Month: July 2020

As a psychologist I sometimes experience despair about the human condition. Our species is capable of imagining possibilities beyond the capabilities of any other species on the planet. Of this there is no doubt. I say this as someone who studies comparative cognition and is well-aware that non-human animals have mental capabilities that generally exceed our expectations (e.g., see here, here, here, and here). That said, we humans are extreme in our capabilities. Indeed, for all we know, our imaginations exceed anything in the universe. We can imagine a telescope lens with the diameter of the planet and use it to create a photo of a black hole 53 million light years away. (By the way, here is an explanation of why the image matches general predictions.) Heck, we can imagine that black holes exist in the first place. We can construct narratives that guide the application of pigments to the Sistine Chapel. We can control the flow of electrons and electromagnetic waves so that words appear on a computer screen and our garage doors open with the press of a button. And we can imagine an ethics that centralizes healing, sustainability and human dignity and we can strive to use this ethics as the organizing principle for our behavior. These are some of the things that our species has shown itself to be capable of. 

And yet recently folks around the U.S. were claiming that the corona virus is a hoax and were going on ANTIFA witch hunts. Here, is a bus belonging to a bunch of hippies being impounded by police out of “ANTIFA paranoia.” The owners of the bus did nothing but peacefully show up to help BLM demonstrators. And here is a U.S. senator, who should know better, cravenly joining in on the hysteria. It’s easy to laugh at this sort of silliness. Except that when laughter meets violence, violence tends to win. Consider Bethel, Ohio on June 14, 2020. After a group decided to hold a march in solidarity with national Black Lives Matter protests, biker gangs and others descended on the town.

Guns and bats to “counter” a march in support of basic human dignity. Why? Or for that matter, why almost 100 years ago did a mob of white residents rage through Tulsa, Oklahoma in a pogrom of racial murder and burnings? Why 23 years before that did almost the same thing take place in Wilmington, NC – a white supremacist coup d’etat that saw the murder and expulsion of black residents from the community?

I’d be the last person to claim that there are easy answers to these questions. At the same time, though, it’s imperative that we at least look for answers. In this post I’ll consider the possibility that part of what’s going on is related to our emotional perceptions and how they influence our explicit reasoning and behavior.  

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts our beliefs about the world are constructed as a set of interlocking maps – maps that at a neurological level describe supply chains of assembly, but also maps at the psychological level that describe the construction and association of our perceptual beliefs with potential actions and outcomes. If I “see” an object to be a particular size, then I prepare actions to interact with the object in a particular way. Similarly, if I “see” a group of individuals as a threat to my community, then I will prepare a set of actions to interact with that threat. In both cases, my perception might be incorrect. The object might not be the size I perceive it to be. The perceived threat might not exist. The problem, of course, is that the origins of our beliefs – be they feelings or visual arrays – are often opaque to us. Further, we cannot simply wish our perceptions away. To hark back to the famous yellow / blue dress – if you see the dress as blue, you cannot simply wish to see it as yellow. Similarly, if you feel an emotion, you cannot simply wish that emotion away. Perception does not work this way. 

I have suggested that perception IS belief. This is true of our classic five senses, but it is also true of visceral perceptions like hunger, vertigo, anger, depression, anxiety, and so on. These visceral perceptions are visceral beliefs. When I “feel” hungry, I believe that I am hungry. When I “feel” angry, I believe that I am angry. 

One of the yawning holes to be filled in psychology, though, stems from the poverty of tools we possess for understanding visceral beliefs. We might be able to take our telescope out and see Jupiter. We can measure its contours, take a photo, and describe its colors. We can read about its moons and how radiation and gravity from the planet rips at Europa. A feeling, though. What is it, exactly? What are its dimensions? How does it fit into the landscape of the psyche? On to what does it map? How does it behave? It’s as if we’ve been given the keys to a machine that can kill us, but we don’t know which buttons and levers do what.

Or, to switch metaphors and broaden the scope, the psychological science of emotions is akin to being a meteorologist 200 years ago. An individual, a community, and a country have emotional systems that roil and impact the social landscape. Like a weather map of cold fronts and storms, visceral beliefs converge, dissipate, and ravage, but also like weather visceral beliefs are predictable. We just don’t know enough. In this sense “guns and bats” are less “crazy” than sadly predictable. As are massacres, degradations, and brutality. Our tools for seeing, measuring and mitigating these storms is at its infancy, which is ironic given the relative importance for understanding this sort of perception as compared to, say, understanding how our sense of color comes about. 

So, let’s spend of moment to unpack a few ways that our visceral perceptual system, i.e., our feelings, are unique relative to our more well-known perceptual systems. I’m going to just pull out three attributes: assignment-of-credit, valuation, and the role feelings play in post-hoc reasoning.