Shifting perception

This NPR post is a good follow-up to the previous post about certainty -- how and why people change their minds about something. The set-up is simple, a man shot photos of huskies playing with migrating polar bears. In 1994 he published the shots in National Geographic, but people hated the photos and the photographer:

[The] photographer Rosing "was besieged by angry faxes and phone calls," from people who thought the photos couldn't be real, that the dog was probably put in the bear's path, "chained up as bait for the white monster." This wasn't play. This wasn't innocent. This was the prelude to a kill — "a sinister trap." The bear, they said, was about to spring and bite the dog; when the pictures stopped, the bear pounced. The dog, they imagined, was probably terrified. No one wanted to look at these photos, Rosing told Jon. "People just couldn't believe it," so he didn't try to sell them. He just stashed them away.


In 2007, the photos were reposted online. The reactions were flip-flopped. More modern audiences were enchanted:

What happened? How could people, maybe the same people, just 13 years later stare at the same pictures and feel so differently about them? Mooallem has a theory. In 1994, he thinks, polar bears were still thought of as proud, dangerous, scary animals. A decade earlier National Geographic put out a polar bear video called "Polar Bear Alert" that begins with a young couple pushing a stroller through Churchill, while Jason Robards, the narrator, describes the town as the "one place in the world where the great white bears roam the streets, dangerously immune to the presence of their only enemy ... man." The dad had a rifle around his shoulder. He needed to, because these bears attacked.

NatGeo's film was rich with bear clawings, bear murders. . . . This film made a particularly deep impression — that these animals were instinctive killers. Knowing that, feeling that, the sequence in Brian Ladoon's backyard made no sense. Vicious Lords of the Tundra don't nuzzle dogs.

Thirteen years later, polar bears hadn't changed, but our sense of them had. By 2007, most people had seen scenes of weak, starving bears struggling to stay on shrinking hunks of melting ice. The earth was warming and polar bears had no place to go. Suddenly, they were vulnerable, heading to extinction. Animals, says Mooallem are "free-roaming Rorschachs." We see them through the heavy filter of our own feelings, our own needs. And our filter for polar bears had flipped. Animals who'd once been proud and vicious had become "delicate, drowning" victims, lonely animals — who now just might need the companionship of a friendly husky — who might come to a backyard, looking for a hug.

Jon Mooallem believes that the stories we tell ourselves about animals totally color how we see them. "Emotion matters. Imagination matters, and we are free to spin whatever stories we want about them." The wild animals, he says, "always have no comment." 

Sociopaths have long had no comment either on the way they are portrayed. I wonder what will change now, if anything, about the public's perception of them. From the comments section of the NPR post:

"Seems to me that MOST hatred.................is based on ignorance."

Or rather, a limited perspective, which we all have. It isn't such a broad term or loaded phrase, but is the same idea. Comes from the popular wisdom that hate comes from fear, which in turn comes from a lack of understanding, especially when we are talking about people fearing/ hating other people. I agree that this is in large part the problem, a human problem. We all have a limited view of the world, and try to judge based on our understanding of our own reality. It takes someone, not necessarily with charisma, or money, or a great idea, but someone with a deep understanding of people, who can be the type of leader to bridge us past this hatred to empathy and understanding instead. Only then can we move on to solutions.


I, too, wondered if the polar bear in the first photograph was going to eat the dog, but it didn't fill me with hate. That would be totally natural. But seeing it in context with the playing is pretty phenomenal.

Labels = license to do ill?

I have been asked recently about whether I think that there is any danger that people will falsely self-identify as sociopaths and then use that label as an excuse to behave poorly. I think that labels definitely do affect the way people behave. David Dobbs wrote about how schizophrenics are treated in North America nations versus African nations, suggesting that because the disorder is considered more of a temporary aberration in some African cultures (as opposed to the sense that it is a full blown disability in western nations), African schizophrenics are more high-functioning. The theory is that western schizophrenics aren't expected to act normally so they don't, at least not as often as African schizophrenics. Of course I'm sure there's a lot more going on to explain the difference, but there is still a lot of power to a label.

So I think this is a legitimate concern, often acceptance of a label leads to better behavior through the process of reappropriaatinon. An academic article, "The Reappropriation of Stigmatizing Labels: Implications for Social Identity" describes the process:

Given that to appropriate means “to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself,” we consider reappropriate to mean to take possession for oneself that which was once possessed by another, and we use it to refer to the phenomenon whereby a stigmatized group revalues an externally imposed negative label by selfconsciously referring to itself in terms of that label. Instead of passively accepting the negative connotative meanings of the label, the speaker above rejected those damaging meanings and through reappropriation imbued the label with positive connotations. By reappropriating this negative label, he sought to renegotiate the meaning of the word, changing it from something hurtful to something empowering. His actions imply two assumptions that are critical to reappropriation. First, names are powerful, and second, the meanings of names are subject to change and can be negotiated and renegotiated.

