Selective perception is the tendency not to notice and more quickly forget stimuli that cause emotional discomfort and contradict prior beliefs. For example, a teacher may have a favorite student because they are biased by in-group favoritism. The teacher ignores the student's poor attainment. Conversely, they might not notice the progress of their least favorite student. [1] It can also occur when consuming mass media, allowing people to see facts and opinions they like while ignoring those that do not fit with particular opinions, values, beliefs, or frame of reference. Psychologists believe this process occurs automatically. [2]
Selective perception has roots in cognitive psychology, where it is studied as a fundamental part of how individuals filter and process information based on biases, expectations, and past experiences. It is closely related to concepts like confirmation bias—favoring information that aligns with one’s beliefs—and cognitive dissonance, the discomfort of holding conflicting thoughts, both of which shape perception. [3] Its applications extend beyond psychology, playing key roles in marketing (shaping consumer focus), politics (influencing voter perception), and mental health (understanding biases in disorders), highlighting its impact on both individual behaviors and societal trends.
The concept of selective perception was established in early psychological studies when researchers began to look at how people select and filter information according to pre-existing beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. [4] The area took its basic grounding in Gestalt psychology, noting the dominant role of cognitive frameworks in perceptual processes during the early 20th century. The concept attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in the mid-20th century as researchers studied its implications for decision-making and communication. The work of Leon Festinger provided a major milestone in the field with his statement of the cognitive dissonance theory in 1957, which went a long way toward explaining selective perception. Festinger argued that when people are exposed to information inconsistent with their already held beliefs, they experience discomfort and are motivated to reduce this dissonance through selected interpretation or perception of information that supports their already existing worldview. [5]
Festinger's theory was given empirical support through some brilliant experiments, most notably his study of a UFO doomsday cult, in which participants rationalized their continued beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. [6] This research demonstrated the function of selective perception in reducing cognitive dissonance and thus maintaining consistency in one's beliefs. Around the same time, supporting findings were demonstrated through studies by Hastorf and Cantril in the 1954 Princeton-Dartmouth football game experiment, showing how personal allegiances influenced the perception of the same events. The studies established selective perception as one of the key concepts in understanding human cognition—outlining its strong implications for areas like media use, political decision-making, and interpersonal communication. [7]
Selective perception may refer to any number of cognitive biases in psychology related to the way expectations affect perception. Human judgment and decision making is distorted by an array of cognitive, perceptual and motivational biases, and people tend not to recognise their own bias, though they tend to easily recognise (and even overestimate) the operation of bias in human judgment by others. [8] One of the reasons this might occur might be because people are simply bombarded with too much stimuli every day to pay equal attention to everything, therefore, they pick and choose according to their own needs. [9]
To understand when and why a particular region of a scene is selected, studies observed and described the eye movements of individuals as they go about performing specific tasks. In this case, vision was an active process that integrated scene properties with specific, goal-oriented oculomotor behavior. [10]
The following discusses selective perception—the tendency to see what is there in light of one's own departmental interests. Dearborn and Simon had 23 middle-management executives experience a case study regarding the Castengo Steel Company. The executives' reactions showed strong departmental influences: 83% of the Sales executives perceived sales problems, 80% of the Production executives focused on organizational structure, and Accounting executives stressed profitability. Miscellaneous executives stressed human relations problems. These findings suggest that business executives focus on issues relevant to their departments when considering various organizational challenges and, thus, substantiate the influence of departmental roles on the shaping of managerial preoccupation and perception. [11]
In one classic study on this subject related to the hostile media effect (which is itself an example of selective perception), viewers watched a filmstrip of a particularly violent Princeton-Dartmouth American football game. Princeton viewers reported seeing nearly twice as many rule infractions committed by the Dartmouth team than did Dartmouth viewers. One Dartmouth alumnus did not see any infractions committed by the Dartmouth side and erroneously assumed he had been sent only part of the film, sending word requesting the rest. [12]
Selective perception is also an issue for advertisers, as consumers may engage with some ads and not others based on their pre-existing beliefs about the brand.
Seymour Smith, a prominent advertising researcher, found evidence for selective perception in advertising research in the early 1960s, and he defined it to be "a procedure by which people let in, or screen out, advertising material they have an opportunity to see or hear. They do so because of their attitudes, beliefs, usage preferences and habits, conditioning, etc." [13] People who like, buy, or are considering buying a brand are more likely to notice advertising than are those who are neutral toward the brand. This fact has repercussions within the field of advertising research because any post-advertising analysis that examines the differences in attitudes or buying behavior among those aware versus those unaware of advertising is flawed unless pre-existing differences are controlled for. Advertising research methods that utilize a longitudinal design are arguably better equipped to control for selective perception.
Selective perceptions are of two types:
Perceptual vigilance refers to the process by which individuals become aware of stimuli in their environment that they find enjoyable or rewarding. People actively seek out information that enhances their experiences, making them more meaningful or memorable. Typically, individuals look for perceptions that align with their needs or desires. However, this heightened awareness can sometimes lead to perceptual distortions, leading individuals to overestimate the prevalence or pervasiveness of these stimuli. [14]
Conversely, people often try to ignore or shift their focus away from stimuli that are irrelevant to their needs or negatively impact them. Sometimes, people may even alter their perception of these stimuli to make them more acceptable. For example, if someone approaches another person, they may have no harmful intent, but the speed at which they are coming toward the other person might prompt their brain to interpret the situation as a threat, triggering an urge to escape. While they are likely to perceive a potential threat in such a scenario, it is improbable that the threat will materialize. [15]
Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental states and social situations, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur, and how these variables influence social interactions.
