Gremlins in the data stream.

Gremlins in the data stream.
The very structures and processes that make us so successful in most circumstances can limit or mislead us in others.* Campbell writes, “ . . . insight and error are back to back in our everyday thinking, two sides of the same coin of the mind’s economy” (249). The shortcuts that let us navigate vast amounts of information can also lead us to the wrong conclusions.

• WMD, anyone? It’s easier to see what we expect than what we don’t.
And since our expectations are necessarily reduced versions of the real world, we can miss a lot of what’s out there. We pick out what fits our preconceptions and overlook the rest.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he was looking for Asia. He bumped into the Caribbean islands and called the people he murdered there “Indians”. He’d miscalculated a bit --by 14,000 miles or so-- but his expectations overrode the evidence in front of his nose. President Halliburton, convinced that all Arabs harbor an irrational hatred of the U.S., and that U.S. intelligence and U.N. inspectors were irrationally covering up for Saddam, cannot admit that Saddam posed not the slightest threat to the U.S.

This “selective perception” is as common as mud. Did you ever meet one of those folks addicted to self-help books? I know a guy who goes through book after book looking for an explanation for his misery. But his problem is quite obvious, and those of us who know him could tell him right away what he lacks; sometimes we have. Possibly some of his books name it, too. But he doesn’t get it because he’s so adept at shoehorning what he sees and hears into an old and cherished story about himself. He’ll spend his life hopping from one emotional regimen to another, looking for something with eyes closed.

Perhaps the biggest reason our schemas, stereotypes and prejudices are so hard to change is that “they lead us to misperceive the very data that could potentially disconfirm them” (Atkinson 692). There’s plenty of experimental evidence for this effect. In one case, college students were given material alternately supporting and contradicting the idea of ESP (extrasensory perception). When tested on the material, students who were skeptical of ESP to begin with remembered information both for and against ESP. But “ESP believers who read the unsupportive version. . . . remembered significantly less of the abstract and in some cases reversed the conclusion, saying that the results supported rather than challenged the existence of ESP” (Vyse 121). They blocked out the information that contradicted their beliefs. I was going to write, “They simply blocked out the information,” but there’s probably nothing at all simple about not seeing or so radically misinterpreting what we do see. Listen to how people (real people, not the talking heads) explain the credit crisis of 2008. How many blame big government? That’s like saying nurses cause cancer, but it’s the only story many people know.

Another set of investigators studied what happens to information as it passes from person to person. We depend so much on what we already know or believe to interpret new information, we can mangle the original data.

Allport and Postman succeeded in creating controlled rumours for study, by showing one subject a picture (often one with emotional overtones), asking him to describe it unseen to a second person, asking that person to repeat the description to a third, and so on, up to around fifteen repetitions. The types of distortions the stories underwent bore a remarkable resemblance to the distortions of dreams and other fantasies. Sometimes a fact would be reversed (in one picture a white man holding a razor is talking to a black; as retold, they are arguing or even fighting, and it is the black man who has the razor) (Sladek 309).


We can see selective perception at work in large and small political contexts. One of my colleagues feels his students take advantage of the welfare system. “I have a lady in her late 40's that still has children in school (she has 9 children total) and has never worked,” he complained. (e-mail 2-11-03). The double-sided stereotype in my town that Mexicans work hard / will underbid U.S.-born workers ignores the fact that employers can abuse undocumented immigrants almost at will; if they complain, they can be deported. Slavery so deranged the South’s rulers that

S.A. Cartwright, a prominent physician . . . . wondered why slaves often tried to flee, and identified the cause as a mental disease called drapetomania, or the insane desire to run away. ‘Like children, they are constrained by unalterable physiological laws, to love those in authority over them. Hence, from a law of his nature, the negro can no more help loving a kind master, than the child can help loving her that gives it suck’ (Gould 1981 pp. 70-71).

