is the way these things get polarized into two realities. No one is arguing that the dress is purple and grey or pink and green. It’s either black and blue OR gold and white. When I went to the dinner for the survivors of the Boston Marathon—all our stories were exactly the same. We all heard the first bomb go off, and we all thought it was celebratory—a cannon being shot to signify the end of the marathon, or fireworks. It was only after we got more information—a shift in the noise, actually—first silence, then a few loud voices, the sound of people running, someone saying the word ‘bomb’ out loud— that our perception shifted to ‘no, this is something really bad’. And that happened to us all at the same time—the events unfolded the exact same way. We all found that time stretched out, and distance stretched out, and we couldn’t see things correctly. We were frantically looking for the people we had been there with. We all described the sound of the second bomb exactly the same way. Our ears were still ringing weeks later. So in the end—we DID experience things similarly. But the difference, the polarization, happened because some of us—like the guy in the coffee shop—didn’t process that information in the same way. What I find fascinating is not that there are 30 different camps—there are two.
Matt Rosza: With regard to conspiracy theories, there is thinking that says that those arise because of the desire to feel empowered. People, often young men, feel powerless in this world and conspiracy theories provide a way for them to feel empowered. The conspiracy theories all usually stem from the idea there are a few bad organizations that are really evil. And the person who believes them is thinking ‘By spreading the truth, I am doing my job as a man to change things.’
Peter Kirby-Harris: I’d like to provide a view outside of the US, with my story about the bombings on the tube in London. I was one train back from one of the explosions at a station. And as I was on that train and it jolted to a stop, a lot of people felt very angry, and directed their anger towards the transport system. Then, when they found out it was a bombing and people had gotten killed, that anger turned to guilt. There was a collective shift, so it can happen.
Mark Sherman: One of the most important things in a crisis is information. No matter how bad it is and how hard it is, the important thing is to give as much information as possible.
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Photo: keoni101 / flickr