Gestalt Principles of Perception

Approximate reading time: 26 minutes

In the early part of the 20th century, Max Wertheimer published a paper demonstrating that individuals perceived motion in rapidly flickering static images — an insight that came to him as he used a child’s toy tachistoscope (a device used to display images for very short periods of time). Wertheimer, and his assistants Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka, who later became his partners, believed that perception involved more than simply combining sensory stimuli. This belief led to a new movement within the field of psychology known as Gestalt psychology. The word ”gestalt” literally means form or pattern, but its use reflects the idea that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. In other words, the brain creates a perception that is more than simply the sum of available sensory inputs, and it does so in predictable ways. Gestalt psychologists translated these predictable ways into principles by which we organise sensory information. As a result, Gestalt psychology has been extremely influential in the area of sensation and perception (Rock & Palmer, 1990).

According to Gestalt theorists, pattern perception, or our ability to discriminate among different figures and shapes, occurs by following the principles described above. You probably feel fairly certain that your perception accurately matches the real world, but this is not always the case. Our perceptions are based on perceptual hypotheses: educated guesses that we make while interpreting sensory information. These hypotheses are informed by a number of factors, including our personalities, experiences, and expectations. We use these hypotheses to generate our perceptual set. For instance, research has demonstrated that those who are given verbal priming produce a biased interpretation of complex ambiguous figures (Goolkasian & Woodbury, 2010).

Watch this video: Perceiving is Believing: Crash Course Psychology #7 (10 mins)

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When Seeing and Believing Go Wrong: Bias, Prejudice, and Cultural Factors

In this chapter, you’ve learned that perception isn’t merely a passive registration of sensory input. Instead, it is an active process influenced by our past experiences, biases, prejudices, and cultures. Given this dynamic nature of perception, it’s unsurprising that individuals may perceive identical situations in vastly different ways, depending on their own personal background and societal influences.

Implicit biases, particularly racial prejudices and stereotypes, are strong influencers of perception. Implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases are pervasive, or something that is widespread or found everywhere, often clashing with our conscious values and leading to unintended outcomes.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that implicit racial biases can shape how people perceive and react to objects or situations. One clear example is the influence of race on weapon identification. Payne (2001) found that participants were quicker and more likely to mistakenly say a harmless object was a weapon when they first viewed Black faces compared to first viewing white faces. This “weapons bias” was further corroborated in subsequent studies (Payne, Shimizu, & Jacoby, 2005; Todd et al., 2021).

These biases aren’t restricted to lab-based reaction time tasks; they extend to more life and death decisions like the decision to shoot. Correll, Park, Judd, & Wittenbrink (2002) and Correll, Urland, & Ito (2006) showcased this with a video game simulation where participants had to decide whether to shoot potentially armed targets. White participants were faster to shoot armed Black targets than white ones, revealing a decision bias influenced by the race of the target.

The real-world implications of these findings are staggering. Over the past decades, numerous high-profile incidents have occurred where BIPOC individuals, especially young Black men and children — for example, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice — were fatally shot by individuals claiming they believed the victims were armed or posed a direct threat, even when they were unarmed. This emphasises the critical importance of understanding and addressing implicit biases in perception and decision-making, especially in contexts with life-or-death implications.