Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 113

Selective perception enables us to create a more limited and also a more coherent and personally meaningful picture of the world, one that conforms to the beliefs, expectations, and convictions we hold. For example, in a famous experiment, subjects were shown a short video of two teams, one wearing white shirts and the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by members of the white team. Halfway through the video, a person wearing a full-body gorilla-suit walks slowly to the middle of the screen, pounds its chest, and walks out of the frame. While consumed with counting passes, about 50% of the subjects missed the gorilla. Their mental spotlight had been directed elsewhere. They were not looking for a gorilla, so they didn’t see one.⁴

© 1999, Daniel J. Simons. Video screenshot taken at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html

Perceptual processes are not only highly selective, they also are personally based. As a result, different people experience the same cues in very different ways. In essence, we never really come into direct contact with reality.⁵ Instead, everything we experience is mediated by the nervous system.