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"They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction [pdf] (2012)
- bethekidyouwant 9mo ago(2012) in short they show people protest videos and tell each that the protest is about something different. Depending on their ‘inherent biases’ they answer questions about said protest differently. Ergo a video cannot “speak for itself”
- deadbabe 9mo agoIs this why the same protest videos can be recycled multiple times for multiple different purposes
- rayiner 9mo agoThis is also why the era of pervasive videotaping of everything hasn’t ended disputes over basic facts of what happened.
- postflopclarity 9mo agoonly because half the people watching the video are spitefully ignoring the basic facts.
- isx726552 9mo agoYes, and now we have billionaires arguing in public about such basic facts: X link: https://x.com/paulg/status/2008989862725341658 https://x.com/paulg/status/2008989862725341658 Screenshot: https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1q6zgq5/theres_something_dangerous_about_the_richest_man/ https://old.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/1q6zgq5/theres_someth...
- boxed 9mo agoThe in-progress community notes are a shit show too. I saw the video and saw someone trying to avoid the ICE agent, but also being EXTREMELY reckless about driving a huge SUV close to people with guns. Everyone is at fault here imo.
- fzeroracer 9mo agoFor reference since I'm going to assume good faith here, I recommend watching the full videos [1] from multiple angles since there's been multiple edits, cuts and potential changes done if you've seen it elsewhere or on social media. These are the unedited and unmodified videos. [1] https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gb_IkGVK7WvsTAXfMvQUoM4a1P3VwXiu https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Gb_IkGVK7WvsTAXfMvQU...
- boxed 9mo agoI've seen them. The issue I think is that if you've got any political opinion before watching, you'll see something different. This thread is literally inside the comments about that! If you're a total outsider and think both sides in the US sound like absolute crazy people, I would assume you can more easily see the crazy by everyone involved. Or maybe that's just another type of bias? I don't know...
- deadbabe 9mo agoThe ICE agents WANTED to use guns, they just put themselves in a position where a seemingly trivial action by the driver could be twisted to be perceived as enough of a threat to justify pulling a gun out and shooting them multiple times in the head. Murderers with a badge.
- boxed 9mo agoIf you believe all that, which I assume the woman in the car did, why did she push the gas pedal? If the ICE agents wanted to shoot someone as you say, doesn't that logically also imply that the woman in the car wanted to be shot at? The logic goes both ways. Of course, consequences matter, hopefully the ICE agent is prosecuted, fired, and jailed.
- derbOac 9mo agoI'm not sure how this intersects with the point of the paper, but part of the problem with the Renee Good case (or things like it) in my opinion is that the focus too often is on the actual events at a particular moment, and not what is surrounding it. I can see some argument, for example, that goes something like "Jonathan Ross was afraid he was going to get hit by a car and misperceived her as trying to ram him when was trying to turn right, so he fired in self-defense." Then there's a subsequent argument about whether it was reasonable for him to think that she was going to ram him, etc. However, what's missing from this is a broader discussion about whether or not an officer should be putting himself in that position near a car at all, when it might be anticipated that there might be misperceptions about what is happening. Whether the officer is competent enough to perceive the difference between someone turning their car versus trying to ram them (especially at that speed). Whether they should have let medical personnel help afterward. When you frame a discussion about perceptions of facts at a particular moment, you kind of get into a frameset of thinking that everything was passively happening, and start overlooking how a particular moment came to be and whether or not the real problems are a set of things that happened minutes, days, or weeks beforehand, and what happened in the time period afterward. E.g., instead of asking "did Jonathan Ross murder Renee Good?" you can ask "were Jonathan Ross and his colleagues competent enough to avoid a situation where they might feel justified in shooting someone innocent?" I guess I feel like this "cultural perception" question often sidesteps more important questions about whether or not what came to be could have been avoided. This gets more deeply into the underlying attitudes or assumptions driving the perceptions one way or another and lets them be addressed more directly.
- mrtesthah 9mo agoWe do know that it’s been a longstanding policy of DHS for officers not to stand in front of cars on purpose just so they’d have an excuse to fire upon the driver. There was an internal audit in 2014 that called out this exact behavior.
- rayiner 9mo agoThis may be related to your point, but I think another problem is that we focus on isolated events instead of applying systems thinking. Any large scale government system will result in accidental deaths. Amtrak has killed almost 600 people in the last four years. (This is not unique to Amtrak. It’s inherent in any rail system that has crossings at grade: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-what-its-like-to-run-someone-over https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-train-driver-talks-about-w....) But as a society we accept that a certain number of bystanders being killed is an acceptable consequence for performance of an important government function. Law enforcement similarly is inherently dangerous. You can enforce various standards, but fundamentally you have to pick where the set the slider bar on the scale from maximizing law enforcement effectiveness to minimizing accidental casualties.
- pcaharrier 9mo agoQuestions, yes, but specifically questions about the facts in the video (not merely "what should happen to the protesters or police?"). "As one would expect, these differences in case-disposition judgments are mirrored in the subjects’ responses to the fact-perception items. Whereas only 39% of the hierarchical communitarians perceived that the protestors were blocking the pedestrians in the abortion clinic condition, for example, 74% of them saw blocking in the recruitment center condition. Only 45% of egalitarian individualists, in contrast, saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, whereas in the abortion clinic condition 76% of them did. Fully 83% of hierarchical individualists saw blocking in the recruitment center condition, up from 62% in the abortion clinic condition; a 56% majority of egalitarian communitarians saw blocking in that condition, yet only 35% saw such conduct in the recruitment center condition. Responses on other items--such as whether the protestors 'screamed in the face' of pedestrians--displayed similar patterns."