People were so foolish back then, but then they didn’t have the benefit of modern technology. Take the Rodney King video. King was the guy stopped for a traffic violation. He ran toward 15 police officers, and they hit him 56 times. 4 cops were arrested for assault. It’s all on tape.

Who knows what the white jurors saw?-- perhaps a thin blue line defending the pearly gates of suburbia against barbarian hordes. You probably remember the Los Angeles riots that followed the verdict (and decades of disinvestment and police racism): 54 killed, thousands injured, 7,000 fires.

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After the deaths of several African Americans detained by police, Los Angeles police chief Darryl Gates said that " . . . blacks might be more likely to die from chokeholds because their arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people" ("Urban League . . . ", New York Times 5-12-02 p.A24).
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The riots point to another nasty dynamic: selective perception can become a self-fulfilling condition. In failing to see police brutality, perhaps because of their own racism, the Ventura whites kicked off a series of events that likely intensified racism among all the communities involved (see Anna Deveare Smith’s compelling exploration in the video, Twilight in Los Angeles). The way we treat folks provokes reactions that simply reinforce our prejudices.

In experiments simulating job interviews, researchers observed how white interviewers tended to be less friendly and more abrupt with black applicants. The researchers then trained interviewers to adopt either the friendly or unfriendly style with a series of white applicants. Observers rated the applicants. “The results showed that those being interviewed (the subjects) who received the less friendly pattern of behavior from the interviewer (as had the black applicants in the first experiment) were rated significantly lower on their own performance and demeanor than were those who had received a more friendly pattern . . . . This study indicates that prejudiced individuals may interact in ways that actually evoke the stereotyped behaviors and thus sustain the prejudice” (Atkinson 693).

Another study had men look at photographs of women and call them on the phone. The men treated the “attractive” women more favorably, and, in turn, the “attractive” women were observed to be “more sociable, poised, and humorous” than “unattractive” women. Remember, neither the men on the phone nor observers who listened to the tapes later had any way of knowing what these women really looked like. The women were clearly responding to the men’s expectations and treatment (Atkinson 693).

These studies remind me of a colleague who told me, “I can spot Puerto Ricans by their rude attitudes-- they think the world owes them something.” I know this person to be extremely judgmental. If some Puerto Rican people were in fact rude to him, likely they were just responding to his pre-existing prejudice (which he himself cannot see).

Seeing what we hope or expect also explains how the most outrageous lies come to be widely accepted. In 1998 journalist Stephen Glass made up dozens of stories for The New Republic before getting caught. The secret of his success with his editors and the public? His well-tuned instinct for popular prejudice, as with his invention of the black teen assaulting an Indian cab driver. As Tom Scocca observed,

Glass's real trick was the way he appealed to his audience's prejudices. His most colorful material usually involved people from outside the New Republic's readership: old folks in retirement homes, menial laborers, backwoods Christians. The behavior he described may have been improbable, but it conformed to stereotype. Old ladies doted, a bit battily, on obscure political figures; a limo driver plotted seductions; religious yokels ranted about the devil. An elderly Pole fumed about a Jewish conspiracy to keep foul-prone heavyweight Andrew Golota from winning the title (Scocca).

But of course the editors were his most important readership. According to another critic,

Glass’s run of faked features happened not just because he was clever and determined but because he was giving The New Republic and other magazines exactly what they wanted. . . . Glass diagnosed an appetite at The New Republic for stories that illustrated, preferably outrageously, the naiveté of traditional liberals and the moral corruption of conservatives. His stories fit perfectly the pugnacious neoconservatism The New Republic of that era was attempting to define (Bowden 148, 149).

Long before that, Charles Stuart shot his wife and blamed a black guy, setting off a massive police intrusion into Boston’s black neighborhoods, and causing an innocent man to be charged. Five years later, in South Carolina, Susan Smith killed her two sons and again blamed a black man, misdirecting the police for nine days. In 2005 the Reluctant Bride falsely claimed she’d been kidnapped by a Latino. Stories like this both draw on and add to our racist fears.

