filling in the blanks

I'm doing a little research on "civil dialogue," trying to figure out why it is we humans have such trouble being polite when we disagree with each other.

One of the reasons I keep butting into has to do with what may be our fundamental bias; we have a hard time disagreeing because we really don't understand how an intelligent, informed and unbiased person can possibly not agree with us.

The belief that we see the world "as it is" - as opposed to the world from a particular perspective - is what some psychologists call "naive realism." Cognitive and social psychologists tell us that we don't perceive reality; we instead perceive our brain's interpretation of the billions of bits of data our senses send us.

That "interpretation" process is, of course, invisible. We're just aware of the end result - the "reality" our brain shows us. What we walk away with is the interpretation; the details get left behind.

This happens even in the most trivial of ways.

Say, for instance, I show you the image below and ask you what the second figure is. You'll tell me it's a B, yes?

Now I show your friend the next image and ask him the same question.

He's going to say it's a 13 - and be pretty darn certain about it. Of course you've both looked at the identical figure but quite sensibly "seen" very different things.

That's because you've both just been bamboozled by your brain. Not that your brain was trying to trick you; instead it was doing what it does best - quickly analyzing information by referencing its vast store of patterns (or schema) as an aid. In fact, if you hand your brain a big "A" on one side of a page and a big "C" on the other, it already has a good idea of what it'll find in between. Even if the "B" you show it looks kind of funny, or is obscured in any way, your brain will "fill in" or otherwise modify the picture so a "B" is all it could be.

Now let's say I ask you and your friend to remember what you saw and ask you to compare notes the next day. I tell you you've seen the same image, but when you come together you realize that I'm obviously lying and your friend saw a different image - either that or your friend is partially blind or is messing around with you. After a bit, because you and your friend are clever people, you may begin to wonder "is it possible we did see the same image" and then it'll occur to you that a B and a 13 can look very similar, perhaps even identical.

Every thing gets smoothed out between you and your friend. You apologize for calling each other morons and move on. But let's say, instead of looking at a B/13 from different contexts, you were looking at a football play from opposite sides of a stadium (and from different teams), or you were watching a congressional meeting from different sides of the aisle. The levels of "interpretation" become infinitely more complex. Opponents the day after will compare notes and be baffled at each other's take on the event. Unlike you and your friend they will doubtfully get to the point where they wonder "how may we have observed the same event yet "seen" different outcomes." Instead, they'll think the other was partially blind or deaf - or that they were too biased by their beliefs to really "see" what happened.