Your own eyes aren’t telling you the truth.
And what you can do about it.
“A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.” Henrik Ibsen
Humans, as a species, are overly reliant on their sight. We hear examples of the sensory bias everywhere. Missouri is the ‘Show Me’ state. Fred R. Barnard popularized the saying, “A picture is worth thousand words.” The Chinese have an expression, “Hearing something a hundred times isn’t better than seeing it once.”
Let’s say your best friend runs up to you and tells you they just saw a guy jump over a car. You might have known this person your whole life. They have never lied to you or given you reason to doubt. Yet, the first thought going through your head is going to be, “Yeah, right.”
However, if the same friend runs up to you and shows you a cell phone video of a guy jumping over a car your response might be, “Wow! That’s amazing.”
In the first situation your instinct is to doubt and in the second situation you immediately believed. Your brain received the information through the eyes and imprinted it as fact. Most of us wouldn’t even stop to wonder if a green screen or CGI was involved. If video technology can put Matt Damon on Mars, it can most certainly can help a man jump over a car.
“A good sketch is better than a long speech.” Napoleon
When we see something, it has tangible value to us. Sound is invisible but written words exist on page or screen. A Mahler symphony is beautiful, but we can’t hang it on the wall the way we would a Picasso. Screens dominate our lives, hanging in every room and residing in every purse or pocket. Our disposition towards the visual has been important in the development of our society.
Written language changed the human experience. Prior to writing, information was passed from person to person orally. If the person who held the knowledge in their head passed away, so too did the information. One only has to play the game ‘Telephone’ once to know how problematic it would be to share a brownie recipe without the ability to write it down. Not being able to properly bake a chocolate dessert is a minor inconvenience. When you add to the complexity or importance the impact grows exponentially. The shared knowledge it took to put Neil Armstrong on the moon would not have been possible if we could only pass physics from generation to generation orally.
“Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth.” Thomas Fuller
What was once an important factor in the intellectual growth of our species has become a liability. Sir Isaac Newton was able to put his thoughts on paper so others could read it and come to understand it. Many who have taken a Calculus class have done just that. Seeing the equations and working them out allows us to stand on the shoulders of a great mind and take our society further.
Our thirst for visual information is being used to subtly manipulate us. Every search and click you make on the internet is being recored, compiled, and analyzed. This data is then used by advertisers and social media outlets to present you with an experience designed to give you exactly what they think you want to see. If you perform a search for refrigerator repair you might expect to find pop-up advertisements with the best deals in new refrigerators.
On a surface level this can be very helpful. The internet is filled with information, most of it irrelevant to you or what you want to know. This aspect of the internet cuts through the noise for you. You do not have to filter your browsing experience, it is being done for you automatically.
However, this seemingly useful feature has turned out to be a major bug. With every interaction, Google, Facebook, and the other giants of the platform, are subtly altering what you see. This filtration presents us a world exactly tailored to the way we feel it should be, not the way it really is. Cognitive dissonance, so important to challenging our theories on life, is eliminated.
In other words, they are filtering out content you do not agree with and making you believe the world is exactly like you believe it should be.
Maisie Keogh, writes in her article ‘The Age of Unenlightenment,’
”We now exist in a digital domain where no two people will have the same results from a search they conduct and where background industrious bots are diligently curating a selection of the things they think we want to see. What’s revealed to us are things that agree completely with our understanding of how we think that the world is and that do not challenge our assumptions in any way.”
Your biases are being used to make you scroll more, click more, and buy more. You are being presented with a mirror instead of a window by which to view reality. What you feel becomes presented as visual fact, re-enforcing your beliefs and making them real in your mind.
“Consider the Opposite”
According to the Alcoholics Anonymous program, acceptance of a problem is the first step to recovery. To combat the internet altering our mental outlook on life, your must adopt a simple phrase into your everyday life.
Consider the Opposite.
During a 1988 study conducted at Princeton University, researchers brought together people with strong opinions concerning the death penalty. The subjects of the study were presented with data which either supported or refuted their position on the subject.
The researchers found that no matter how impactful the information, the data did not change the minds of the participants. The believed their judgements to be sound regardless of the strength of the argument against their position. This is known as bias assimilation.
Evidence of the internet creating powerful bias assimilation can be found on social media and news outlets. While happening all the time, the effect is most notable during an election cycle. People will see their political beliefs reflected back at them and begin to view those who disagree as ‘ignorant outsiders.’ This polarization makes it very difficult to find the compromises or consensus needed to govern diverse populations.
There is a cure for bias assimilation. In the aforementioned Princeton study, people were entrenched in their positions and no amount of verified data would budge them from their position. Even when the facts were exactly opposite a persons belief, that person held firm. There was one way to break the mold. Instead of trying to argue with or convince the subject of the study, the researchers asked them to consider the opposite
For example, if a person were passionately against any abortion, the researcher might ask them if they could think of a reason for an abortion, like the mother’s life being in grave danger and the fetus not viable.
When the subject took the time to think about the opposite side of the story something changed in the way they thought about the situation. Rational thought broke through the self-inflicted echo chamber and allowed reason to take over.
“As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than any picture” John McCarthy
As you venture forth into the internet, be aware you are being tracked and your actions are creating an information bubble. If you should consume news or read something today, before accepting it a face value, challenge yourself to ‘Consider the Opposite’ position. As humans, our ability to reason has elevated us. Don’t let what we see trick us into thinking the whole world is exactly like we perceive it to be on the internet.
If you want to explore this subject more, read “The Age of Unenlightenment” by Maisie Keogh.
Eric Underwood is a Husband, Father, writer, educator and REALTOR licensed in the state of Georgia. He spent his twenties as a Professional Umpire and became an instant Dad of a seven and nine-year-old at the age of 34. When not parenting three amazing kids or helping his amazing clients buy and sell real estate, he is the Head Coach of the Cartersville Middle School Girls Soccer Team. You can find his publications about real estate, parenting, youth sports, education and self-improvement on Medium.