Though people often believe their visual experiences reflect the objective state of the surrounding world, a wealth of recent evidence suggests that perceptions are systematically biased. We draw from contemporary research and supplement with real world anecdotes to suggest that two aspects of perception are subject to influence by states internal to perceivers themselves. We focus on the biases that arise from two difficult tasks faced by the visual system. First, visual information is often unclear and ambiguous; yet visual input must be categorized quickly and efficiently. Second, people can focus on only a subset of perceptual information at once, and as a result visual attention is necessarily directed at a subset of the surrounding world. We document ways in which expectations, desires, and fears help to resolve perceptual ambiguity and direct attention. Finally, we discuss the functional nature of visual biases and note potential consequences in important domains.Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it in your heart? Is it in your eyes? -Bruce Springsteen, "American Skin (41 Shots)" On July 22, 2005, the Metropolitan Police of Greater London were searching for suspects wanted in relation to four attempted bombings carried out the previous day. The police had leads. They found a gym membership card inside one of the bombers' bags and obtained grainy photographs of the suspects from closed-circuit cameras. From this, they guessed that the three suspects in question were of Somali, Eritrean, or Ethiopian descent, narrowed their search to the neighborhood of Tulse Hill, and set up surveillance on a suspected apartment block. The morning of the stakeout, Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician living on the block, left his home for work. An officer on surveillance duty compared the foreign features of Menezes' face to those seen in the photographs. Surreptitious pursuit of Menezes ensued. At the Stockwell Underground Station, Menezes took a seat on a train for his commute to work. Undercover officers tackled and shot Menezes seven times in the head at point-blank range. Menezes, a male, foreign in appearance, and coming from the same building that officers expected the suspects to reside, shared no other similarities to the terrorists and was entirely innocent.The story of this tragedy sounds like many others: Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin, Patrick Dorismond, Ousmane Zongo, Tim Stansbury, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Ramarley Graham. These tragedies repeatedly raise questions about how people mistakenly see what seems so plainly visible to others. How was a Brazilian electrician mistaken for an African terrorist? How was Amadou Diallo's wallet misperceived as a gun? In this article, we discuss the psychological research that may suggest possible reasons they occurred.In addition to these tragic examples, we also discuss instances of more positive perceptual biases. At times, people see the world around them in a way that is more favorable than it might appear under different circumstances. When a woman looks ...
The short‐ and long‐term health benefits of both regular physical activity and healthy eating are well established for persons of all ages. Despite publicity about these benefits and publications of activity and healthy‐eating guidelines, many people struggle with implementing exercise and eating goals. With this work, we propose multiple social cognitive–motivational mechanisms by which social support can promote self‐regulatory success in these domains. Specifically, we outline how interpersonal processes can improve both action planning and action control across the pre‐action, action, and post‐action phases of physical activity and healthy‐eating goal pursuit. We suggest that close relationships offer a promising avenue for improving and promoting individual‐level health behavior. We also discuss limitations, costs, and potential future interventions relating to health, social support, and interpersonal processes.
Rates of physical inactivity continue to rise in the United States. With this work, we tested the efficacy of a strategy affecting the scope of visual attention designed to promote walking as a form of exercise. Specifically, we examined the influence of narrowed attention on the frequency (Studies 1a, 1b, and 3) and efficiency (Studies 2 and 4) of physical activity in general (Studies 1 and 2) and within exercise bouts measured across multiple days (Studies 3 and 4). We provide convergent evidence by investigating both individual differences in (Studies 1 and 2) and experimentally manipulated patterns of visual attention orienting (Studies 3 and 4). We discuss implications of attentional strategies for self-regulation and fitness.
In an era of increased political polarization, it is important to measure how receptive US American citizens are to diverse political views. Being more open to diverse political viewpoints—openness to political pluralism—may involve holding emotional and intellectual tolerance, non-rigidity, and proactive motivation to seek out different political perspectives. In three preregistered studies of US residents, we present a new self-report measure of openness to political pluralism (OPP) consisting of 25 items. In Study 1 (MTurk n = 400), we verified a preregistered bifactor model with four facets, conducted initial validity analyses, and created a short five-item version (OPPS). Both OPP and OPPS have high internal consistency and test-retest reliability. In Studies 2 and 3, MTurk participants (n = 258) and Qualtrics panel participants (n = 296) completed OPP and measures of related constructs to validate our scale. OPP was modestly correlated with actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and highly correlated with open-minded cognition-political (OMC-P). Greater OPP was associated with an inverted U-shape relation to left-right political orientation. It was also correlated with more politically diverse social networks and varied information seeking. We discuss how our measure of openness to political pluralism can be used in future research.
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