Perception filters: How what you see is not really what is there

I just finished reading Michael Shermer’s treatise on critical thought, Why People Believe Weird Things. Toward the end of the book he discussed something that has been on my mind for a while now: perception filters – at least that’s what I’ve come to call them. It’s also a nifty Doctor Who reference (I’m a geek!). Shermer calls it confirmation bias.

The concept is fairly self-explanatory; everything you take in is filtered through your mind in some way. This filtering effect adds or removes information from the original message until it meshes neatly with what you want to observe, not necessarily what is actually there. This of course pertains more to cognitive messages rather than visual stimuli – interpreting the meaning of spoken words (including the inflections and tones used), or deciphering body language. That’s not to say perception filters don’t affect visuals as well. Hallucinations are an example of this (or the cloaking of the TARDIS… Doctor Who!), but that’s a a different beast to tackle.

A quote from Shermer’s book might help to elucidate the subject more:

“The presumption of a relationship predisposes one to find evidence of that relationship, even when there is none to be found or, if there is evidence to be found, to overweight it and arrive at a conclusion that goes beyond what the evidence justifies.”  Raymond Nickerson

Shermer talked about perception filters as they pertained to the intellectual elite, explaining how even today’s top minds can fall victim to believing in weird ideas. I’d like to knock it down a few notches and consider the role of perception filters in the layman (myself included).

Let’s start by looking for examples in everyday life. Do you believe in God? Then chances are all of the marvels of life you witness will act as further evidence of His sublime creation, even if they have very mundane and unexciting reasons. This is not a riff on the religious, and please don’t mistake it as such. A religious person might attribute a family member surviving a car crash to God’s will while someone secular might attribute it to luck, or to quick response by EMS services and skillful work by surgeons. Indeed a religious person will also attribute the survival to the medical staff involved, but they will place additional emphasis on God than a secularist would.

That’s just one example, one that will likely not have much of an impact on your life decisions. Let’s move on to something that might. Think that a girl (or guy) likes you? Well then, many of their actions will seem flirtatious even though they are not. Even if they are being slightly flirtatious you will likely attach additional meaning where there is none all because everything they do is going through a romantic filter in your mind. You take what you want and reject evidence to the contrary. You accept the positive hits while denying the existence of the negative.

As Shermer mentioned:

“Even in judging something as subjective as personality, psychologists have found that we see what we are looking for in a person”

But how do we combat it? How do we automatically correct these filtered thoughts? It takes an active approach, one that might not be viable when it comes to social situations. I do not think it’s possible to remove a perception filter completely to the point that you witness what is there and only what is there. These filters are ingrained in you, part of your personality and a result of your genetic coding and your upbringing.

So let’s go along with the flirtatious girl (guy) analogy (forgive me, I’m a 23-year-old male). What are the options available to us? The most extreme would be to adopt a perception filter opposite of the one currently in play, in this case assuming that all of their actions have no additional meaning. Think of it as donning a suit of armor – you’re vision is narrowed, but you easily deflect potentially dangerous blows. The armor does most of the work, requiring little effort on your own part. Of course the downsides of this are obvious.

The more laborious approach would be to keep the filter but actively monitor what is passing though and getting rejected by it. Think of it like monitoring your anti-virus software and reading each file name as it is scanned. In this way you can discern a flirtatious smile from a friendly one, an admiring gaze from a simple stare. But it takes time, and hesitation is not something looked favorably upon in social interaction. So I question the viability of this approach.

Which brings me to my final point: this is all conjecture to me, and I welcome any additional thoughts on the matter. We all come from different walks of life and have no doubt experienced various perception filters and their effects. How have you handled them?