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Fake news will thrive as long we are happy to see only what we want to see
If a gorilla walked right in front of your eyes, you wouldn’t miss it, would you? Actually, half the country probably would.
In a classic 1999 experiment, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons showed people a video of basketball players, some wearing white shirts, some wearing black, and asked them to count how many times the players in white passed the ball. Halfway through the film, a woman in a gorilla suit saunters into the scene, faces the audience, thumps her chest and walks away. Extraordinarily, more than half of Chabris’s and Simons’s subjects were so intent on watching the ball being thrown that they failed to see the gorilla.
The experiment poses important questions about the reliance of eyewitness accounts. It also has a bearing on the way we access information, including news. Two stories last week illustrate how we often see what we expect, or want, to see.
The first is the tragic story of Dutch teenager Noa Pothoven. Sexually assaulted and raped as a young girl, Pothoven’s pain led to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anorexia.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/08/fake-news-will-thrive-as-long-as-we-are-happy-to-see-what-we-want-to-see?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1560018422
In a classic 1999 experiment, psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons showed people a video of basketball players, some wearing white shirts, some wearing black, and asked them to count how many times the players in white passed the ball. Halfway through the film, a woman in a gorilla suit saunters into the scene, faces the audience, thumps her chest and walks away. Extraordinarily, more than half of Chabris’s and Simons’s subjects were so intent on watching the ball being thrown that they failed to see the gorilla.
The experiment poses important questions about the reliance of eyewitness accounts. It also has a bearing on the way we access information, including news. Two stories last week illustrate how we often see what we expect, or want, to see.
The first is the tragic story of Dutch teenager Noa Pothoven. Sexually assaulted and raped as a young girl, Pothoven’s pain led to post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anorexia.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/08/fake-news-will-thrive-as-long-as-we-are-happy-to-see-what-we-want-to-see?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium=&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1560018422
Yep.
4 replies
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