Was my memory of this paper objective, reliable, and accurate? Apparently, various aspects had little lasting significance to me: the teams, article authors, the question of whether the teams were evenly guilty or Dartmouth was more guilty of infractions, the role of the Princeton star in the debate, and the descriptive jargon of the authors. What was significant to me was the convincing evidence that the two teams ‘saw’ two different games and that these experiences were related to the observers’ different expectations: I remembered this key conclusion correctly.
I forgot the important fact that the questionnaires were administered a week after the game rather than immediately after, with no attempt to distinguish the effect of personal observation from that of biasing editorials. As every lawyer knows, immediate witness accounts are less biased than accounts after recollection and prompting. I forgot that there were also two groups who watched for infractions as they saw a film, and that these two groups undoubtedly had preconceptions concerning the infractions before they saw the film.
The experiment is less convincing now than it was to me as an undergraduate student. Indeed, it is poorly controlled by modern standards, yet I think that the conclusions stand unchanged. The pattern of my selective memory after 23 years is consistent with these conclusions.
I have encountered many other examples of the subjectivity and bias of perception. But it is often the first unavoidable anomaly that transforms one’s viewpoints. For me, this football game -although hearsay evidence -- triggered the avalanche of change.
Hastorf and Cantril [1954] interpreted their experiment as evidence that “out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.” Compare this ‘objective statistical experimental result’ to the much more subjective experiment and observation of Loren Eiseley [1978]:
“Curious, I took a pencil from my pocket and touched a strand of the [spider] web. Immediately there was a response. The web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur. Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational, extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I did not exist.”
Stereotypes, of football teams or any group, are an essential way of organizing information. An individual can establish a stereotype through research or personal observation, but most stereotypes are unspoken cultural assumptions [Gould, 1981]. Once we accept a stereotype, we reinforce it through what we look for and what we notice.
The danger is that a stereotype too easily becomes prejudice -- a stereotype that is so firmly established that we experience the generalization rather than the individual, regardless of whether or not the individual fits the stereotype. When faced with an example that is inconsistent with the stereotype, the bigot usually dismisses the example as somehow non-representative. The alternative is acceptance that the prejudice is imperfect in its predictive ability, a conclusion that undermines one’s established world-view [Goleman, 1992c].
Too often, this process is not a game. When the jury verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial was announced, a photograph of some college students captured shock on every white face, joy on every
