There have been a lot of conflicting comments about the various videos showing the ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis mom killed last week. One behavioral expert walked through how people can see the exact same video and have completely different takes on the matter.
Speaking to CNN on Wednesday, social psychologist Emily Balcetis said that she's been studying for 20 years how people look at the same evidence in a case and come to different conclusions.
Balcetis, who penned the book Social Psychology of Visual Perception, told Pamela Brown that people consider a video as a neutral witness, when that isn't necessarily the case.
"Of course, video provides important and valuable information that we need to understand the events of this case," she noted. "But it's not a complete understanding of what what has happened, because video evidence and the footage that it creates is constrained by where the camera is located and what that camera is pointed at, it can't any one video cannot take in the full complexities of a social situation like this one that we saw. The video is missing important information."
Her second point is that observers have limited visual and cognitive abilities and are trying to analyze altercations that are "complex."
"They're fast-moving. There are many moving social dynamics, and that overwhelms our ability to take in with precision and clarity all of what we're seeing at the same time, or at any one moment," said the New York University associate professor. "That means when you couple those two facts together, there are gaps in our understanding of what's happening in this video."
Viewing the video several times doesn't mean that any additional information is gathered because people tend to only see the same things over and over. It does nothing more than solidify the viewer's perspective.
"They're not seeing what they didn't see the first time. That maintains those misunderstandings," Balcetis said. "But then how do we fill in those gaps of understandings?"
She described the human brain as a "computational machine" automatically producing data based on what is viewed.
"Generations and generations have led our brains to evolve to fill in those gaps of understanding. And it does so by leveraging social identities," Balcetis continued. "The more we feel aligned with police officers or with authority will shape not just our opinions about whether that officer was culpable for the violence that we saw, but how we view that video evidence in the first place."
In studies she has performed in the lab, they discovered "the more that somebody paid attention to one target in that video, be it the police officer or anybody, that they held a negative attitude towards, the more that they were confident that that person was the aggressor, that they were the ones responsible for the violence that they observed because the more you pay attention to any one target, the what we found in the science was that the more inaccurate they were about the full scope of the case facts."
The goal is to shift understandings in an era governed by polarization.
One thing a viewer can do to account for this "is to try hard to look for the things that we didn't see the first time. If we try to pay attention to what didn't capture our attention to the thing that didn't move fast, to the thing that we didn't think was threatening in the first place, we might understand the case facts in a different way."
In her case, she didn't see Good turn her wheel sharply to the right to go around the officer. After she noticed that, she said it changed her perspective on the matter entirely.
