In the hours following the aftermath of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minnesota on Wednesday, video footage of the incident has been watched, rewatched, slow-mo’d and analyzed from countless angles.
Yet a starkly different interpretation has emerged, along partisan lines, about what exactly went down: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confidently told Americans “it was an act of domestic terrorism” on the part of Good.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded: “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense. Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit.”
The fallout from this fundamental disagreement over reality — and what our eyes are actually witnessing in the footage — is at the core of the dogfight we’re currently witnessing in the press and on social media.
But how can different people look at the same footage and tell themselves entirely different stories about what they’re seeing? And how can people cope with these discrepancies and share communities with one another when they can’t seem to share a reality? HuffPost spoke with experts in psychology and group behavior to gain a better understanding of what’s happening.
The Ways We Watch Video Plays A Part
The medium of video feels fundamentally black and white, and straightforward. However, that leaves out one important factor: Our eyes.
“Video feels like an infallible witness. It doesn’t seem subjective,” Emily Balcetis, an associate professor of psychology and faculty director of research at New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences, told HuffPost. “But just as our eyes can only see what they are pointed at, so too can the camera capturing the footage. By necessity some of the surrounding context, constraints or forces contributing to what is captured never appear on camera.”
Our attention — and what it is drawn to — plays a part as well, particularly in fast-paced footage with a lot going on at once: “Our visual attention is limited, leaving us unable to see all of what is present especially in complex visual scenes,” Balcetis said. “Simply put, when we are looking to the right we can’t see what is to the left. We may be unaware of what we are unaware of, complicating our ability to fully appreciate what it is we have seen and what we might not even know we have not.”
Balcetis also notes that “WHAT we look at is often not random.” That’s because our attention is more likely to land on things that are brightly colored, quick or moving unexpectedly — and because we as individuals are potentially more likely to look in some places than others.
“As a social psychologist, my research has found that who we are — and the types of people we think share aspects of our identity and values — guides who we spend more time looking at,” she said. “Which means we might see more of what they are doing and less of what someone else is doing. We are all missing some of what is happening when we’re watching video evidence.”
Citing a 2014 paper she previously published with Yael Granot, Balcetis also notes that the personal ways that an individual identifies with a social group (for example, if you feel that policing in the U.S. aligns with your values) can color where you are likely to look while “watching altercation footage that portrays ambiguous use of police force against a civilian.”
“Those who fixated more on a target they identified with exhibited stronger differences in how they judged culpability and punishment than those who looked less,” Balcetis explained. “Thus, identification doesn’t just bias opinions — it biases how people make sense of what they attend to in the first place.”
Balcetis does note that this is something people may not be aware of and that recognizing these behaviors and approach to video can help a viewer more accurately process the information they’re receiving — which that 2014 study found after asking individuals to reframe their attention.
“When we, in fact, asked people to try to allocate their attention equally among all the people when watching a video depicting potential police use of force, we did not change whether in fact they felt a sense of connection or felt supportive of police,” she said. “Instead, we changed what they looked at in the video.”
She said that the result did see “a shift in how they looked at the evidence,” “increased the accuracy of their understanding of the actual case facts” and “removed the polarizing effect of identifying with police on their judgments of the acceptability of officers’ use of force.”
“We did not nudge people into siding with or siding against officers. Instead looking differently and more inclusively at all targets changed their understanding of case facts for the better and removed the polarizing impact of their preexisting attitudes about the people involved,” she said.
The MAGA Demographic Has Been Primed For This, Too
The nature of MAGA as a movement and the people who typically align with it are also factors, as Daniella Mestyanek Young, a cult and group behavior scholar and author of “The Culting of America,” told HuffPost. And it starts by recognizing behaviors that were already drilled into the smaller-scale groups that make up this population — particularly when it comes to disregarding information that doesn’t fit the narrative of their leaders.
“So much of what’s happening right now goes back to the ’80s and a bunch of these evangelical mini-cults that were all moving for political power,” said Mestyanek Young, who is also a survivor of the Children of God cult. “There had been isolation — teaching them to distrust the media — and several of these very important elements already in place.”
That is partially why, she said, there’s a seemingly immediate jump to agree and repeat what they’re told.
“Along this route, they were really trained to only listen to a few sources. This, by the way, this is exactly the same as in cults like the Children of God. We had ‘fake news’ back in the ’80s,” she continued, noting that members of these high-control groups are “so trained not to look at outside sources and to take in outsiders’ perspective.”
“This is where Trump can just say whatever he wants,” she said, “and they will just look at the evidence, but believe what he says.”
“When a society can’t reach a consensus on basic, observed reality, like a person being harmed on camera, it’s a direct assault on our ability to trust our own senses.”
– Jeff Guenther, therapist
Another piece of the puzzle is also, of course, the phones and internet of it all, bringing on “algorithmic” radicalization.
“The social media platforms figured out that the more sensational material they feed us, the longer we’re going to stay on those sites,” according to Mestyanek Young. “And I think that’s really important to understanding how this polarization has happened. I kind of think that Americans are not experiencing the same reality anymore.”
If This Makes You Feel Gaslit, Angry, Deeply Depressed…
It can certainly feel unmooring to realize that you and your neighbors are not grounded in that same reality. Add in graphic, violent footage on top of a larger culture of political fear, and it makes sense that people are having such strong reactions.
But that’s not necessarily the problem, as therapist Jeff Guenther (@TherapyJeff on social media) told HuffPost.
“From a clinical perspective, we’re talking about collective moral injury,” Guenther said.“It’s not just the trauma of seeing the violence, which is bad enough, it’s the psychological whiplash of watching a video of a tragedy with your own eyes and then being told by the people in power that you’re hallucinating. It’s crazy making. It’s infuriating. It’s mentally destabilizing.”
Guenther also explains how that gaslighting energy can create “a sense of pervasive unsafety” that can lead to short- and long-term issues for your mental health, from “hypervigilance and total exhaustion” in the short-term as your nervous system works overtime to process the distress, to the long-term risks of people becoming more cynical or dissociative in response to the trauma.
“When a society can’t reach a consensus on basic, observed reality, like a person being harmed on camera, it’s a direct assault on our ability to trust our own senses,” he said. “That isn’t just ‘politics’; it’s a form of institutional gaslighting that leaves people feeling like they’re losing their minds. Personally, I feel like I’m losing mine.”
“When the gaslighting playbook is used over and over,” he continued, “people start to check out because the cognitive dissonance is too painful to carry.”
That’s why, he noted, finding your “reality anchors” can do so much to ground you: “You need to talk to people who saw what you saw. You have to say the truth out loud, repeatedly, to keep it from being overwritten by the official narrative. In this climate, validation isn’t just a ‘nice’ thing to have; it’s a tool for psychological survival.”
And, ultimately, Guenther warns against the “trap” of trying to “bridge the gap” or “find common ground” immediately after events like this.
“Don’t fall for it. It’s a form of emotional labor that survivors and witnesses shouldn’t be forced to do. I don’t even want to get close to ‘both-sidesing’ this shit,” Guenther said. “When you’re arguing with someone about whether or not a human life has value, you aren’t having a ‘difference of opinion,’ you’re experiencing a fundamental clash of values. In these scenarios, ‘common ground’ doesn’t actually exist, and trying to find it only serves to neutralize your valid outrage.”
“You don’t owe anyone a debate right now. Your energy should be 100% focused on community care and self-preservation,” he continued. “You can worry about ‘circling the square’ of a shared society later. For now, it’s okay, and arguably necessary, to build a wall around your peace.”
