You Are Not So Smart YANSS 333 - Selective Perception - Jay Van Bavel
55 snips
Feb 16, 2026 
Jay Van Bavel, NYU professor of psychology and neuroscience who studies how group identity shapes perception. He explores why people watching the same footage see different realities. Topics include how attention and eye movements build subjective experience. He links group identity, naive realism, and social media dynamics to explain widening perceptual divides.
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Perception Is Constructed, Not Given
- Perception is an active construction, not a passive receipt of reality.
- Two people can watch the exact same video and perceive two different realities due to prior expectations and motivations.
They Saw A Game: Dartmouth vs Princeton
- In the 1951 Dartmouth–Princeton game study, students from each school remembered the other team as the aggressor.
- Even when shown the game film later, Princeton and Dartmouth students still made opposite foul counts.
Conscious Vision Is Post-Processed
- Visual input is heavily processed before reaching conscious awareness.
- Conscious perception can be disconnected from raw visual encoding, as in blindsight examples.
