Concepts Leading to Inaccurate Perceptions free essay sample

Hundreds of years ago determining the outcome of an event or situation was somewhat easier than it is in our present day society. As our world and time evolved so did the people which inhabit it. Going from Point A to Point B is very rarely a straight line anymore, the path is often filled with twists and turns that could end up leading to a point you never saw coming. In psychology especially lies a wide range of topics and concepts that can lead to inaccurate perceptions, cognitions, and conclusions of certain situations. Ideas such as the afterimage effect, availability heuristic, ethnocentrism, groupthink, the lack of object permanence, non-random assignment of research participants, optimistic explanatory style, and proactive interference are all subjects that tend to skew one’s original perspective or path. To start things off I will begin by discussing the afterimage effect. This effect is what occurs when your eyes, after leaving the receptor cells, analyze visual information in terms of opponent colors. We will write a custom essay sample on Concepts Leading to Inaccurate Perceptions or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page When I tried the example in the book with the flag and the dot, I couldn’t quite grasp the concept as well as I wanted to. I realized that the afterimage effect was almost like an optical illusion, so I found a really great example where a negative picture of Beyonce had three colored dots on her nose; one dot was green, one was blue, and one was red. When you took your eyes off of the negative picture and looked at a plain dot right next to it, blinking once I was able to see a full colored picture of Beyonce. The afterimage effect greatly distorts one’s visual perception of objects when dealing with colors that are received by the eye and those colors that are opposite of them. An effect like this can change the entire way you perceive an inanimate object. As I began to look into availability heuristic, I soon realized how often people subconsciously partake in it. Before I get head of myself I should first explain what availability heuristic is all about. Have you ever watched the news and heard about an event that you almost simultaneously judged the minute you heard about it? This is kind of what availability heuristic entails; more specifically it is how one bases judgments on how mentally available information is. That is in instances that come readily to mind people have a tendency to presume such events are common than they actually are. I found a slightly humorous example where people think they’re more likely to die in a shark attack rather than dying from being hit by falling plane parts, when in reality it is actually the exact opposite. The only reason people believe this is because on the news and in the media we as a society are more likely to hear about a shark attack (i. e. Shark Week) rather than hearing that someone was fatally hit with a piece of a plane. Availability heuristic can severely alter the way we judge situations in everyday life. Just because we think something is common, like dying from a shark attack, we must learn to take a step and analyze that this is not always true, that maybe people actually die more often from flying plane debris. `The concept of ethnocentrism has become a leading idea in forming inaccurate perceptions, particularly in today’s society. In a nut shell ethnocentrism is when a person judges another culture solely based by the values and standards of their own culture. A prime example of ethnocentrism occurring in our present day society is how Americans judge people in the Middle East and vice versa. People in America think that everyone in the Middle East violent terrorists that only seek to destroy those who do not share their same beliefs; and in some cases this may be true. However placing such a harsh standard is not reasonable, for in the Middle East not everyone is Islamic; Hinduism and Buddhism are two religions that also populate that region. Both these religions also happen to be based on extremely peaceful morals and a strict set of humanitarian values. As you can see the rather broad idea of ethnocentrism can cause very large and very specific inaccuracies among social perceptions in our world. Ethnocentrism almost single-handedly ruined the peace between two powerful regions of the world. Anyone who has ever had any type of schooling I can almost guarantee has experienced a concept known as â€Å"groupthink†. Groupthink is characterized as a mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides the opportunity for realistic alternatives. A very general example could be when a group of students working on a project in English would rather just get the project done instead of considering all the possibilities to make the project something special because not everyone in the group cares that much about the grade. Here we see that the idea of group think distorts the project as a whole and ultimately can change the way people in the group view English class and maybe even school. A more specific example I found of a situation where groupthink led to an imprecise conclusion is the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster. Basically NASA officials knew about the potential failure of this launching, but because some people in the group didn’t want to delay the launch, NASA went through with it. This is a case where the groupthink definitely led to not only inaccurate but disastrous conclusions. Playing Peek-A-Boo with a little baby is for some reason so amusing to adults. It’s baffling how the children honestly believe that just because they can’t see you, that automatically means you aren’t there. Well there’s actually a name for this, called the lack of object permanence. This phenomenon is mostly experience by young children where they aren’t aware that things continue to exist even they’re not perceived. The game of Peek-A-Boo is one of the easiest examples that demonstrate the incorrect perceptions the lack of object permanence brings on. Obviously closing your eyes doesn’t mean the whole world disappears and you’re somehow floating in another dimension; it just means you can’t visually perceive what’s around you. One concept that is especially important to researchers in the psychological field that perform experiments to collect data is the idea of random assignment versus non-random assignment. Random assignment is when you assign participants to experiment and conduct conditions by chance, which is what normally minimizes preexisting differences between those assigned to different groups. However non-random assignment is when you as the experiment conductor know that the participants were specifically chosen for some reason. For example if a journalist was going to write a piece on how people that live in the city of Pittsburgh actually view the city, he would need to get feedback from people that live in the city. But if this journalist were to only sample his friends whom he knew shared the same ideas as him, it really wouldn’t be a credible article; some might even consider the data faulty due to the fact the research wasn’t obtained randomly. The way people explain themselves and why they experience particular events is an attribute called explanatory style which usually indicates how this is done. A specific version of explanatory style is optimistic explanatory style. To be optimistic is to have the tendency to always look on the bright side of things. This can however lead to fallacious conclusions that may have not been intended. Take for example the hypothetical situation I’m about to describe. A senior in high school, Percy, is extremely bright but quite shy and soft-spoken. One day in math Percy lets a rather rude kid cheat off of his test and because of the great grade the kid received on the test he ends up passing Percy in the running for valedictorian. Percy having an optimistic explanatory style is still happy though because he managed to get the salutatorian spot instead. Percy was looking at the situation with completely clouded judgment. Because he was always so optimistic, Percy didn’t try to fight his way back into the top spot of his class and there was really an undeserving candidate for valedictorian because of it. The last concept I will describe to you is that of proactive interference. Proactive interference is the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information. An example of this is actually an issue I deal with in school. English speaking people usually have a hard time learning Spanish because they’ll want to apply already known English grammar skills to the Spanish language, which if you’ve ever taken any kind of language you’ll know definitely does not work well at all. Proactive interference does exactly what it sounds like it does, it interferes with the way people perceive new knowledge which can ensue damage on a person’s life in the long run. In the world of psychology it’s almost imperative to analyze how and why concepts alter situations that can lead to inaccurate perceptions and conclusions. The common ground that all the concepts mentioned above share is that they somehow lead to inaccuracies. Whether it’s the afterimage effect and your vision is distorted or ethnocentrism where your view of social norms is biased and skewed, these concepts lead to visual, physical, mental, and behavioral miscommunications that I believe deserve to be examined and studied.