Leon Festinger was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior is largely attributed to his theories and research. Festinger is also credited with advancing the use of laboratory experimentation in social psychology, although he simultaneously stressed the importance of studying real-life situations, a principle he practiced when personally infiltrating a doomsday cult. He is also known in social network theory for the proximity effect.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental disturbance people feel when they realize their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory. This may ultimately result in some change in their cognitions or actions to cause greater alignment between them so as to reduce this dissonance. Relevant items of information include peoples' actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when an action or idea is psychologically inconsistent with the other, people do all in their power to change either so that they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that people induce attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states. The person interprets their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others' behaviors.
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.
The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view. Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them. The phenomenon was first proposed and studied experimentally by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.
Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.
Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.
The Ehrenstein illusion is an optical illusion of brightness or color perception. The visual phenomena was studied by the German psychologist Walter H. Ehrenstein (1899–1961) who originally wanted to modify the theory behind the Hermann grid illusion. In the discovery of the optical illusion, Ehrenstein found that grating patterns of straight lines that stop at a certain point appear to have a brighter centre, compared to the background.
Attribution is a term used in psychology which deals with how individuals perceive the causes of everyday experience, as being either external or internal. Models to explain this process are called Attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early 20th century, and the theory was further advanced by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Heider first introduced the concept of perceived 'locus of causality' to define the perception of one's environment. For instance, an experience may be perceived as being caused by factors outside the person's control (external) or it may be perceived as the person's own doing (internal). These initial perceptions are called attributions. Psychologists use these attributions to better understand an individual's motivation and competence. The theory is of particular interest to employers who use it to increase worker motivation, goal orientation, and productivity.
Disconfirmed expectancy is a psychological term for what is commonly known as a failed prophecy. According to the American social psychologist Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, disconfirmed expectancies create a state of psychological discomfort because the outcome contradicts expectancy. Upon recognizing the falsification of an expected event an individual will experience the competing cognitions, "I believe [X]," and, "I observed [Y]." The individual must either discard the now disconfirmed belief or justify why it has not actually been disconfirmed. As such, disconfirmed expectancy and the factors surrounding the individual's consequent actions have been studied in various settings.
Mood management theory posits that the consumption of messages, particularly entertaining messages, is capable of altering prevailing mood states, and that the selection of specific messages for consumption often serves the regulation of mood states. Mood management theory now belongs to a larger group of theoretical approaches which speak on media content and how it plays a role in mood management. Mood optimization is a current affective sate of media mood management.
Selective exposure is a theory within the practice of psychology, often used in media and communication research, that historically refers to individuals' tendency to favor information which reinforces their pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information. Selective exposure has also been known and defined as "congeniality bias" or "confirmation bias" in various texts throughout the years.
The ostrich effect, also known as the ostrich problem, was originally coined by Galai & Sade (2003). The name comes from the common legend that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger. This effect is a cognitive bias where people tend to “bury their head in the sand” and avoid potentially negative but useful information, such as feedback on progress, to avoid psychological discomfort.
A cognitive vulnerability in cognitive psychology is an erroneous belief, cognitive bias, or pattern of thought that predisposes an individual to psychological problems. The vulnerability exists before the symptoms of a psychological disorder appear. After the individual encounters a stressful experience, the cognitive vulnerability shapes a maladaptive response that increases the likelihood of a psychological disorder.
Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved. Emotions are typically viewed as having three components: subjective experience, physical changes, and cognitive appraisal; emotion perception is the ability to make accurate decisions about another's subjective experience by interpreting their physical changes through sensory systems responsible for converting these observed changes into mental representations. The ability to perceive emotion is believed to be both innate and subject to environmental influence and is also a critical component in social interactions. How emotion is experienced and interpreted depends on how it is perceived. Likewise, how emotion is perceived is dependent on past experiences and interpretations. Emotion can be accurately perceived in humans. Emotions can be perceived visually, audibly, through smell and also through bodily sensations and this process is believed to be different from the perception of non-emotional material.
Belief perseverance is maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it.
Vicarious cognitive dissonance is the state of negative arousal in an individual from observing a member of their in-group behave in counterattitudinal ways. The phenomenon is distinguished from the type of cognitive dissonance proposed by Leon Festinger, which can be referred to as personal cognitive dissonance, because the discomfort is experienced vicariously by an observer rather than the actor engaging in inconsistent behavior. Like personal cognitive dissonance, vicarious cognitive dissonance can lead to changes in the observer’s attitudes and behavior to reduce psychological stress.
In psychology and cognitive science, perceptual vigilance refers to a form of selective perception where a person has a heightened state of awareness and attentiveness towards specific stimuli or information, generally to satisfy a motive. This phenomenon involves individuals becoming more attuned to detecting and processing relevant sensory input or cues from their environment. Perceptual vigilance is influenced by various factors such as personal interests, goals or expectations.
