Perceptions of the World

10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World
 
Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change our common perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean.
 
https://uglyduckblog.wordpress.com/2013/...the-world/
 

 

 

It is tempting to assume that perception and reasoning solely entail physiological and psychological processes. If that be the case, the appropriate methodology for understanding and predicting another's behavior would involve entering that person's reality--metaphorically approaching that individual as an information processing system.  This is psychology's imprint on Americans' understanding of the human condition: if one can understand how the world is perceived and experienced by another person, then one can predict that person's behavior.   In the movie The Silence of Lambs a novice FBI investigator employs the worldview of one serial killer to capture another. In the 1994 jury selection process for the O.J. Simpson trial, scientific methodology was employed to predict who would comprise the most sympathetic jury. 
 
Elsewhere we examined several great tensions shaping the human condition: the role of nature versus nurture in shaping humans' social fates and the tensions between the needs of individuals' and the needs of their social systems. The relative importance of these tensions--and relative potency of one force versus the other--has produced great divides in social psychological theories. Another issue generating a major schism involves the workings of the human psyche, whether individuals' decision-makings are more-or-less rational (or, perhaps are determined by some universally uniform neural brain design) or whether they are shaped by uncontrollable sociocultural (external) or emotional (internal) forces. If the later is the case, if, for instance, people see what they expect to see and society is the source of these expectations, or if life is but of a series of freely selected behavioral choices which, in turn, are socially-shaped action sequences, then we indeed have the social component of a social psychology.  
 
Here, the intent is to stress the socio-cultural component of consciousness and thought.  (See Erica Goode's New York Times article [Aug. 8, 2000] "How Culture Molds Habits of Thought" and Kurt & Gladys Lang's "Off the Bandwagon: Some Reflections on the Influence of Perceived Public Opinion.") This is not to deny the roles played by our hardwiring (e.g., the neural circuitry of our sensory organs and brain) and personal factors (e.g., personality types, cognitive maturity, emotional status and social experiences) in shaping perception and decision-making. But the argument here holds that it is also our social environment that largely determines what we perceive (and what we ignore) and which channels the ways in which we cognitively process that information. Shaping perceptions is, as will be seen, the key to social power.  People see what they expect (and want) to see, and the source of these expectations derive as much from what they learn from interacting with each other as they do from direct personal experiences. Culture, for instance, gives us a rank-ordering of the primacy of sensory data. In American society, for example, the visual is deemed most important, and we're generally take to be less important matters of touch (consider the paucity of touch-distinctions in our language). And given that different groups have differing templates for perception and thought, the methodological unit for study and comparison are these groups and their members' socially-shared cognitions.
 
http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/socpsy-5.html