YANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel

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Renee Good Shooting

0:47On January 7th, 2026, United States federal agents shot and killed Renee Good. And on January 24th, 2026, United States federal agents shot and killed Alex Preddy. These shootings took place during protests over the conduct of immigration agents and the people who died.

1:17They were protesters. Each incident, each shooting, each killing was recorded on video by bystanders. And those videos spread all across the internet, social media, everywhere. People shared those videos online, those recordings of federal agents shooting and killing Renee Good. And then a few weeks later, the videos of the shooting and killing of Alex Preddy. And each time, afterward, online and off, people began to disagree about what they saw in those videos.

1:53The truth of them.

1:56Politicians made statements about those videos. And in those statements, they disagreed about what they saw.

Subjective Reality

2:03I watched those videos. And to me, those shootings looked unjustified. They looked like murders. So, like many people, I was initially shocked when I read comments and saw commentary in which people disagreed with what I thought I was seeing with my own eyes. What seemed indisputable. I was shocked and astounded. Even though I was aware of the fact that psychology has been researching this very phenomenon for the better part of a century.

2:36There's a lot of research, a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that we can see the very same thing differently. See different things. To put it very simply, we don't passively receive reality. We actively construct it. Your subjective experience, when you watch a video, when you observe anything, is assembled along a pipeline of brain activity across many brain regions.

3:06It's like an assembly line of cognition. And at the end of that assembly line, what you see can be different from what another person is seeing in the moment. And especially in memory. It's still shocking, though. It's astounding. But the evidence is clear. If two people have two different political ideologies, two different groups with which they identify different attitudes, different experiences, different expectations, different models of prediction, different factors that differently affect their attention second by second.

3:42All of those things will alter what they perceive to the point that two people can watch the exact same video and they will see, in quotation marks, see, that is, they will perceive two different realities.

Introduction to Podcast

4:08My name is David McGraney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. This is episode 333, and it's being recorded in February of 2026. And right now, when I was seeing the aftermath of these videos, I noticed that many people, online and off, were wondering about this very thing. And not just with these videos, but many other videos as well. And with news stories, and just facts in general. It's not uncommon right now to see people commenting about what's going on politically in the United States and ask, are the people who are seeing this differently, are they just in another reality?

4:52Like, how can they be looking at the exact same thing I'm looking at with their eyes and not see what I see? And I wanted to reach out to an expert on this very thing to help explain why this happens, what we know about it, and what we can do about it if we're interested in preserving democracy or having a moderately functional legal system. Because there's a strong exasperation bubbling up, an absolute confusion over how can two groups of people see the exact same video evidence, yet not agree on what they are seeing.

Psychology of Perception

5:29But in psychology, this is a well-known phenomenon, and it's the subject of one of the most famous studies in all of psychology. So, I reached out to Dr. Jay Van Babel at NYU and asked if he'd come on the show to help us understand all this. My name is Jay Van Babel. I'm a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University and the director of the Center for Conflict and Cooperation. And I am, I guess, my core research interest is how groups and identities change the way we think about the world.

6:02My first question for Dr. Babel, seeing that he's an expert on this very thing, was what did it feel like for him when he noticed how people were watching the same thing but not seeing the same thing? Yeah, I mean, I saw the video probably the first time it flashed through my social media feed, and I knew instantly that this was going to be one of those they-saw-game moments. They saw a game. That's the name of the very famous psychology study. We'll talk all about that later on in the show. And I actually have a substack, the Power of Us substack, and we had, you know, we rewrote a piece about how this is going to be very challenging for people to come to some sense of shared reality.

6:43And I think that challenges our intuitions because we think if there's video evidence, we can solve the problems. It will be right in front of us. We can anchor on what we're all seeing with our own eyes. And then it should be easy to figure out what exactly happened. And this is, like, obviously how the legal system operates, and people seem to have an understanding of this. But in these cases where people are really passionate about it, it's really connected to a core sense of their identity, they filter it in very different ways. Very different ways. Because there are several psychological filtering mechanisms that we use when we're looking at anything.

