What Are You Reading Wednesday

What Have You Just Finished Reading:
Finished the book I mentioned last week with the 'damaged' heir (born hypoxic due to the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck).  There were several plot holes and some faulty reasoning...which I've noticed as a general trend with this author.  But, I also tend to like her characters, so I'll roll with the plot holes.

It's works a bit like fanfic in a way, your mind keeps working on the stuff the text left out  (several scenes I WISH had been included), so you end up thinking about it more than something really tightly written and plotted.  It's mental 'fix it' and 'fill-in-the-blank.'   Weird how that works on your mind. (And she still needs a better editor for formatting and homophone errors, of which there were many.)   Still, I cared about the characters and was emotionally involved enough that I'm interested when the brother's book comes out in the fall.  I want the brothers reconcilliation (and will be disappointed if that reconcilliation underwhelms or doesn't pan out.)

What Are You Reading Now:
Skin Game by Jim Butcher.  The new Dresden Files book. .

Not Everyone Is Watching the Same Show That You Are

It's called confirmation bias.

I had a bit of this slam into my face the other day while walking my dog.  I frequently walk Zoe with the little old scooter-riding lady down the street.  (Actually it's a group of people who walk their dogs in my mother's neighborhood, so I'm regularly walking Zoe with several dogs).   Anyway, on Memorial Day I was walking Zoe with said 'little old lady' down the street who mentioned that she had been watching World War II movies all day and (I quote) "Those liberals should watch those so they'd stop sending our boys into war..."

Cue my look of being quite perplexed.  When she said "those liberals..." I thought she was going to go the "weak" and "avoiding a battle" route which is the more usual tactic, but... er...  "sending our boys to war" wasn't what I expected her to say because...er... wha?  Clearly she does not read the daily anti-war posts over on Daily Kos.  It's a bit like Superman's whole "backwards verse", isn't it?

Of course I also know that she watches FOX News constantly, and, to be honest, I placed her statement almost entirely down to tribalism and 'othering'.

Basically, if you consider 'those people' (whoever 'they' might be, in this case 'those liberals') to be 'against' you, then you reflexively assign the position opposite your own to the 'other' side... simply because 'my' side must agree with me (obvi)  so the 'other' side must be against me (duh) ... even when the positions your are assigning the 'other' may bear no resemblance to their actual positions.  Yeah, it causes cognitive dissonance for someone on the outside, but it doesn't cause cognitive dissonance for the person doing the 'othering' because it's all based on their own assumptions to begin with.

(I did laugh when the older man who walks dogs with us said that he was stopping watching Bill O'Reilly because O'Reilly was getting 'too liberal'.   I laughed.  Out loud.  Openly.  (Was that mean?)  The imbibing housewife, I say with some affection merely because -- honest to god! -- in two years I have never once seen her without a glass of wine in hand.  She's like Courtney Cox's character on Cougar Town! ...Anyway, she laughed as well and agreed with me.    (Sidenote: we're the ones that are a few/several decades younger than the first two, which may also be a factor in the O'Reilly reaction.)  Anyway, I wanted to ask, O'Reilly is to 'the left' of who exactly?  Limbaugh and Beck?)

At any rate, sorry that this post got all political.  It wasn't meant to be.  I was basically referring back to this article on i09

Selective Perception Is What Makes People Fight About TV


Selected quote:

Selective perception describes the phenomenon of only seeing what we want to see. This bias is most glaring when a large group of people see the same events - like a television show.

Have you ever been standing next to a friend, saw a fight happen in real time, and then turned to each other and said, "He/she was crazy." One of you backs the first of the combatants, and the other is entirely on the side of the second. You can't imagine how your friend feels different. Everything you saw seems to back your position. Your friend feels the same.

What you experienced was called selective perception. Give a person a preconception and they will not notice, or soon forget, anything that doesn't back their position. {...}    A surprisingly divisive show was All in the Family. Running throughout the 1970s, it featured a bigoted American father who constantly butted heads with his grown daughter and her liberal husband. The show sometimes got flack from liberal writers, who claimed that it reinforced bigotry in everyday life. The show creators shot back that the kids were always in the right, and the dad was always in the wrong. Clearly, the show discouraged bigotry by making it the butt of every joke.

Then came a survey that showed they were both right. Liberals watched the show because they believed it reinforced their views. Plenty of bigots did the same.

I've read similar survey results for Colbert Report. Some people don't see the satire aspect that others do.