Paradoxes of information perception and mechanisms of society management based on them

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

A paradox is a situation (phenomenon, statement, statement, judgment or conclusion) that may exist in reality, but may not have a logical explanation for the observer.

This definition is offered by Wikipedia. The problem is that many people, faced with paradoxical situations, are unable to explain to themselves where these or other opinions, conclusions, decisions came from in their worldviews. Our article will help you figure out how this happens and what to do with it.

We may have been fortunate enough to live in the information age. Information about almost everything is available to most of the inhabitants of the Earth largely due to the invention and development of Internet technology. Just know the "what", "where" and "how" to look. With the increasing availability of data exchange technologies using the Internet, people are increasingly sharing information through blogs, or personal pages.

However, any phenomenon has two sides - the information with which we interact may not be reliable, or our measure of understanding the processes occurring in the world around us is such that our interpretation of the incoming information becomes superficial and false.

Needless to say, actions based on false information are unlikely to lead to the expected result? Let's figure out why we can be deceived, and how to learn how to competently interact with information.

Mechanisms for perceiving information through the senses. Conditionality of this phenomenon

The phenomenon of "deformation of perception": positive and negative aspects

Probably everyone is familiar with the wise saying - "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." However, recently scientists have come to the conclusion that literally everything is "in the eye of the beholder." Whatever you are looking for, be it a menacing expression, unethical research methods, or just the color blue, you will find it.

Even if this is actually not the case, you will without any problems (moreover, unconsciously) expand your definition of what you are looking for, and as a result - "voila", you will see the subject of your search right in front of you.

This phenomenon is called “perceptual warping,” and according to a recent study published in Science [2], it affects everything from concrete assessments to abstract thinking. In the simpler part of the study, the scientists showed participants 1,000 points one at a time, in shades that ranged from blue to purple, and the task was to determine if a particular point was blue.

For the first two hundred tests, the points were evenly distributed across the blue-violet part of the spectrum, so that about half of them were more blue than not. However, in subsequent studies, scientists began to gradually remove the blue dots until the vast majority were in the violet part of the spectrum.

Interestingly, during each of the tests, the participants identified approximately the same number of dots as blue. As the dots became more violet, the definition of "blue" simply expanded to include more violet tones. This continued even when the participants were told in advance that towards the end there would be more purple dots than blue ones.

The effect persisted even after participants were offered a cash prize, unless they mistakenly recognize the purple dots as blue.

Researchers found the same perceptual distortion when they asked subjects to complete more challenging tasks.

For example, they were asked to rate faces for threatening expressions, and to classify scientific hypotheses into ethical and unethical. As faces became more tender and hypotheses more ethical, participants began to identify faces and hypotheses previously seen as “good” as threatening and unethical.

Is it possible that our subjective assessment of the phenomena with which we interact does not always coincide with the objective reality? This study suggests that we perceive objective phenomena as relative. We think we are capable of identifying purple circles, but in reality we are highlighting the most purple circle we have seen recently.

The human brain does not classify objects and concepts like a computer. The concepts in our heads are somewhat blurry. This phenomenon is of great importance for … yes, in general, for everything.

For example, Matt Warren of Science believes that perceptual warps can explain the tremendous amount of cynicism in our world.

“Humanity has made great strides in tackling social problems such as poverty and illiteracy, but as these phenomena became less prevalent, problems that had previously seemed insignificant began to appear to people more and more acute,” he writes.

Nonetheless, perceptual distortion may just as well explain optimism in times of disaster: when things get worse, problems that seemed serious yesterday seem insignificant.

The word "deformation" has negative connotations, but none of them are inherently harmful. Deformation of concepts and perceptions means that people tend to shrink and expand various categories in their heads, and not notice that the outside world is constantly changing, constantly in motion.