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- baumy 9mo agoI think you have to be careful with this as well, the word "blocking" in particular reminds me of a protest over the Israel/Gaza war that happened at my alma mater a couple years ago. Protesters camped out at a central campus thoroughfare, and some protesters tried to stop people from walking through it. Not every protester did this and it wasn't done consistently by those who did, although some people avoided the area entirely just because they didn't want to deal with it. There were certainly other ways to travel from point A to point B on campus, just slightly longer and less convenient ones. Were people "blocked" from walking through campus? Without disagreeing on any of the above facts, whether people agreed that someone was "blocked" largely came down to who was on each side. So you end up in this annoying semantic argument over what "blocked" means, where people are just using motivated reasoning based on who they want to be the bad actor. Then you have another layer of disagreement - is it the responsibility of someone walking through campus to make a tiny effort to walk a few minutes out of their way and avoid instigating or escalating? Or do they have every right to walk through a public campus they're a student at, and anyone even slightly getting in their way is in the wrong? This feels closer to a principle people could have a consistent belief about, but again, people's opinions were 100% predictable based on which side of the protest they agreed with
- pmichaud 9mo agoMy tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments. The abstract: > “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con- ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro- tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out- side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.
- pcaharrier 9mo agoI think this (from near the end) is also noteworthy (based on the two quotes from the late Justice Scalia at the beginning of the article): >Still another point illustrated by Justice Scalia’s reactions is the ubiquity of cultural cognition. The disposition to form perceptions of fact congenial to one’s values isn’t a pathological personality trait or a style of reasoning integral to a distinctive, and distinctively malign, ideology. (Indeed, the appeal of those sorts of surmises could themselves be seen as evidence of the disposition to form culturally congenial perceptions of how the world works.) Precisely because cultural cognition doesn’t discriminate on the basis of worldview, members of all groups can anticipate that as a result of it they, like Justice Scalia, will likely find themselves members of a disappointed minority in some empirical or factual debates and a member of the incredulous majority in others. The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.
- bad_haircut72 9mo agoI have observed this effect at team retros
- RickJWagner 9mo ago[flagged]
- fzeroracer 9mo agoI'm sorry, but it is deeply ironic for you of all people to be posting this given your statements on the ICE shooting not even 24 hours ago [1] [2]. You are quite literally the exact basis for this research in question. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546310 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46546283
- like_any_other 9mo ago[flagged]
- TimorousBestie 9mo agoIf you want to relitigate this please go do it in the other thread.
- Lerc 9mo agoIn this particular instance I don't think he's wrong, The posts in the links could be considered evidence of how pervasive the outrage/blindness effect is.
- thrance 9mo agoThis guy has made half a dozen comments saying her murder was justified, but some views seem to be immune to moderation on here. I've had dang or tomhow come at me for waaay less (and I'm not saying I was in the right).
- RickJWagner 9mo ago[flagged]
- bondarchuk 9mo agoCan we really conclude that people "see" what they say they see? I think most people would not think twice about saying "protesters did not block the road" when in fact they know full well protesters blocked the road and they really mean "protesters blocked the road and that's good actually".
- RandomTisk 9mo agoThere's a strange pattern of die hard obstinence, even in the face of basic and common facts that we as as society until fairly recently all agreed upon. The reason is that works, if you admit fault/guilt then the usual consequences follow. If they remain obstinate, there's a chance they can project their crime on someone else which doesn't really work except it does retain for them a certain level of public support, from those who "see" what they want to see. It's devastating society.
- derbOac 9mo agoI think there's a real deficit in research on and understanding motivated cognition, and a lot of blurriness about attitudes versus belief versus perception. I don't just mean anything political, I mean things including physical pain and all sorts of things. When someone states something, it's very difficult to distinguish between "this is honestly what I saw or felt" versus "this is what I wanted to see or feel". When you get into the fact that consensus can be wrong, it leads to all sorts of issues. It would be nice to have some kind of way to discriminate at what point in the percept -> attitude -> construal chain (which is probably more of a feedback loop) we are.
- vacuity 9mo agoBefore getting to research, I think a more honest attitude towards admitting motivated cognition in oneself and others is appropriate. I may give a spur-of-the-moment remark on a political situation, but at least if someone presses me, I will readily provide more insight on my biases and values. When I take the time to contemplate, I usually try to modify my eventual response to avoid undue bias altogether. Being reminded that motivated cognition is pervasive in all of us should reduce the unintentional-but-convenient faults in our cognition.
- postflopclarity 9mo ago[flagged]
- dayyan 9mo agoWhen you attempt vehicular manslaughter of an armed federal agent lawfully performing their duties, you find out.
- mrtesthah 9mo ago[flagged]
- postflopclarity 9mo ago"the bitch had it coming"
- Levitz 9mo agoOn the contrary, if I learned something from the Rittenhouse case is that there's a type of person who, when stuff like this happens, doesn't care about video at all, they just grab the narrative and go with it.
- postflopclarity 9mo agohow is that "contrary."
- IncreasePosts 9mo agoI'm as liberal as they come and when I watched all the Rittenhouse videos, I thought it was pretty clear that he defended himself in a reasonable fashion when he was being attacked by a mob
- 01100011 9mo agoI don't think so, given the drastically different takes on something that seemed quite obvious to me after rewatching the video many times. It was quite clear that many takes, on both sides, seemed to bypass the events in the video and jump straight to whatever ideologically-driven interpretation they needed to be true.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoSome previous discussion: 2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32257799
- adolph 9mo agoBrings to mind the Errol Morris investigation of a pair of historic photos in which the photographer may or may not have altered the scene to amp up the drama. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/roger-fenton-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death/ https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/roger-fenton-valle...