It's probably obvious why reappropriation or a label is appealing to members of a stigmatized class of persons:

Stigma, according to Goffman, is an attribute that discredits and reduces the person “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (Goffman, 1963, p. 3). Social stigma links a negatively valued attribute to a social identity or group membership. Stigma is said to exist when individuals “possess (or are believed to possess) some attribute, or characteristic, that conveys a social identity that is devalued in a particular social context”. 
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Being stigmatized carries with it a number of burdens. First and foremost, stigmatized persons are disadvantaged in terms of opportunities they are afforded and the outcomes that they achieve. Overt and covert prejudice and discrimination can deny the stigmatized entry into elite stations in life, from education to jobs to housing.
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Stigma, like categorization (Wittenbrink, Judd & Park, 2001) and stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995), is context-dependent (Crocker, Major & Steele, 1998). Thus, an individual may be stigmatized in one context but not in another context. In different cultures and in different times, groups such as the overweight or gays have not been burdened with stigma. Instead, these features are or were considered normal, or, in some cases, desirable (Archer, 1985). Intellectual ambition may be lauded in one context (e.g. classroom) but derided in another context (e.g. fraternity) or by another group (e.g. disadvantaged inner city youths). It is the variability of stigma that intrigues us. It suggests that what is considered stigmatizing is socially constructed and, in the end, malleable. In the case of stereotype threat, a social category label takes on negative connotations within a particular context. One approach to decreasing stereotype threat, and thereby to reduce the potentially performance-constraining effects of stigma, is to frame the task as non-diagnostic of underlying ability (Steele & Aronson, 1995). An alternative approach, which is the focus of this chapter, is to transform the connotative meaning of the traits that are linked to the social category, revaluing them positively. Reappropriation, typically in the form of self-labeling, is one strategy that attempts to revalue social identities. Reappropriation and other socially creative strategies are possible because of the situational, socially constructed, and thus malleable nature of stigma.

How and why reappropriation?

Where “queer” had connoted undesirable abnormality, by the fact that it is used by the group to refer to itself, it comes to connote pride in the groups’ unique characteristics. Where before it referred to despised distinctiveness, it now refers to celebrated distinctiveness. Reappropriation allows the label’s seemingly stable meaning to be open to negotiation. In addition, the defiant act of reappropriation may attack the negative evaluations of the denoted group. By refusing to perceive “queer” as demeaning, in-group members make it more difficult for out-group members to gain recognition for their own display of superiority, thereby undermining one of the functions of prejudice (Fein & Spencer, 1997). The ability of reappropriation to deprive outgroup members of a linguistic weapon is nicely exemplified in an episode of The Simpsons. In this episode, Homer becomes angry with a gay character for using the word queer to describe himself, yelling “And another thing. You can’t use the word queer... that is ourword for you.” This example emphasizes that implicit in the concept of reappropriation is the idea that language is an ongoing process of negotiation, a power struggle over the connotative meaning of symbolic referents. As such, self-labeling can serve to diffuse the negative connotations of the word. Further, by reclaiming names formerly soaked in derision, an individual exerts his or her agency and proclaims his or her rejection of the presumed moral order.

In successful reappropriation, an alternative vision is presented that does not necessarily change the underlying denotative meaning of a concept but transforms the connotative evaluative implications. In the case of “queer,” reappropriation implies that deviance or abnormality is itself not necessarily a bad thing, thereby promoting a celebration of diversity. Through reappropriation, the implication of distinctiveness in the term “queer” was not disputed or challenged, but rather the evaluative meaning that it connoted was transformed. Via reappropriation, the group asserts that it is still unique, or exceptional, but that exceptionality is positively valued. The distinctiveness of the group and the label is maintained, but it is simply the negativity that is challenged.

The rest of the article details a model of misappropriation. But yes, there is a very real danger to labels, both in people self-identifying strongly with a label and possibly the normalizing of certain behaviors via reappropriation of the label. Those are the natural consequences of labels. But, they are not necessarily bad consequences, particularly when the label has been overly stigmatized and the reappropriation of the term allows the label to reflect more truthful connotations as part of a larger cultural re-evaluation of the stigma, as well as allowing the stigmatized group to reintegrate themselves into a society that is seeking to exclude or subjugate them.

But don't sociopaths deserve their stigma? If you look at the core personality traits of a sociopath, they are not necessarily negative, but neutral or even positive -- charm, confidence, fearlessness, etc. As the article mentions:

Traits often take on different connotative meanings when placed in the context of the in-group versus the out-group. For example, intelligence when describing Jews (when they are an out-group) may be interpreted negatively as conniving. With regard to group-based evaluations (Brewer, 1979), loyal may be considered positively when describing the in-group, but take on negative connotations, such as clannish or exclusionary, when describing the out-group. Galinsky and Moskowitz (2000) presented traits in the context of the in-group and the outgroup and asked participants to rate the favorability of each trait (cf.Esses & Zanna, 1995). Traits were rated less favorably in the context of the out-group, even when the assignment of traits did not differ.