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.