7:18You're probably aware of a lot of these things. You've heard about it. We've talked about them before. But one of the things we haven't really covered is motivated perception. And that is seeing, hearing, just taking in information from the senses with a goal in mind. Often an unconscious goal. A motivation you may not be aware motivates you. And that happens early on, before reasoning even begins, before memories are encoded. What I'm saying is, yes, we are motivated reasoners. We do a lot of motivated reasoning,

7:51which is taking the supposed facts at our disposal, information we gathered through a confirmation bias, and through biased assimilation, and other filtering mechanisms, and using them to support justifications and rationalizations in pursuit of desired conclusions and interpretations. But before all of that, our very perception is influenced by unconscious goals and motivations. Which means, before you experience subjective reality, before you experience the result of perceiving things through seeing them and hearing them and so on,

8:25that reality has already been shaped by previous cognitive processes. Biased processes. And what are those processes? How do they work? Why do we do this? That's what we're going to talk about in this episode with Dr. J. Van Bavel,

Break and Sponsor

8:41right after this break. Starting with one of the most famous studies in psychology. A study that has produced hundreds of follow-up studies into how and why we tend to see what we expect to see. And why it is so important to pay attention to who and what affects those expectations. In yourself and others. All that, after this.

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10:15And if you're planning on some stargazing, a new SUV will give you plenty of space. Get paired with our newest fleet yet at Hertz.com. Okay, that thing I said I would talk about in the middle of the show. It's not quite the middle of the show, but here's the thing. You are probably super interested in critical thinking. If you are the kind of person who is right now listening to this podcast, then you might also be curious to find out about the Higher Order Thinking Skills course that I am co-presenting

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12:59Welcome back to the You Are Not So Smart podcast.

Interview with Dr J Van Bavel

13:13I'm David McRaney and what follows is my interview with psychologist, Dr. J. Van Babel. Okay, this famous study, if you could, 1954 study, it was called They Saw a Game, a case study. The game they saw was Dartmouth versus Princeton and it was a whole thing. Help us understand what even was this study and what was it about? Okay, so this is one of my favorite studies in the history of social psychology. It's based on a football game that happened almost exactly 75 years ago on Princeton's campus.

13:47And at the time, Princeton, I'll set the context. Princeton, I think, was undefeated and one of the best teams in the country. They also had, like, the all-American quarterback, this guy named Kazmaier. I think he was on Time Magazine and he was playing his last game. So you've got the best team in the country, one of the most prestigious universities in the world with the, like, famous, you know, nationally famous now, all-star, all-American quarterback. And they played Dartmouth, also, you know, an Ivy League rival, a rivalry that dated back a long, long time.

14:19And Dartmouth comes to town and Dartmouth is not as good of a football team at this particular moment. And the game unfolds and it gets incredibly violent. In fact, it gets so violent that Kazmaier, the star, gets, I think, carted off the game because he gets injured. I forget if they broke his leg or something, but a really, really awful game. And it just escalated in foul after foul. And we know football is normally violent, but apparently this game was quite an exception. And so Princeton ends up winning the game.

14:50If I recall, Kazmaier won the Heisman Trophy. So in some sense, all is well that ends well. But what happened immediately after the game is almost more interesting, is that it was covered in the Princeton newspaper and the Dartmouth newspaper in radically different ways. So in the Princeton newspaper, they talked about how Dartmouth was, you know, brutal and violent and disgusting. And in the Dartmouth newspaper, they covered it as if Princeton had, like, instigated all the violence and conflict and fouls and marred the game with it.

15:23And so these two professors, Albert Hastorf, who was at Dartmouth at the time, and Hadley Cantrell, who was at Princeton, they ran two studies. And one study is they just had people who had been at the game write down what they remembered had happened. When they looked at them, they had 122 students, and they claimed that the other team had started the rough play, and only two believed that their own team had initiated it. Overwhelming evidence of bias, right? They see the same thing. They have radically different memories.

15:54Okay, of course, memory could be, you know, distorted for all kinds of reasons. So they did what we are doing right now, showing people the video. You know, when you log into, like, your favorite or most trusted, you know, 5 o'clock news or news website or social media influencer, you're seeing the video, and then you can decide. So they did that exact same thing 75 years ago. They had a video, and they played it to a separate set of participants. And they thought, okay, the video's right in front of them, their eyes are watching it. And they came to the exact same problem, which is that they had radically different interpretations of what they were seeing in front of them.

