“Our eyes are very far removed from the parts of our brain that are seeing,” Jay Van Bavel, a neuroscientist at NYU, explains. This is the truth about how our brains work: Light enters our eyes, sounds enter our ears, smells enter our nose, but what we end up perceiving may not be a perfectly accurate representation of the world. Our brains decide to pick one interpretation over the other (and then get pretty stubborn about it). The photo projects light into our eyes, but there’s enough information in that light for the image to be interpreted in two ways. Just think of “ the dress.” The image that went viral in 2015 was incredibly polarizing: Some looked at it and saw it was blue and black, and others saw white and gold. We know it’s possible for two people to look at the same image and see two completely different things. There’s an important, overarching thing to know about how our brains perceive the world: They’re constantly guessing. Recognizing that our perceptions of the world don’t necessarily reflect the pristine truth of the world is humbling. “Knowing that other people could truly be seeing things differently from us is a way of being able to better understand them and empathize with how they feel,” Leong says. Recently, Yuan Chang Leong, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and co-authors published a neuroscience experiment in Nature Human Behavior that lends evidence to the idea that people really do “see” things differently. It’s a key question, one that’s captured the imagination of a new generation of psychology researchers today. It’s similar to another concept - motivated reasoning, where we come to conclusions we’re predisposed to believe in.īut the Princeton-Dartmouth study left many unanswered questions, since the researchers didn’t know if the fans truly “saw” different versions of the game or if they just said they did. This idea that we see what we want to see is called motivated perception. Princeton fans wanted Princeton to look good. ”It seems clear that the ‘game’ actually was many different games and that each version of the events that transpired was just as ‘real’ to a particular person as other versions were to other people,” they wrote in their influential 1954 paper. The psychologists concluded it was like the two sets of fans were watching a different game. In the results, the rival students greatly disagreed over which team was more at fault. ![]() During the replay, the students were instructed to pretend to be the referees. They asked students at each university to watch video highlights from the game. Hastorf and Cantril decided to run a very simple test. ![]() With so much debate about “who started it,” two psychologists, Albert Hastorf of Dartmouth and Hadley Cantril of Princeton, united to answer this question: Why did each school have such a different understanding of what had happened? ![]() A Dartmouth player broke his leg.īut in the aftermath, each side blamed the other for instigating the violence. The Dartmouth versus Princeton football game of November 1951 was, by all accounts, brutal.
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