More recently, I was disabused of a fond stereotype of my own: that the rich white boys of the Duke U. lacrosse team went beyond underpaying a low income black woman for a sex display, and raped her. Years ago I knew another person who made apparently false allegations, and drew a lot of support for a long time because her story fit just what we had come to expect from corporate thugs. I don't know if in either of these cases the community or democratic groups in particular did more than aggressively push for the truth; in the Duke case, the prosecutor crossed the line, ignoring or even covering up facts that tended to exonerate the students. As democrats we are doubly obligated to push for the truth in cases like this, because so often the crimes are only too real. We cannot afford to let careless handling of facts in a particular case discredit the much broader truth.

Self-fulfilling expectations are an occupational hazard for teachers --hazardous to our students, at any rate-- especially when we underestimate their abilities and consequently discourage them from learning as much as they could. The problem is serious enough to have generated a lot of research. I was somewhat relieved to read that, according to these studies, most teachers hold realistic expectations of their students and will also change their expectations as they learn more. Nevertheless, it's all too easy to discourage learners from achieving their potential (Cotton 1989), and it only takes one such teacher to set a child back months or years.

Institutions, too, can set up conditions for self-fulfilling prophecies. The Cold War was not solely the result of rabid anti-communism on the part of politicians in U.S. business, church, media and government, but their aggressiveness and secret dealings certainly justified Russian and Chinese suspicions. Halliburton appeared dumbfounded that its threats to destroy Saddam did not nurture in the dictator a spirit of cooperation, openness and gratitude; the rest of us were less amazed. Nor were we surprised that Halliburton’s racist policies towards Muslims and naked grab for their resources did not discourage terrorism.

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“He had no freakish notions that things were so, or might be so, when they were not so. All his thinking and reasoning, all his mind, in short, was based continually upon actual facts, and upon facts of which, as I said, he saw the essence.”
-- Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, about Lincoln (Cohen 22).
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The biggest danger of selective perception is that it makes it very hard to learn from new experience. In discussing the way volunteers in one study discounted evidence contrary to their beliefs about capital punishment, Atkinson adds, “One disturbing implication of these results is that evidence introduced into public debate in the hope of resolving an issue --or at least moderating extreme views-- will tend instead to polarize public opinion even further. Proponents of each side will pick and choose from the evidence so as to bolster their initial opinions” (690).

Reagan was famous for basing his political homilies on news clips about welfare queens and polluting trees, modelling an analytical style for a whole generation of talk radio potty-mouths. Of course, Ronald brazenly lied even after carefully selecting only the facts that would support him.

Over a period of about five years, Reagan told the story of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting deceased husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." The real welfare recipient to whom Reagan referred was actually convicted for using two different aliases to collect $8,000. Reagan continued to use his version of the story even after the press pointed out the actual facts of the case to him (www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/reagan.html).

But we don’t have to lie to be dishonest. Years back, historian Staughton Lynd studied class struggle in colonial times. Later he wrote,

I am now more conscious that I selected a range of data which I could be pretty certain would substantiate the thesis I hoped was true. I studied opposition to the United States Constitution in Dutchess County, New York, because Dutchess County had a history of landlord-tenant conflict very likely to be connected with how groups aligned themselves for or against ratification of the Constitution. The bias involved in my selection of Dutchess County did not necessarily invalidate my findings, but it raised serious questions as to their generalizability. I believe this is how bias characteristically operates in the work of other historians, too: not in the deliberate mishandling of evidence, but in the selection of research design (Fischer 85).

It doesn’t matter that Lynd may have unconscious of his bias at the time; he had the capacity and the responsibility to know his preferences and look beyond them. The same is true of those rock-star journalists who quote rock-star think-tankers and CEOs about how clean the air is, or what a friend we have in Free Trade, and ignore or belittle the voices of the millions who actually bear the costs. The finest recent example, of course, is Halliburton’s end run around the intelligence agencies to scrounge up the justification for war.

Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq . . . told me that what the Bush people did was ‘dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership . . . . They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was very bad information . . . ‘ (Hersh 77).

