Each and every one of us, albeit in our own way, is immersed in a tireless, and often unconscious, search for meaning in the events and things around us. It’s natural for us to try to find order in events because our brains are obsessed with order and logic, so we try to make sense of everything that happens.
In this search for meaning, we establish what is known in psychology as punctuation, which is nothing more than a cause-effect order. The curious thing is that once we have established this punctuation, once we have given an order and explanation to the facts, we become attached to that version of reality and take it for granted. In practice, we self-confirm this vision of reality through selective attention. And worst of all, we then show a tendency to ignore all the facts that refute our view, falling victim to what is known as confirmation bias.
The strange case of the damaged windshields
In the late 1950s, the city of Seattle suffered a strange phenomenon that reached epidemic proportions: an increasing number of drivers noticed that their car windshields had small indentations, like tiny crater-shaped holes.
The matter reached such proportions that, at the request of the governor of Washington State, President Eisenhower sent a group of experts from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to Seattle to find the cause of the mystery.
The commission soon discovered that two theories were circulating among the city’s residents to explain the phenomenon of damaged windshields. The first, which they called the “fall-out theory,” claimed that recent Russian atomic explosions had contaminated the atmosphere, and the radioactive fallout generated by these experiments had transformed, in Seattle’s humid climate, into a kind of dew that damaged windshield glass.
Supporters of the “asphalt theory” were convinced that the long stretches of highways that had recently been paved as part of a road network program launched by Governor Rosollini had, due to the region’s humid climate, created numerous acidic particles that affected the previously unscathed windshields.
However, the researchers did something unique: instead of investigating both theories, they simply started from the beginning by asking whether there really were that many damaged windshields. The men from the Federal Bureau of Investigation assumed nothing, and thus discovered that there had actually been no increase in the number of damaged windshields.
What had happened was a mass phenomenon: when news of damaged windshields spread, drivers began to take notice of their own cars. Many of them began looking at the windshield from the outside, leaning over it to examine it more closely, instead of looking from the inside through the glass, the normal angle from which they always viewed it.
From this unusual perspective, they could clearly see the tiny craters found on almost all windshields, which are due to normal wear and tear. The researchers therefore concluded that what had occurred in Seattle was not an epidemic of damaged windshields, but rather an epidemic of inspected windshields.
This case, described in the book “Is Reality Real?” by Paul Watzlawick, shows us how an everyday, insignificant event that often goes unnoticed can become a deeply emotional issue. From that moment on, our minds begin to search for an explanation, and when we find one, even if it’s far-fetched, we don’t need any further proof or question the origin of the matter. We simply make our explanation real, and it becomes self-consolidating.
What is selective attention?
Selective attention is a natural process that allows us to select a stimulus from a multitude of distractions and focus on it. Once we concentrate our attention, everything else fades away, allowing us to perform the task better.
This mechanism helps us filter and prioritize the relevance of environmental stimuli, classifying them according to their importance for the task at hand. From this perspective, there’s nothing negative about this; the problem begins when we make generalizations about reality based on selective attention. Then we fall victim to a perceptual bias, just like the Seattle drivers.
In fact, selective attention is responsible for the fact that when we buy a car, we suddenly see the same model everywhere. At that point, we think there’s an epidemic of similar cars, or we may think that we’re actually just giving it more importance because we have an emotional connection that didn’t exist before, and therefore, now that model has become a relevant stimulus for us.
The brain prioritizes stimuli that are relevant to us, causing us to dismiss the rest as irrelevant information. There’s no doubt that the mechanism of selective attention prevents our brain and processing system from becoming overloaded, but it can end up playing tricks on us.
Of course, there are some factors that exacerbate selective attention, making it easier to ignore or attend to each stimulus:
- Similarity. The more the stimulus resembles what worries or concerns us, the more likely we are to pay attention to it.
- Spatial proximity. The closer a stimulus is to the subject we’re focusing on, the more we’ll pay attention to it, as we’ll tend to think there’s some kind of relationship that allows us to explain the phenomenon. This can lead to the error of making erroneous inferences based solely on a temporal relationship.
- Emotional significance. The more emotionally significant a stimulus is, the more likely it is to enter our radar. As a result, we can end up establishing completely spurious correlations based on our emotions.
How does selective attention become a perceptual bias?
Selective attention ultimately becomes a perceptual bias when it distorts reality, when we draw conclusions based on erroneous premises, our emotions, or random events to which we assign a meaning that cannot be verified.
In practice, selective attention narrows our view of reality, causing us to see facts through tunnel vision, and interpretation bias narrows our perspective even further. Interpretation bias occurs when we assign a certain meaning over others to a stimulus that is actually ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations.
The problem is that we don’t notice interpretation bias because we’re unaware of selective attention. If we only see part of reality – the part of reality that doesn’t produce cognitive dissonance and that aligns with our beliefs and feelings – we won’t even consider the possibility that we’re making mistakes when drawing conclusions.
And the more certain we are of our vision of reality, the more rigid, intransigent, and intolerant we become. In fact, selective attention and interpretation biases underlie disorders such as anxiety and depression, learned helplessness, and many interpersonal conflicts.
How can we get rid of selective attention bias?
In reality, we can’t get rid of selective attention, and it’s not necessary, as it’s a useful mechanism. However, we can minimize its impact on cognitive biases. Simply being aware that our view of reality is only a small part of it and that there may be other views just as valid as ours allows us to open a window to change.
The mental exercise of questioning everything, even things we’ve always taken for granted, also keeps the brain in shape and protects us from selective attention and interpretation bias. Take one of your most deeply held beliefs and ask yourself where it originates and what assumptions it’s based on. Analyze it as if you were an impartial observer and try to dismantle the reasons behind it. This exercise in mental metaphysics will take you further and further and open your mind to new possibilities and interpretations you might not have even considered before.
After all, remember that sometimes you can’t avoid hitting the stone; the secret is not to get attached to it. Life is a journey of discovery in which we must change our interpretations and beliefs because that is synonymous with growth. It’s okay if we initially aren’t able to see things from a broader perspective; the truly important thing is to remain open to other interpretations that can enrich our vision.
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