16:31Princeton students thought Dartmouth committed about 10 fouls in the game, and Dartmouth students only thought the Dartmouth team committed about four fouls in the game. So, again, having the video and watching it doesn't solve anything. They had a pretty radical conclusion for that time, I think, which was there is no such thing as a game, quote, unquote, existing out there in its own right, which people merely observe. They basically said that everything is happening in the brain and getting filtered in different ways, and there's nothing really objective to anchor on.

17:02And so that's why we come to these very different interpretations of reality. First of all, just to lay it out, and correct me if I'm wrong here, these different brains, each brain is generating its own subjective reality. You have all these people watching the game. There's this assumption, though, that there's an objective reality out there. All these people had different memories, so they experienced it differently. They remembered it differently. So the assumption is I'm going to show you the film, and now we'll all come back into congruence. We'll all sync back up again because here's the thing.

17:34You may have experienced it differently. You may have remembered it differently. But here, we're going to all watch it together again. But then in the room, they saw it differently, and that's the part that just freaks me out even now, even after having looked at stuff like this forever and ever and ever. They didn't update. They didn't correct. They didn't go, oh, yeah, okay, well, now that I see it, I can see, okay, yeah, it's more like that than it was the other way. That's not what happened for the most part. They re-saw it differently. What does this even suggest about what's going on when it comes to perception leading to some sort of cognition

18:13leading down the line to all the other things that happen to beliefs, attitudes, reasonings, behavior, and all the other stuff? At what point in that process is the difference taking place and what's affecting that difference? Yeah, so this is something we obviously can't tell from this study, but there have been many, many studies looking at how our brain processes information. So when you see something initially, you know, the image hits your eye, it is sent to the very back of your brain, which is your visual system, and then it starts being sent forward, you know, through the kind of two streams.

18:47It goes through the bottom part of the brain, which is determining what you're seeing, and the top part of the brain, which is determining where it's happening. And then those are all kind of put together to create a perception. So when we get the subjective sense that we're seeing something, it's something that's already been heavily filtered and processed through all these different systems of our brain. It's not just going right from our eyes into our conscious awareness. The great example of this in neuropsych is people who have blind sight. So they, you can show them an image, and they don't even think they're seeing it, but their body can act as if they're seeing it.

19:22So they'll have people who think they're blind, and they'll have them walk down a hallway with a bunch of obstacles in the way, and the person who thinks they can't see the obstacles will, like, carefully be navigating around all the obstacles. And so what that means is our conscious perception of what we see is disconnected in the brain from what our visual system is actually encoding. And so that is, I think, where you're getting a lot of this disconnect on these things. The visual system is starting to take in information, but then it's getting processed and filtered and interpreted in ways,

19:55by the time we're kind of consciously aware of it, it's almost like a video that's been heavily edited. If I'm hearing you correctly, this isn't a camera. This isn't, it isn't just going in my eye holes into my brain screen, and I'm looking at the brain screen. Like, it's a whole lot of brain stuff is happening before I have the subjective experience of having seen a thing. And that would be true across the board, having tasted a thing, having heard a thing, having felt an emotion. There's a lot of stuff happening before it gets to whatever awareness I have of it. The thing, though, is I can understand if people were under different lighting conditions, or they were, had a better seat,

20:30or there was, like, it wasn't as noisy over here, or this person had something weird to eat. There's all sorts of things I can imagine affecting something. But they're seeing, like, what are the facts of the matter in front of them differently. That's, it suggests there's something social at play, that there's, this group has an allegiance to this team, this group, and this university, this group has an allegiance to this team and this university. How could that be affecting my raw perception of something?

21:01Like, I'm, I'm, I'm asking this question, not of this study, but of all the work we've done since the study, that this study sort of helped kick off. Let me layer on an additional variable that helps even make further sense of how people get to these different beliefs based on seeing the same thing. So the second thing is anything you're watching is actually quite complex. So when you were watching a video of a football game, your visual attention, where your eyes look, actually can be looking at the quarterback or the defensive player who comes in and tackles the quarterback or the receivers down the field or the offensive line.