================= ingenious excuses, xtreme xplanations =================
"On one occasion [the UFO investigators] refer to a Brazilian named Caetano who claimed to see and be abducted by a UFO while his traveling companion Elvio, looking in the same direction, could only see a bus. The authors explain this anomaly by arguing that the aliens must have caused Elvio to perceive the UFO as a bus, ignoring the more likely possibility that Caetano was the one probably hallucinating (Matheson 121).
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Let me mention one further wrinkle to this question of self-deception: false claims to objectivity. Mainstream journalists have been doing this for years, pretending to fairly represent both sides (by which they usually mean, one clique of rich people in dispute with another). I appreciate the rules and procedures some journalists claim to follow to verify information, but not the pretense that these formal safeguards eliminate bias. It’s no consolation whatsoever that the rightist media have taken the failures of “objective” reporting to excuse their own outright lies.

I notice a slightly different kind of selectivity in religious talk: the common testimonial that the testifier was on the road to perdition before she saw the light. I heard once on James Dobson’s Focus on the Family program (9-30-04) a woman relate the story of her conversion. She worked for a doctor who did abortions. She was in danger of succumbing to feminism, she said, until she asked for a sign from God to show if abortion was right or wrong. Then she was told to clean the abortion machine, saw a bloody fetus, and decided to oppose abortion.

Stories like this depend on the claim that people change their minds through divine inspiration; that without God’s intervention they would be predisposed to believe and act in a different way. Thus they satisfy themselves (if not uninvested observers) that they are not simply seeing what they want to see.

Naturally, as folks who prefer democracy, we have our own notions of how the world works-- for the most part, considerably more truthful than Halliburton’s.** But we, too, have to resist the temptation to select only the facts that fit our case.

Telling the truth takes special skill and care when so many others do not. We have no need or responsibility to repeat the lies and half-truths so amply broadcast through commercials, talk shows, presidential press conferences, and The New York Times. Our responsibility is to use our slender resources to share the important information the masters do not see fit to print (the vast Christian media make much the same argument). But we can’t afford to overlook what doesn’t so easily fit our models.

Oil and racism were central to the Iraq invasions, for instance, but were not the whole story, and do not point to a way to extricate. The West’s economic and military domination of the Middle East is a foundation of Muslim terrorism, but Osama and pals are not the oppressed and will not evaporate any time soon, even if we can get the U.S. to adopt more just policies. Rich white men do sometimes rape black women, but not in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. “We Shall Overcome” and “The people, united, etc etc.” are thrilling aspirations, but historical nonsense. (If this is news to you, let me refer you to Palestine. Or just open any history book, about almost any land.) We have powerful understandings of the world, but we’ve got to keep developing them. Many of us did not see 9/11 coming, and Halliburton took immediate advantage while many of us thrashed around for months.

We need our preconceptions. We make sense of the world by superimposing a sort of mental grid that helps us figure out what to look for and how one thing is related to another. But a lot of these schemas or stories or paradigms conceal more than they reveal. Corporations buy politicians like rolls of toilet paper, so we need to get rid of Big Government. Permissive liberals forced Rupert Murdoch into putting all that sex and violence on TV. People shoot and stab because their parents didn’t beat them enough when they were little. We have few rights in the workplace so we can’t let unions boss us around. We fear terrorism so we must invade other people’s countries. The list goes on. We read events in very different ways, depending on which story we use to understand it.

So it’s not simply better information that we need. Just to be able to understand new information, we need better stories. At least we can dig out and dust off those stories long packed away at the bottom of the closet.


* I read that paying attention to limits makes me a conservative. Baloney. The fact that we need food and work, that kids need adults in their lives, that the economy cannot grow forever without irreversible damage to our one and only resource base, all these require us to demand regime change.

** Slaves always know more about their masters than vice versa. That’s scant comfort, though. For the price of, say, an SUV and a credit card, the bosses can always find some slaves who will spy and squeal on the rest of us.