This is extremely important for survival. For example, each person's concept of happiness and success should expand and contract so that we don't become too depressed or, on the contrary, indulge in euphoria. And, nevertheless, when people classify different things, we need clear, specific parameters for different categories, otherwise the peculiarities of perception can easily lead us into confusion. [3]

How do we assess what is happening

It is also known that we evaluate what is happening on the basis of our experience and values. A person, hearing the speech of another, depending on mood, state of health, personal attitude to the interlocutor, weather, etc., selects in the stream of the perceived sound wave that which can and wants to perceive.

For example, if the interlocutor speaks a different language, the person can focus on familiar words that are borrowed in his language, or he can try to understand the interlocutor through what is called straight-knowledge, which is especially developed in children. If the interlocutor gives unpleasant information, or the person perceives the information in a negative way, then the perception filter may work - the content of the message is interpreted incorrectly.

A similar statement applies to the visual, gustatory and olfactory organs of perception - a person recognizes signals from the environment and draws conclusions about the information received through the senses based on his experience.

With the expansion of perception, a person increases the range of sensitivity to environmental signals, seeing, hearing, etc., possibly the same information as before, but processing it with a wider range of perception, which makes it possible to more fully assess what is happening in the world around a person. From birth, our perception is superimposed on the pictures of the world of our parents, especially the mother, being inside which before his birth, the child assimilates her system of nerve impulses in response to what is happening in the surrounding world.

Further, as you know, there are educational institutions (kindergarten, school, university), which also offer their own picture of the world. Coming to the university, students, quite often, hear from teachers:

"Forget what you were taught in school."

It means that for a broader mastery of knowledge about the world, you need to be flexible about the already accumulated knowledge - there are exceptions to strict rules, life circumstances are broader than any rules. Therefore, it is important to be able to recognize at the moment of the onset of certain life circumstances, where which of them lead. And we have such an internal toolbox.

“Conscience is a moral consciousness, moral sense or feeling in a person; inner consciousness of good and evil; the secret place of the soul, in which the approval or condemnation of every deed is echoed; the ability to recognize the quality of an act; a feeling that encourages truth and good, averting lies and evil; involuntary love for good and truth; innate truth, in varying degrees of development (Dahl's Dictionary).

A righteous person lives according to the voice of his conscience, which allows him to make the right choice in his actions in life.

Vivid examples of subjectivity of perception are pictures, where several images are guessed depending on the "way of recognizing images" of the beholder:

The picture shows a duck and a hare

In the picture you can find the image of a young and old woman

Does everyone see dolphins here?

Worldview and morality as filters for information processing

Human morality is something like an ordered list, consisting of phenomena familiar to a person and their assessments (good, bad, etc.). And this "list" is ordered by preference. That is, at the top of the list are the most important moral standards for a person, and at the bottom are less significant.

At the same time, moral standards are connected with each other like rails with many paths forks (depending on which assessment of a particular phenomenon, this leads to other sets of phenomena and events, and therefore to other moral

estimates).

An example of different types of morals in relation to the phenomenon of Smoking and related branches of probabilistic events

When the processing of incoming information takes place in the psyche (and processing is a kind of algorithm), then the intermediate results of processing are compared with the life attitudes of the person himself, which are recorded in morality. And the matching starts with the highest priority mores - down to the lowest priority, until a match is found.

That is why in the picture of the jug above, children often see dolphins, and adults - a man and a woman in intercourse. This is due to the fact that for children in the first place the knowledge of the world around, nature, and in adults, more often - the instincts of reproduction. So, after the coincidence of the moral standard with the information that is being processed, the assessment of this phenomenon (good, bad) sets further results. Therefore, in the same information, different people will find both negative and positive, and come to different conclusions.

If we imagine the structure of the universe in the form of a matryoshka (interconnected processes and phenomena), then actions coordinated with the hierarchically higher levels aimed at the development of the entire system (in our case, humanity) can be considered morally righteous. And morally vicious are purposeful actions that hinder the development of mankind.

Why do we love to be deceived?

In psychology, there is such a thing as “secondary benefit”. To effectively interact with the world around you, you need to constantly be alert, collected, since the world is in constant motion, and the actual information changes regularly.