21:35You can be looking at all these different things when you're watching the game. And it turns out that who you are shapes where you look. There's been research with police videos where police get into, like, kind of a scuffle or a violent conflict with a suspect, which is very much what you're seeing, you know, that's going in these national news stories right now. When people look at these videos, there's a lot going on. And it turns out that people are shifting their attention to different places. So other research has found, this is by Yael Granote, who is a former PhD student at NYU.

22:07She ran these studies where she showed people these police videos with police scuffles with suspects. And then she measured how much you identify with the police. And it turns out that if you're strongly identified with the police, you look at different parts of the video than if you don't identify with the police. And then this shapes what you see. And this shapes who you think is responsible when there's violent conflict. And so our identification, the extent to which we care about a group, our trust and respect them and feel connected to them, shapes our eye movements, which shapes the information that is sent to our brain and then processed.

22:43And that leads us to very different conclusions. And so that is another layer of the problem is, in addition to our brains doing this interpretation, our brains come with desires and expectations based on our identities. And they determine where we're even looking in the first place. And so if you are somebody who actually really respects the police, you're going to be looking to see if the suspect does something that's inappropriate. If you don't trust the police, you're watching them and looking to see if they do anything that triggers or escalates the violence.

23:14And so that's something we also bring to these videos is that we're looking at different places. And that's something, again, people are not aware of these things, in part because they're happening very quickly. A lot of times they might even be happening unconsciously. We're not aware of how we're processing the information, let alone about how we're biasing our attention in the game or in the police video. Okay. It doesn't ever go away, that feeling you get right about here where you're like, oh man, it's a really freaky experience to accept this. Two things come to mind to me, naive realism and just awareness in general.

23:53All these people in the original study, for the most part, weren't aware that this was happening. They felt that what they were experiencing and seeing was the truth. And not just the truth, reality, objective reality. It's very difficult to accept that what you're experiencing isn't the raw, unfiltered truth of things. I was giving a talk at University of Southern California a couple weeks ago, and I was in another professor's office, and we were talking about these videos.

24:24And we were recounting the details of the videos, and I had even seen the New York Times thing, where they show you every single camera angle, and they kind of narrate it all. And I thought, okay, that's as rigorous as you can get. But when I got into this professor's office, we kind of even had the semi-general same conclusion about what happened. But he was talking about different people in the video that were involved in triggering different things that I hadn't even seen before. And it was, again, because I wasn't paying visual attention to them, even in any of the recaps that I had seen or the slow motions or the breakdown.

24:57So even there, we were having the same problem. And again, it reminded me of the famous studies on inattentional blindness, like the invisible gorilla studies, where famously they asked people to watch a video of a bunch of people passing around basketball. And you're asked to track, count the number of times, you know, the people pass the basketball. And then they have this person in a gorilla suit walk through slow motion in the video and kind of dance in the middle of all the people playing, passing the basketball. And most people look at that video and don't even notice.

25:27They don't even see the person in the gorilla suit, even though they walked through literally the middle of the video and danced around and obviously look like they don't belong. And again, it's like when your attention is locked in on that basketball moving around, you're missing something that literally is walking through the middle of your attentional field. So that same thing is happening here. And I literally had this experience talking with somebody in their office like two weeks ago about this exact same video. So that's so fascinating to me because you drew the same conclusion.

25:58Yeah. So that's what I'm hearing here is you both had a similar opinion. Yeah. But you were drawing the conclusion looking at the same video, but you weren't drawing it from the same details of the video. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We came to a conclusion about who was responsible. You know, we thought the woman was wrongly shot. Be transparent about it. And we didn't feel like she was driving to hit the officer who shot her three times. But we had different interpretations of why that was and who triggered it. And he was talking about the other ICE officers who had come up to her side.

26:31I forget exactly what he was saying, but I hadn't even paid attention to them or their role. But he really had paid a lot of attention to them and thought they were really instrumental in triggering her to drive away. So even then, even when we somewhat agree, we can be filtering it in different ways and paying attention to different things. I had a neuroscientist tell me not too long ago, Dr. Catherine Devaney, the way she saw it was the world is what you pay attention to, what you attend to. So there's so much emphasis on that in Eastern philosophies and Eastern spirituality stuff where it's all about noticing what you're attending to and then dialing in how you're going to attend to things going forward and how that's going to affect your subjective reality.

