Perception and Political Thought: Questioning our Decision Making

Perception and Political Thought: Questioning our Decision Making

This week in class we learned about the basics of how humans perceive their environment and objects within it as well as the brain’s tendency to quickly form conclusions about our physical surroundings based on a vastly simplified version of reality. While this tendency allows us to form mental models of reality rapidly and based on incomplete information, it also comes at the expense of accuracy. At the end of lecture this past Monday I started to think about how bias influences perception and how inaccuracies in our understanding of the how the world works might be playing out in electoral politics.

One of the biggest takeaways I got from the readings and lectures on the topic of perception is that in the face of an overwhelming amount of stimuli, our brain assembles the relevant features of sensory stimuli into coherent abstractions referred to as internal representations. Additionally, what may prove to be the most troubling aspect of perception as it applies to political thought has to do with the fact that the way the human brain forms these representations is shaped by our previous experiences.   

Funnel of Causality, The American Voter

Last year I had the pleasure of being enrolled in a class on Political Psychology. One of the perspectives addressed in this class is especially relevant given the current political landscape within our country as election day approaches. Philip Converse, a political psychologist at the University of Michigan          (Go Blue!) was a strong proponent and contributor to the Minimalist perspective of political decision-making. The underlying principle of this perceptive is that the vast majority of those that participate in the political process, do so with a stark lack of sophisticated knowledge guiding their decision making.  Instead of following a rational-actor model, political decision-making is thought to follow what Converse and his colleagues referred to as the Funnel of Causality, in which people disregard most of the details of the political information they receive disassembling it until they end up voting one way or another.

I find it very easy to draw a conceptual as well as visual parallel between this model of political decision-making and the Information Processing Bottleneck described by George Miller and Robert Buckhout. Taking this in to consideration when thinking about political decision-making, our perceptions of the political environment could be seen operating under similar mechanisms. There are way too many sources of information about politics, and way too much variability in this information for us to conceivably process it all. Therefore it would make sense that we follow a pattern of hypothesis formation about political ideology that shares fundamental characteristics with that of sensory perception. 

Given all we have learned about the influence of previous experiences on perception and the capacity of bias to color and shade how we perceive the world around us, what does this say for the validity of a our democratic political system? Does our country truly operate with a government run “by the people, for the people” or has it simply become an amalgamation of media influence and the biases passed on by our parents as well as the events we’ve lived through? Could our political beliefs be nothing more than the result confirmation bias, the result of years of conditioning and the formation of mental models of political ideology based on repeated exposure to the same types of political thought? Furthermore, Should we rethink our two-party system given our understanding of how we jump to conclusions for the sake of preserving our directed attention? Given the notion that we tend to form abstractions of our surroundings based on what is efficient and automatic, I find it troubling that we are forced to choose between one option or another, it seems that our two-party system does most of the “chunking” for us when it comes to simplifying the variability of issues and values with which we could possibly identify. 

References

1. Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E., & Stokes, D. E. (1960). The American Voter. New York: J. Wiley & Sons.

2. Miller, George A., Robert Buckhout "recognizing and Identifying," in Psychology: The Science of Mental Life. Second edition, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. 1973, pp.188-201