It is beneficial for people to accept "ready-made" information - this does not require additional stress for detailed processing of the information received, the development of new models of behavior, etc. One can give specific examples of social management technologies based on the paradoxes of perception, in particular, attention control.

What in psychology is called the method of step-by-step psychological influence in the field of social management was implemented in the Overton window technology, when a change in public opinion on an issue goes through several stages, from strictly unacceptable to normal (read our article about teachers' flash mob, which has recently excited public).

Moreover, each stage passes into a new one very smoothly, therefore, changes in society are proceeding imperceptibly for ordinary people.

It is worth noting that any technology can be used in different ways, according to the morality of managers, so, while implementing a righteous strategy, it is better to do it gradually!

Influence of information technology on the way people process information

Information technologies, oddly enough, can create additional difficulties for people with adequate perception of information. Every day, more and more people complain of problems with brain activity - the ever-increasing absent-mindedness (that is, the inability to concentrate their attention, gather their thoughts to solve some problems), the difficulty of memorizing information, the physical inability to read large texts, not already talking about books.

And they ask doctors to give them something to improve brain activity and memory. And, paradoxically, this problem is characteristic not only and not so much for the elderly, “weakened by their brains,” which, it seems, are “supposed to be by age,” but for middle-aged and young people.

At the same time, many are not even interested in why this is happening - they automatically blame it on stress, fatigue, an unhealthy environment, at the same age and the like, although all this is not even close to being the reason. There are those who are well over 70, who are doing great with memory and brain activity. So what's the reason?

And the reason is that, despite all the arguments, no one categorically wants to give up the so-called constant, round-the-clock "connection to information." In other words, the accelerated loss of your brain functions began on the very momentous day when you decided to be constantly “in touch”.

And it makes no difference whether you were forced to do this by a business necessity, exhaustion from idleness, or an elementary fear of being “not on a level”, that is, the fear of being branded as a black sheep, an eccentric among your own kind.

Back in 2008, it was known that the average Internet user reads no more than 20% of the text placed on a page, and in every possible way avoids large paragraphs!

Moreover, special studies have shown that a person who is constantly connected to the network does not read the text, but scans like a robot - snatches scattered pieces of data from everywhere, constantly jumps from one place to another, and evaluates information exclusively from the position of “share”, that is "But can this" revelation "be sent to someone?" But not with the aim of discussing, but mainly with the aim of evoking emotions in the form of an animated "burp", accompanied by short remarks and exclamations in SMS format.

Joke

In the course of research, it turned out that pages on the Internet, as already mentioned, are not readable, but are skimmed through a pattern reminiscent of the Latin letter F. The user first reads the first few lines of the text content of the page, then jumps to the middle of the page, where he reads a few more lines (as a rule, already only partially, without reading the lines to the end), and then quickly descends to the very bottom of the page - to see "how it ended."

People of all ranks and specialties complain about problems with the perception of information - from highly qualified university professors to service workers for servicing washing machines.

Such complaints can be especially often heard in the academic environment, that is, from those who, by the nature of their work, are forced to communicate closely and daily with people (teach, lecture, take exams, and so on) - they report that the level of reading skills is already low and the perception of information among those with whom they have to work falls lower and lower from year to year.

Most people have tremendous difficulty reading large texts, let alone books. Even blog posts larger than three or four paragraphs already seem to some too difficult and tedious to understand, and therefore boring and not deserving even an elementary understanding.

It is unlikely that there is a person who would not have heard the popular network saying “too many beeches - not mastered”, which is usually written in response to an invitation to read something longer than a couple of dozen lines. It turns out a vicious circle - it makes no sense to write a lot, since almost no one will read it, and the reduction in the volume of transmitted thought leads to even greater meagerness of not only readers, but also writers.

Even people with good (in the past) reading skills say that after a whole day of tossing around the Internet and maneuvering among tens and hundreds of emails, they physically cannot start even a very interesting book, since reading only the first page turns into a real challenge.

And as a consequence of this phenomenon, it is more difficult for people who use “ready-made” information read “diagonally” to adopt the experience that others are trying to convey through literature.