27:09They say in the original paper, the Dartmouth-Princeton paper, Hassdorff and Cantrell, they wrote, and I'm paraphrasing, what the people saw, which was influenced by their priors and their expectations and everything. That's what they noticed from all the things that were, as they wrote, emanating from the field. And then what they saw was what they attended to and what they attended to created the experiences that they had, including emotional ones. And that gave rise to different experiences and then different memories down the line.

27:41And it all comes back to that attention thing. It is astonishing to learn about the human mind and the brain that's generating it, we assume, that who you are from moment to moment and what you experience subjectively has so much to do with what you are or are not attending to from moment to moment. I'm going to zoom out to my other research that I study, as you know, I do a lot of research on how this unfolds on social media. The attention economy all operates on capturing our attention. You just like went very Buddhist about like who we are as our attention.

28:13I thought that was a brilliant quote. OK, so now what's happening on social media is, first of all, the algorithms and the platforms are designed to keep you attending as long as possible. Average person is scrolling through 300 news feed a day on social media. That's the height of the Statue of Liberty. Average person's on, you know, doom scrolling for two and a half hours a day. For young people, by the way, it's five hours a day on average. Five hours a day. Yeah, so five hours a day. Now imagine these young people and I have kids. By the time they die, assuming they live the average life expectancy, that means they spent 10 years, no, 10 years of their life doom scrolling on social media.

28:52So that is who we are becoming. For you and I, who probably scroll like the average of people our generation would be about five years of our life were spent doom scrolling. For young people, it's 10 years. I'm typing this. So when you talk about this being an existential issue, this is as existential as it gets. You know, if you were told you had 10 years to live because you had cancer, would you opt into just doom scrolling through it all? Well, okay, so to freak, that's like, we're going to really zoom up. There's like levels of existential crisis here, right?

29:23We don't share reality. People in power are telling us what to believe. And now this is like so core to who we are because we're doing this. Okay, now the next layer of existential crisis in this attention economy, this is what my new research is on, we've been tracking who posts about these issues, about politics, about how to interpret these videos. Well, it turns out 3% of people post like 90% of the content about politics. And now we're studying who those people are.

29:55We're measuring them in the lab and in studies. These are the people at the most extreme ends. People who are extreme about any issue are the ones who are posting the most. And they're posting really kind of extreme views of things, that this is evil or virtuous. And so the people driving the conversation for those 10 years of your life as you're scrolling through and you're being told what to believe when you watch a video or what to believe when something happens in the news, you're being pushed to believe by the people with the most extreme slanted views alive.

30:28And so that is the news feed you're reading. When you're reading people's interpretations online, you're not reading, you know, the bell curve. Most of the people live in the middle of that bell curve. They're invisible. They're not posting. They're doom scrolling, unfortunately. But they're not weighing in because guess what? They have complex or nuanced views or ambivalent. So those people aren't weighing in. So we're not seeing all the nuance. We're just seeing from the people with the most extreme interpretation. And that's shaping what we think and what we expect to see.

30:59So that is also a problem. We talk about diet. You know, do you have a healthy diet? It's going to affect your well-being and your body shape and your longevity. This is our information diet for 10 years of our life for the Statue of Liberty of News feed each day. That's what we're eating. It so astonishes me that you can have something as heinous as a person being what appeared to me to be murdered.

31:45And then for people to interpret that differently, their reasoning arrives at that conclusion because there's something that is motivating them to want to reach that conclusion. How can our social concerns or our allegiances or our in-groups, for a lot of the people that are seeing this video differently than other people, they aren't a senator. They aren't going to political rallies. They very barely interact with their political life in any way except just through the feeling that they are or are not one side or the other.

32:20Yet that affects their perception, memory, experience, and how they talk about it with other people. How can that even be true, is what I'm trying to say? There's two ways in which this can be true that we're biased in this way. One is evolutionary. So the oldest, the most, you know, ultimate explanation for this is we evolved in small groups. We had to fit in. If we didn't fit in, we were kicked out of the group and we died. And we did not pass on our genes. So we are the ancestors of generation after generation after generation after generation after generation of people who fit in.

