The Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib

[TheMercenary]

Good Stuff:

Every human being has his own particular web of associations for identifying and interpreting reality, which, most often, instinctively and unthinkingly, he superimposes on every set of circumstances. Frequently, however, those external circumstances do not conform with, or fit, the structure of our webs, and then we can misread the unfamiliar reality, and interpret its elements incorrectly…
— Ryszard Kapuscinski, “Travels with Herodotus” (2007)

Hanson, among others, pioneered the idea that observations in science are not independent of theory but are, on the contrary, quite dependent on it. In his book, “Patterns of Discovery,” published in 1958, he coined the term “theory-laden” and wrote: “there is more to seeing than meets the eye.” I would like to make an even stronger claim: Believing is seeing.
It is said that seeing is believing, but often it’s the other way around. We do not form our beliefs on the basis of what we see; rather, what we see is determined by our beliefs. We see not what is there, but rather what we want to see or expect to see.
The term “belief-laden” could easily be substituted for “theory-laden,” and Hanson’s ideas extended to seeing in general. To use the familiar Gestalt image of the duck-rabbit: if we believe we see a rabbit, we see a rabbit. If we believe we see a duck, we see a duck. And the situation is even worse than the Gestalt psychologists imagined. Often our beliefs completely defeat sensory evidence, or condition us to turn our senses off completely. What is really there? Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? Or could it be a gerbil?
We see the world in a way that is influenced by our beliefs.

The truth matters not to the messenger:

Human rights workers and prisoners needed a spokesperson to dramatize the growing evidence for abuses at Abu Ghraib and at other U.S. military prisons around the world. The Hooded Man was that ideal spokesperson – a living symbol of abuse. An icon. Clawman had suffered at Abu Ghraib, and he had an interest in being heard. This is not to say that anyone was involved in conscious fraud. But it is to say that there were pressures on all of us to believe that Clawman was the man under the hood.

The photograph should be a constant reminder of how we can make false inferences from pictures. And of how pictures and language can interact to produce falsehood.