What to do? To develop, first of all, attention and observation, the ability to concentrate, concentrate and, of course, acquire personal life experience - these are faithful helpers in the development of personality and gaining an adequate view of the world.

In general, people who are accustomed to viewing short messages, moreover, on different topics, except for a kaleidoscope and a mess in their heads, begin to divide their lives into short segments. This leads to the fact that the continuous processes taking place around are not recognized precisely as processes, but are seen as an unconditioned set of accidents.

The illusion of knowingness

The era of information technology and the ever-increasing speed of information processing creates for many people the illusion of omniscience, since you can go to the Internet and find ready-made information on a topic of interest. In the case of applied skills (for example, cooking, or how to nail a nail, etc., which has to do with processes that can be immediately tested in practice), everything is fine.

But when it comes to conceptual (ideological) knowledge and knowledge systems, there are often those who have read one book, attended one seminar and are already climbing to others with advice on “how is it correct”.

Problems of superficial perception of information, clip-like thinking become the reason for rash decisions in people's lives, which have a significant impact on their entire subsequent life.

For example, the idea of a beautiful life on earth (project "Anastasia") attracted many to start building their ancestral settlement, leaving the city. But many of the "Anastasians" overestimated their capabilities and state of affairs, because "life on earth" presupposes a different mode of work - sometimes from dawn to evening, unusual

for city dwellers.

Another example of a superficial assessment of information - in society there are various assessments of the personality of I. V. Stalin - he was a tyrant or a great reformer-benefactor of the people. Often, those who adhere to a negative assessment of Joseph Vissarionovich ignore the fact that during the years of his leadership of the country tremendous growth was made in all spheres of the country's society.

That is, people who hang hard labels on certain phenomena and processes forget about the diversity of life phenomena and management processes associated with these phenomena.

It is worth mentioning such a phenomenon as imprinting. This is the primary memorization of information about some phenomenon, object, or process. If any assessment of the phenomenon has become the property of your memory, especially in childhood, then this assessment is then very difficult to overestimate. The same assessment of Stalin I. V. as a tyrant, which is now broadcast from many sources, can become "truthful" for the younger generation, and it will be very difficult to change it later.

An example of propaganda:

Yuri Dud and Kolyma

The forces interested in such an assessment know about imprinting, and use it to form a stable public opinion, which will be very difficult for their opponents to change. So it is important, as far as possible, to educate young people to work with information, to remind them of the bright sides of our great history.

In the issue of moral assessment of information, a person can act in a Divine manner, that is, he is able to predict the consequences of his actions, be responsible for them.

Another scenario is also possible - a person who does not want to understand or accept the established order of things acts according to the principle “I do what I want” - which corresponds to the structure of the psyche, which expresses disagreement with old traditions, the foundations of society and attempts to solve problems of his own without coordination their actions with conscience.

Development of an algorithm for making management decisions

The question of the stability of control under conditions when in a conditionally closed system it is possible to receive inaccurate information is relevant. That is, what should a person do to adequately assess the information coming from the environment. There are algorithms (sequences of actions) for developing control decisions in a given situation.

The first type of algorithms for developing a control decision (behavior)

Scheme No. 1. Control algorithm in emergency situations

In an algorithm of this type, incoming information is sent for execution without preliminary processing, so that people who receive and process information according to such a scheme do not evaluate it for reliability, but immediately make decisions based on it. Thus, it is very easy to "load" false information into them, and expect a completely predictable reaction to it.

But even if there is no such control from the outside, then, constantly reacting to the momentary, people think in short periods of time and cannot focus on longer processes, and even more so, manage them.

The second type of algorithms for developing a control decision (behavior)

In order for the current actions to steadily lead to the implementation of the desired distant perspective, it is necessary to always remember and coordinate your decisions with this your idea of the future. Although an external source of information can teach one to desire a particular perspective. When memory plays a significant role in making a decision, we move on to the second type of algorithm.

