Inattentional Blindness - Another Approach

to the Question: Why Can They Not See?      
by Andrew Bard Schmookler
My naming my website “NoneSoBlind” indicates how struck I have been that so many of my fellow Americans have been unable to see something I regard as so blatant, as well as so vital, about the regime wielding power in America.

 

How can they not see that this regime is a means by which evil forces are dismantling all that’s best in America?

 

 

WHY CAN’T PEOPLE SEE?

 

I’ve found this blindness on the part of so many of my countrymen has not only surprised but also deeply troubled me. And so not only have I, in crafting my forum to deal with these dark times, drawn upon the old English Protestant saying, “There are none so blind as those who will not see.” But I’ve continued publicly to wrestle with the question of how this blindness is to be understood.

Early on, here on NSB, I posited a psycho-cultural explanation of how the vulnerabilities and defects of otherwise good people are being exploited by these Bushite “masters of the theater of the moral lie.” Thus in the piece, I suggest that people who have imbibed an overly strict morality, and have therefore been unable to integrate their forbidden impulses into their conscious selves, have unconsciously welcomed a chance to identify with the enacting of evil under the guise of the Bushites’ false righteousness. (See: Here’s the puzzle: How is it that many remarkably decent people can support leaders who are remarkable precisely for their lack of such decency?)

And in more recent weeks, I called attention to some stunning research that demonstrates that a great many people in America today can have their political views driven in the direction of fascist values and perspectives by having their fear of death evoked, sometimes even in very indirect and subtle ways. The research described in the piece by John Judis (?), published originally in The New Republic, suggests one possibly important factor in the warping of political perception by many of those who have given their support to this fascist regime;

Now I’ve come upon another line of thinking that may help illuminate this puzzle of the dangerous blindness of so many Americans. Before I make this latest foray into solving this puzzle, let me first say that the answer need not be one factor or another, but can be some mixture of all of them, and perhaps others besides. Deep human behavioral phenomena are often “over-determined,” i.e. are brought about by subtle and intricate combinations and interactions of forces.

I just happened lately to be reading the book Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin (an autistic woman who has become famous for her understanding of animals. In the course of her discussion, she talks about how “normal people literally don’t see a lot of things.” She writes (p. 24):

There’s a famous experiment by a psychologist named Daniel Simons…called Gorilla in Our Midst, that shows you how bad people’s visual awareness is. In the experiment they show people a videotape of a basketball game and ask them to count how many passes one team makes. Then, a little while into the tape, while everyone is sitting there counting passes, a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks onto the screen, stops, turns, faces the camera, and beats her fists on her chest. Fifty percent of all people who watch this video don’t see the gorilla!

Even when the experimenters ask them directly, “did you notice the gorilla?” they say, “The what?” It’s not that they don’t remember the lady in the gorilla suit…These folks actually didn’t see the lady gorilla in the first place.

This theme recurs later in the book, as she introduces the concept of “inattentional blindness” (which is the title of a book by Arien Mack and Irvin Rock). One key part of the idea is that people tend to see only what they are looking for. Grandin writes (p. 51):

[I]t’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place… Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see, and it’s hard to expect to see something you’ve never seen.

 

Maybe it’s mixing up two kinds of phenomena that occur on such different levels that they cannot be understood in the same terms. But nonetheless, the question occurs to me: Might the inability of many Americans to see the blatant fascist evil before their eyes for what it is be an instance of inattentional blindness?

 

Perhaps, according to this idea, these Americans simply cannot see what they are not looking for.

It is not clear that the failure to notice a woman in a gorilla suit putting herself for a moment before a camera showing a basketball game can be compared to the failure of people to notice that an American presidency has become, before their eyes, the very kind of dishonest and thuggish regime Americans have traditionally prided themselves on opposing. But then again, perhaps the phenomena are akin: for some people, such evil in the White House might be the kind of thing so new and unexpected that they simply cannot see it.

Grandin speaks of human beings in general. But it should be recalled that though — amazingly — fifty percent of people failed to see the woman in the gorilla suit, the other half of the people in the study did see her. And so whatever may be the tendencies of human beings generally, this inattentional blindness seems to be the result of other factors as well.

My guess is that people differ in their ability to see the new; that they differ in how ready they are to accommodate their conceptual framework to take into account new information entering their visual field, as opposed to the inclination to disregard any such information that challenges their pre-existing scheme of understanding.

The phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” according to that hypothesis, would be a function of how humans are “built,” as Grandin says. But also of how their life experiences have shaped their motivational structures to develop flexibility vs. rigidity of expectation and perception.

Which brings us back around to those other explanatory frameworks for this American blindness. Fear, it has been shown, greatly diminishes people’s tolerance for ambiguity: so those people who have been most vulnerable to fear are probably also those who have the least tolerance for the uncertainties that come with the acknowledgment of the unexpected phenomena that cannot be assimilated into their pre-existing view of the world.

 

And further, those whose psychological structure has required the continual practice of denial and distortion, I would predict, are more likely to be those who fail to notice the woman in the gorilla suit.

 

 

 

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