You look all over for your glasses until someone points out that they are on your head. You think you’ve misplaced your phone, searching all over the house, until you go back to the first place you looked and find it there. The classic situation, of course, is when your spouse asks you if you have seen something; you say ‘no’, they come to find you, and the thing they were looking for is right next to you. If you’re like me, we can be looking right at something and not even notice it’s there. In all honesty, I really did not see it.
National Public Radio reported on two researchers who study something called inattentional blindness, or, how people fail to see things that are directly in front of them when they’re focused on something else. In a real life situation, a police officer was sentenced to jail for obstruction of justice when he said he did not see other police beating a man even though he was in the immediate vicinity. It seems the officer was chasing another suspect at night, focused on that person’s movements, passing right by the police beating. The researchers Chabris and Simons recreated the event, seeing whether it was possible for people to not see what was happening right in front of them. The research was conducted in the same manner the crime was said to have been committed. Chabris and Simons had three students stage a fight—two students beating up a third. Fully two-thirds of the subjects in the experiment did not see the fight. Even when the experiment was re-created during daylight, still 40% of the respondents saw nothing.[1]
If it’s possible to miss what is right in front of us, is it possible that sometimes we see only what we want to see? Something called the backfire effect says that when our deepest beliefs are challenged by conflicting evidence, our beliefs get stronger.[2] If the candidate you support says he cuts taxes and I show you how he has raised taxes, you refuse to believe my evidence because you believe your candidate no matter what. In the first case, humans don’t see everything: we have blind spots. In the second case, humans refuse to see everything: we put blinders on. We have a great deal of sympathy for someone who honestly doesn’t see what’s right in front of them; happens to us all the time. However, we have real problems with folks who refuse to acknowledge something right in front of them. That is hypocrisy. And it happens to us more times than we care to admit.
For Moody Radio, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, personally seeking truth wherever it’s found. To be broadcast on Moody Radio October, 2011.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137086464/why-seeing-the-unexpected-is-often-not-believing
[2] https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/