Over the course of the academic year, Brandeis faculty from diverse disciplines convene to share their perspectives on broad issues with the Brandeis student community during events called Critical Conversations. This year’s first Critical Conversation, “Comfortable Illusions: How Our Brains Mislead Us,” recently took place and featured themes regarding biological perception, social behavior and nationalistic biases.
The talk was moderated by Professor of French and Comparative Literature Michael Randall (FREN), and the faculty participants were Professor of Psychology Donald Katz (NEUR/PSYCH), Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Gutsell (PSYCH) and Associate Professor of Sociology and International Global Studies Chandler Rosenberger (SOC/IGS).
Randall started the conversation by sharing a thought experiment: in the sport of hunting, which animal would be most beneficial for tracking games, a dog or a hawk? The question implicitly focuses on which sensory system is the most important. Randall explained how on the one hand, hawks have great visual acuity, but while dogs don’t have as clear vision as hawks, they have a far more developed olfactory sense.
Considering best practices in hunting informed medieval notions of perception that were especially relevant to philosophers in 14th-century France. Randall concluded that “hunting actually represents a different medieval point of view regarding perception … In our Critical Conversation tonight, we are offering, in some ways, an updated version of this earlier debate about perception.”
Followed by Randall’s introduction, Katz demonstrated how the contextual cues that humans receive influence their perception of objects. He first presented the audience with a simple collection of lines that formed a trapezoid. Then, a proportionally smaller trapezoid was placed inside the larger trapezoid. While the image was initially unambiguously a trapezoid, the image now looked like the side of a wall with a window on it, giving the illusion of a rectangle being viewed from an angle.
Katz proposed how the brain can be thought of as a computational machine that processes raw sensory information from our visual system and outputs the most likely object that is being seen. As he puts it, “Your brain intrinsically, and without asking your conscious permission, plays detective. It considers the clues in the surrounding circumstances.” These clues make up the context of the situation.
Furthermore, Katz asserted the importance in considering context in understanding perception saying, “Someone who doesn’t see things the way you do isn’t necessarily dumb or uneducated. It might be that the context that they read through the data is remarkably different than yours, which means that your perceptions are just as subjective as anybody else’s.”
Gutsell extended Katz’s ideas regarding human perception of objects to the perception of other groups of people in social settings. During her presentation, Gutsell proposed a common situation humans face in order to illustrate how context influences social perception, saying, “Imagine you are in a strange city and you are lost … You don’t know which way to go back to your hotel.” At this point in the scenario, people scan others in their surroundings to make a decision about who to ask based on traits such as age, gender and race, for example.
Gutsell noted, “There is a big difference between categorizing the physical world and categorizing people because when [we] categorize another person, we place ourselves in relationship to that category.” A question that humans then ask themselves is whether they are members of that category or not. If the answer is yes, the other person is considered a member of the in-group, while if the answer is no, the person is considered a member of the out-group.
The biases humans have between in-group and out-group individuals affect the social dynamics between the two groups. Gutsell cited several examples, including an image of a politically ambiguous protest and a black and white picture of a racially ambiguous person. She explained how related studies had been performed where participants were told that the content of the image was either a member of their in-group or their out-group. As a consequence of this information, the responses varied from negative and threatening associations toward out-group members and positive or safe associations towards in-group members. This ultimately illustrates how one’s context, upbringing and notion of social norms color the perception of others in quickly evolving social situations.
Rosenberger scaled up the ideas presented by Katz and Gutsell to the scope of nations and international affairs. In particular, Rosenberger discussed the Russian president Vladimir Putin and how his experiences as a KGB officer shaped his decisions regarding the recent invasion of Ukraine.
In 1989, Putin was working as a KGB officer in East Germany, where he was running intelligence tasks for the Soviet Union and contributing to Soviet control over East Germany. In November however, the East German regime started to fall and a mob of enraged protesters surrounded the Dresden KGB building. Despite Putin’s fervous attempts, he could not get the Red Army to provide protection because Moscow was “silent,” and no orders were given. Consequently, Putin developed the fear of a sudden collapse of the Russian central power.
Understanding the context of Putin’s political history shaped his ultimate decision to invade Ukraine when the Ukrainian government sought to join the Western defensive alliance NATO.
Overall, Rosenberger described how “nationalism is perhaps the biggest out-group we come up with … A big part of international relations is understanding how other people see the world … and the kinds of conversations that they have within their cultures that bind them together.”
After the faculty presentations, first-year students taking University Writing Seminar classes as well as other members of the Brandeis community in the audience had the opportunity to partake in a question and answer session. The overarching takeaway that the Brandeis faculty imparted was the subjective nature of perception and how that affects our physical, social and national outlook.
