People have this experience when reading an article or proofreading a text: they clearly encounter a typo, but they cannot find it because they follow the words. For example, when you see the three characters “Supreme High Wu”, you will immediately think that the fourth character is “up”. Even if the word is obviously “down”, you will think it is “up” and go along without knowing it. . This phenomenon is called “expectation-conditioned perception” in academic circles.
The so-called “expectation-constrained perception” means that people are easy to perceive what they expect to happen, and it is not easy to perceive what they do not expect. The “expectation” mentioned here refers to the things and situations that should happen subjectively. Under the restriction of this “expectation” (in fact, it is misleading), complicated and objective things are often mechanized and simplistic. Prejudice and prejudice also often grow because of this.
In daily life, people tend to analyze and judge things based on their existing knowledge and experience, and make choices and decisions. Generally, the more knowledge and experience you have, the more accurate your judgments and decisions will be. But not necessarily. If certain prejudices and prejudices are mixed in the existing experience, it may cause obvious deviations and errors in the understanding. Just like “suspecting neighbor stealing axe”, because the owner holds prejudice and suspects neighbor stealing axe, he looks more and more like a thief when he sees other people’s words and deeds. There is no shortage of such phenomena in the real society: when you see an old man who falls down and lies on the road, he thinks that he is a wicked person who commits blackmail and false accusations; when he sees a well-dressed person, he thinks that he is a rich person, and a plainly dressed person is a poor person; Those who dress orthodox are serious people, those who dress revealing are not serious people; those who are kind and kind are good people, those who are glaring with anger are wicked people; and so on. They are all cognitive experiences formed based on certain objective facts and special phenomena, and these experiences often become “expectations” for judging things and choosing behaviors, thus restricting the perception of common events and common phenomena. Practice has proved that this kind of constrained perception is often wrong, and at most it can only show that a single case is correct and not of general significance.
If the problem is that ordinary people’s perceptions of certain life phenomena are restricted by “expectations”, the overall situation will not be affected. If leaders and managers are also accustomed to “expectations restricting perceptions” in social governance and daily work, then it is worth being vigilant. . For example, a grass-roots leader has made great efforts in environmental governance and consciously achieved great results in his work. He should and will definitely be praised by his superiors and recognized by the masses. However, after inspection and inspection by the superior supervision team, many problems were found, and the masses also raised concerns. many criticisms. The steering group pointed out that: you think that you will be praised by your superiors and the masses if you do some work, but your work situation is only in line with your own expectations. A big gap – this kind of self-righteous “expectation” that not only loses itself, but also hampers the cause. Another example is that some people think they know their old subordinates, old colleagues and other acquaintances very well, so when they make a realistic evaluation of them, they are already occupied by their original perceptions, and this “expectation” misleads their reality. Perception and result evaluation often do not conform to the objective situation – this intertwined erroneous “expectation” and perception is often an important reason for the lack of objectivity and fairness in identifying and employing people.
From the materialist epistemology point of view, “expectation conditioned perception” is a preconceived and taken for granted empiricism. When it observes, analyzes and deals with problems, it does not proceed from objective reality, but from personal feelings, subjective wishes and narrow experience, and uses an isolated, static and one-sided point of view to understand the world, which eventually leads to the separation of subjective and objective , knowledge and practice are separated. Countless facts show that wrong experience will inevitably lead to wrong perception, and correct experience may not necessarily lead to correct understanding, because the objective situation is always changing, even the experience that has worked correctly has changed over time. A fundamental error will occur. If there are prejudices, hallucinations and unrealistic “expectations” in the mind, it will become a major obstacle to understanding the objective world. This requires abandoning the fetters and shackles of empiricism, not letting “expectations” mislead perception, distorting facts, and deviating from the truth, truly seeking truth from facts, starting from reality, and using practice as the only criterion for testing cognition, so as to accurately reflect objective things The original appearance, to prevent the deviation and error of ideological understanding.
It is said that a certain publishing house has a senior professional proofreader. In order to avoid “expectation restricting perception”, he insists on proofreading backwards from the last word of each book and each article, resulting in “zero error” proofreading for decades. miracle. The stone of this mountain can also attack jade.
