Perceptions

In personal reflections about her reporting on the Iraq war, Alissa Rubin emphasizes the principal lesson she has learned from her eight years of experience in Iraq is not to underestimate the complex history or hatreds of alien places. (Alissa J. Rubin, “From Iraq, Lessons for the Next War,” New York Times, November 1, 2009).

Human perception operates according to patterns established in the brain. Americans tend to look for the best, both in people and in outcomes. This can be a positive attribute when on familiar ground. But in a foreign context rife with unknown hazards, trying to recognize patterns that presume the best can lead one to observe what one expects and to miss dangerous realities.

In Iraq, Americans wanted to believe that the Iraqi sectarian and ethnic hatreds were not as deep or pervasive as the years of occupation have revealed them to be. Americans also wanted to believe that the Iraqis, freed from Saddam’s nightmarish rule, would warmly embrace democracy, another hope that has proven to be more of an illusionary hope than having any factual basis.

Similar self-deluding processes have been at work in the American perceptions about Afghanistan. Americans wanted to believe that the invasion succeeded beyond expectations and that Afghans appreciated liberation from the Taliban’s oppressive rule. Many Americans heralded the election that brought President Hamid Karzai to power as marking a transition to genuine democracy. Time has proven those perceptions sadly wrong. Afghans do not want any outsider – regardless of ideology or motivation – to rule them. Indeed, Afghans do not want to live with a strong central government but continue to find their identity through tribe, ethnicity, and religion. The Karzai regime is corrupt and unable able to govern most of Afghanistan. The Taliban are now resurgent.

Pattern recognition shaped by expectations causes not only foreign policy difficulties but also personal problem. One partner expects the other to have an equal degree of loyalty to their relationship. News of an affair or statement that the relationship is ending comes as an unbelievable shock. A parent sees one aspect of a child’s personality; the parent is unable to believe in the existence of another side, uncontrolled and disrespectful, that teachers see daily at school.

Research by cognitive scientists indicates that changing the patterns by which a person’s brain interprets data from the world requires repeated confrontation with data that, at best, fits an existing pattern very poorly. This cognitive dissonance eventually leads to the emergence of a new pattern, a pattern that better fits the available data.

Selective perception is one way in which people colloquially refer to brain patterns. A person continually hears, sees, or smells an immense amount of data, more data that the brain can process. Brain patterns help to filter out data that the person has learned to consider irrelevant. For example, a person who lives near a busy road, under the approach pattern for an airport, or adjacent to a train track may quickly to filter out those noises as unimportant. Conversely, a person almost asleep may instantly come to a state of alertness when she or he hears an unexpected noise. Alertness to sensory stimuli and recognition of important inputs help to keep a person safe while allowing routine functioning that would be impossible if the person sought to attend every sensory stimulus.

Mentally connecting disparate data related to more complex matters such as the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq occurs in much the same way as selective perception except that the brain patterns involved are far more complex. Understanding how the brain functions and being alert to the inherent risks of applying the wrong expectations and patterns to new situations, whether national or personal, represents the best safeguard, though far from an infallible one, against making similar errors in the future.