Concepts Leading to Inaccurate Perceptions
Hundreds of years ago determining the outcome of an event or situation was somewhat easier than it is in our present day society. As our world and time evolved so did the people which inhabit it. Going from Point A to Point B is very rarely a straight line anymore, the path is often filled with twists and turns that could end up leading to a point you never saw coming. In psychology especially lies a wide range of topics and concepts that can lead to inaccurate perceptions, cognitions, and conclusions of certain situations. Ideas such as the afterimage effect, availability heuristic, ethnocentrism, groupthink, the lack of object permanence, non-random assignment of research participants, optimistic explanatory style, and proactive interference are all subjects that tend to skew one’s original perspective or path. To start things off I will begin by discussing the afterimage effect. This effect is what occurs when your eyes, after leaving the receptor cells, analyze visual information in terms of opponent colors. When I tried the example in the book with the flag and the dot, I couldn’t quite grasp the concept as well as I wanted to. I realized that the afterimage effect was almost like an optical illusion, so I found a really great example where a negative picture of Beyoncé had three colored dots on her nose; one dot was green, one was blue, and one was red. When you took your eyes off of the negative picture and looked at a plain dot right next to it, blinking once I was able to see a full colored picture of Beyoncé. The afterimage effect greatly distorts one’s visual perception of objects when dealing with colors that are received by the eye and those colors that are opposite of them. An effect like this can change the entire way you perceive an inanimate object. As I began to look into availability heuristic, I soon realized how often people subconsciously partake in it. Before I get head of myself I should first explain what availability