32:51And part of fitting in is agreeing with people, is feeling a compulsion deep down to interpret things the same way and to get along in various ways. And to defend your group against the group across the river that might come across and kill you all. So you need to be a good group member for your own survival in that sense. Or a predator comes, you need to work together instantly and cooperate. And so that's our evolutionary trait that sets humans apart from any other primate, any other species. That's why we can go to the moon and stuff, because we can cooperate, work together in groups.

33:25So this part that we're talking about being problematic is also part of our genetic DNA as a species that, like, is our key to our success, too. So I think that we have to understand that it's like a double-sided sword, you know? It has some good things and some bad things, and they cut different ways. So I think that's the deepest route. And then the other route is just the proximal motivations, you know? If you stand up and say something, even if you might be open to interpreting the video a different way,

33:55if you stand up and say that publicly on social media and your friend group in the community that you live in is going to see that as sacrilege, then you get socially ostracized from your community. And that might be a community of people that your kids hang out with, that you hang out with. It might be people at work. And we're very segregated as a society based on whether you live in small towns or big cities, whether you work at, you know, a university or you work in construction. And so the people around you, on average, share your political beliefs and identities.

34:28And if you speak out publicly in ways that challenge that, it could be really devastating for your quality of life. So you have to understand the social and community pressures, group pressures that people face and the motives and incentives of their environment to really understand why they believe things and certainly why they say they believe things. There's a sense that this is fresh, that our political ideologies have now become forward-facing identities that have this much impact on us. Is that fresh? Is that new? Is that something that's of the era?

35:01Or has this always been how it's been? Like, since there's been people and since we've had politics where you could identify yourself as in one political group or another, like, is that, how new is this actually? How severe is this by comparison? So the aspect in which our identities shape our impressions and perceptions, I think, is really old. You know, they saw a game was from 1951 when that study was run, that game happened. Happening then, I'm sure it was happening 75 years before that. I'm sure it was happening 75,000 years before that.

35:33But politics. So what happens is, the other aspect of identity is, these tendencies that we have as humans to think a certain way and act a certain way in groups get amplified when the groups are in more extreme conflict. And so what's happened over the last 45 years is, Americans have become more and more and more polarized. They hate each other more and more and more. And I think social media is just like, it's unclear how much it's fueling that. But certainly, it reveals it and expresses it in extreme ways.

36:05And so what's happening is, there's more and more pressure and people around you to encourage you to interpret something a different way than somebody who's part of a different group, and to have complete disdain if another set of people interpret it differently. And so I think that's the, we have these evolutionarily ancient brains that have kind of incentivized and structured and carved by evolution to do this. But then you drop them in a modern environment where, A, there's extreme levels by any measure that we have the most extreme levels of polarization

36:38that political scientists have ever measured in the U.S., and in a technological environment that is amplifying the most extreme voices and that are feeding us a news feed of those. And so you take all of those things and put them into a bowl and swirl them up, and this is what you get. So that's, there's some parts of it that are really old and some parts of it that are really new. But unfortunately, it's the combination of those old things and those new things together that are not good for us. Well, you start to understand how it went in other societies that spilled over into violence, sectarian conflict, religious conflict.

37:17You know, we start, it's hard to, it was hard for me up until recently to understand the psychology of people that lead to all of these things happening, authoritarian regimes. And now I can see it and feel it happening in real time. And I'm like, oh, wow, that's how you get to those extreme things in history that seem like they're behind us. It's never going to happen again. And then you're like, oh, wow, this is how it happens in various ways.

Conclusion and Book Promotion

37:55Thank you very much to Jay Van Babel. His book on things like this is titled The Power of Us. For links to that and everything else that we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there inside your podcast player. The title of my book on things like this is How Minds Change. Details about that are in the links and also over at davidmcraney.com. You can follow me on Twitter and threads and Instagram and Blue Sky and all that kind of stuff at, at symbol David McCraney.

38:29Follow this show at Not Smart Blog. We're also on Facebook slash youarenotsosmart. If you would like to support this one person operation, that would be very nice. And this is a one person operation. No editors, no staff, just me. The way you can support the show, keep it going, make it better, is go to patreon.com slash youarenotsosmart. Pitching in at any amount will get you the show ad-free. But the higher amounts get you other things. The opening music is Clash by Caravan Palace.

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