How Does Selective Perception Work?

We select our perceptions at one of two levels: low-level (perceptual vigilance) or high-level (perceptual defense) (Assael, 1985). This selection takes place after we receive stimuli and begin the next phase in information processing: registration. It is during the registration phase that we are utilizing past interpretations to help us select how to perceive the current stimuli (Travers, 1970). During this phase of information processing, we determine at which level the stimuli belong and, even more importantly, we determine if it belongs to us at all.

Evidence of low-level, or, vigilant perception, can be found in the way we respond to current activities going on around us in the present. This level is primarily concerned with physical safety and incorporates our senses to filter out what is not needed to achieve the task at hand. Thus, this bundle of stimuli is usually relegated to the box that Sherif and Cantril would call "selectivity of perception."

High-level perception, or perceptual defense, is more withstanding and long-term and acts as the baseline for interpreting "facts." This level is that at which we choose to perceive the world in which we live and relate it to our belief systems and ways of being. We are, as Sherif puts it in his field of perception concept, "self-referencing" by using ourselves as our own frame of reference (1946).

It is at this level of selectively perceiving that we likely don't even realize we are, indeed, the ones doing the selecting. Over the course of time the meanings we've created become routinely imbedded in our general stock of knowledge. According to Burgoon, Burgoon and Miller (1981) once a certain response is evoked by a stimulus there is a great likelihood that, in the future, a similar stimulus will evoke a similar response.

Both levels of perception are created by habit so that they can become habit. We habitualize both low-level and high-level ways of selectively perceiving in order to make it easier to protect ourselves - either from external factors (usually physical) or internal dissonance (Assael, 1985). When we habitualize low-level ways of interpreting we provide a routine map to help us sort through our sensory data. The act of habitualizing our high-level interpretations allows us to maintain a view of the world that remains consistent to our cognitive processes. This need for consistency is what drives the processes of both high and low-level selective perception (Moore & Thorson, 1996).

For an example of low-level habitualizing think of when you first learned to drive. At first you hadn't yet established the habit of responding to what it is that presents the most present danger to your safety. You had, by that point, already habitualized the pattern of perceiving the world by filtering out information that is non-necessary for the task at hand. So you were already in the habit of doing that. Until you'd driven a car for a while you don't know what truly was necessary for that particular task, but, as soon as you did, by golly, you made a habit out of it! Why? Because you're habitualized to habitualize.

The reason we make our way of perceiving, as well as the very act of perceiving, into habitualized actions is that such actions carry with them the psychological gain that we receive when our choices are narrowed. When our choices of perception are narrowed it frees us from the burden of the myriad of real decisions life gives us. Thus, according to Berger and Luckmann (1967) habitualizing what we perceive provides "a psychological relief that has its basis in man's undirected instinctual structure." Furthermore, Berger and Luckmann contend that "habitualization provides the direction and the specialization of activity that is lacking in man's biological equipment, thus relieving the accumulation of tensions that result from undirected drives." The result is a stabilization that allows for a solid background against which human beings can go forward. With many "facts" securely woven into this background, the individual now has open to him a foreground available for deliberation and innovation (Berger & Luckmann, 1967, p.53).

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