Michael Shaw, discussing a photo that some people wanted to believe contained the face of the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the influence what people see has on those people: “When people look at a photo of Terry Schiavo and insist she's sentient, or when Bill Frist says that he can determine the same thing partly from observing images, it's hard to argue with what people want to see. In fact, in spite of research that has seriously questioned the nature of visual recall (especially in criminal cases), people continue to rely on such inferences.”
He posts the cropped version of the photo that people would have seen in the newspaper, and then posted the uncropped version that did not get as much attention. He's careful to state that it's possible that Ahmadinejad was involved in what in the embassy takeover more than 25 years ago, but that the photos shown in the media do not constitute enough evidence, and that even an alternate framing calls into question whether the man in the photograph took the lead role in the event the photograph depicts.
Post new comment