Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 112

Do you see what I see? This seems like a simple question, but is it? A recent analysis of international media reporting of a 2002 Olympic skating scandal provides a nice illustration of how people can see the same thing differently and specifically the influence of preexisting loyalties on the perception of a single event (Stepanova, Strube, & Hetts, 2009). In the 2002 winter Olympics, the Russian skaters Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze were awarded the gold medal in the figure skating pairs competition, and the Canadians Jamie Salé and David Pelletier received the silver. However, shortly after the event, reports of “vote trading” among the judges led to an investigation and additional scrutiny of the performances of the skating pairs. In the tradition of Hastorf and Cantril’s (1954) examination of the Princeton-Dartmouth football game, Stepanova, Strube, and Hetts (2009) analyzed 425 newspaper reports of the controversy from Russia and the United States to determine what, if any, biases might have been present. Recall that Hastorf and Cantril (1954) found that both media reports and observations by fans of the Princeton-Dartmouth game demonstrated clear differences in perceptions of the fairness of the game that aligned with fan loyalties. Stepanova et al. (2009) analyzed 169 Russian and 256 U.S. articles using native-speaking Russian and American coders. They found that media reports in the two nations were consistent with East West loyalties: That is, the Russian reports construed both the skating event and the overall scandal in a pro-Russian, anti-West manner, whereas the U.S. stories reflected a pro-Canadian, anti-East interpretation. Of additional interest is that the U.S. media often acknowledged the bias (but demonstrated it nonetheless), but the Russian news outlets did not. The Stepanova et al. (2009) research is notable for two reasons: It updated and replicated the Hastorf and Cantril study, and it examined how construal can vary across cultures.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, prior to the 1950s psychologists and laypeople alike thought that there was one “reality” that all of us see and understand in essentially the same manner. However, research starting in the 1950s punctured this somewhat naïve perspective, leading to a new appreciation for the role of individual construal in social perception (Freeman & Ambady, 2014). The broader point here is that the ways in which individuals come to know and understand the world are affected by a multitude of forces, including desires, feelings, and goals, which can constrain and alter our seemingly unbiased perceptions (Bruner, 1957; Hahn & Harris, 2014; Ross, Lepper, & Ward, 2010). In this chapter we will survey research on social cognition—a topic discussed in both Chapters 1 and 2—and will place special emphasis on how our thinking processes are biased in both obvious and subtle ways.

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