Scheme No. 2. Control algorithm based on the inclusion of the flow of current information in the system memory

In people who work out decisions according to the second scheme, memory is also involved in the process, in addition to the executive organs. That is, there is a comparison of the incoming information with the one that is in memory on the same issue.

The advantage of such a scheme over the first algorithm is that when making decisions, people have goals from a relatively distant future in mind, and make decisions based not only on fresh information, but on the basis of all available in memory.

The disadvantage of the scheme can be called insecurity against false information, which can be loaded into memory, and then - "play" in the appropriate situation, since there is no place in this scheme for a critical assessment of the information entering the memory - everything is remembered and used.

In other words, memory protection is necessary - from which the intellect draws the necessary information in the process of developing a managerial decision. This leads to a third type of algorithm.

The third type of algorithms for developing a control decision (behavior)

Scheme No. 3. Control algorithm with memory protection from unreliable information

Everything happens in it, as in the second type of algorithm, but before loading the input stream of information into memory, it is passed through a watchdog algorithm, which, based on some methods, reveals unreliable and dubious information, including attempts to direct and indirect control from the outside …

The watchdog algorithm is needed so that the development of a managerial decision would be carried out only on the basis of information recognized as reliable on the basis of the chosen methodology laid down in the watchman.

In cases where there are difficulties with determining the quality of information, the memory watchdog algorithm puts it in "quarantine", for the subsequent clarification of its reliability, search for new methods that will allow this information from the quarantine to either be introduced into thinking or weeded out.

The algorithm assumes that critical thinking has the highest authority in the system. Therefore, an individual who makes decisions according to the third scheme can move information from the "quarantine" to the area of normal "memory", change the "memory watchdog algorithm" as the system gains experience, which requires in the management process a reassessment of the memory contents according to the categories "reliable", " false”,“doubtful”,“undefined”.

The conspicuous difference in the behavior of systems controlled on the basis of algorithms of the first, second and third types is that a change in the input information flow in the algorithm of the first type causes a very fast reaction, and in the algorithm of the second and third types, the input flow of information may not be at all cause no visible change in behavior, or may cause changes in behavior after only some time.

If the forecast of the system's behavior is included in the algorithm for generating a management decision (the "predictor-corrector" scheme is used), then the change in control can anticipate the change in the flow of input information. However, despite such a visible indifference from the outside in the behavior of the system in relation to the input stream of information, the input information is not ignored in the algorithm of the second and, especially, the third type.

In comparison with the algorithm of the first type, in them it is processed differently: in the second, it is stored in memory, and then causes consequences; in the algorithm of the third type, it is subjected to even more complex processing aimed at ensuring the achievement of long-term goals. Although this is not directly related, since both the first and the second type of algorithm can lead in the chain of events to some long-term goals.

Algorithms of the third type from among those described have the highest noise immunity to environmental noise and intrinsic noise, as well as to attempts to control from the outside. The use of an algorithm of the first type is justified when you need to react immediately, for example, in the event of a fire, but after that you always need to return to the algorithm of the third type. [4]

However, some people are guided by the strategy of using the first type of algorithm, and this strategy quite often finds its expression in the well-known phrase:

"There is no time here to think and discuss - you have to work: you see for yourself what circumstances have developed."

If no conclusions about the current situation in order to revise the strategy of behavior have been made, then the crisis nevertheless comes, and the conclusions and solutions for getting out of the crisis situation are found later, when the system already requires a greater amount of restoration work.

Since a lot of forces have already been identified in the surrounding culture that are trying to manipulate the masses, the paramount question is, according to which algorithm each processes information. The stability of the movement of society towards the goals, which the majority define for themselves as a "bright future", depends on this.

What conclusions can we draw?

A person who takes responsibility for his life in the era of the information society is obliged to learn

work with information, learn to adequately evaluate it in order to make the right decisions in your life.

Learning to interact with the world is at the heart of our life, and it is based on an adequate assessment of what is happening in the world around us. For this, it is important to form morality from an early age, living by conscience, which will help to learn to navigate in the flow of information coming to us.