Tuesday, October 28, 2008

How people perceive the world

In yesterday's NY times, David Brooks has a nice piece on decision-making. It dovetails well with the Professional Vision paper that you read last week, along with our discussion during Emily's talk. One of the comments he makes is this: "Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably simple operation. You just look and see what’s around. But the operation that seems most simple is actually the most complex, it’s just that most of the action takes place below the level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain."

Read the full text here.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for highlighting this article, Steve! I will have to show this to my undergraduate students since we just finished discussing perception.

-Travis

Ginny said...

Same here....THXS