The Ease of Misinterpretation

A picture is worth a thousand words—and a few thousand worthless ones. An article in The New York Times titled “A Desolate Princess of the Bronx? Not Then, Not Now” provides evidence of how easy it is to misinterpret an image. The iconic picture published on Halloween 1991 that showed then-six-year-old Guissette Muniz standing alone amidst a scene of urban poverty provoked readers of the newspaper to contact the family offering gifts or expenses-paid travel opportunities—yet Muniz herself never felt impoverished. With two employed parents and a supportive neighborhood community, the Muniz family lived “ok” Mr. Muniz says. It may not have been a cushy life, but it was a far cry from the sense of destitution the picture suggests.

The ease with which we misread not just pictures but conversations, people, events, and other things that occur in day-to-day life shows us how quick we are to make assumptions. Like in the case of the Guissette Muniz photograph, a girl on an empty street is immediately interpreted negatively because we project our impression of poverty onto what we see before us. We have a compulsion to categorize everything that we come into contact with into neatly drawn boxes—even though all our experiences of life point us to the contrary. Life doesn’t fit into boxes or categories—it is wild and chaotic and personal. Why, then, do we instinctively slap a label on everything we encounter?

Evolutionarily speaking, it may have been a helpful survival tactic to be able to interpret events speedily so that we are not caught under the foot of a mammoth as we try to understand why it is blundering our way in a fit of rage. Supposedly, in an age when we receive pieces of information at an increasingly rapid pace, we should be getting even better at interpreting them. We are constantly being updated by smartphone, blog, or websites that update in real time. This trend extends beyond Twitter or Facebook—The New York Times website is also updated before the next issue is in print. But this bulk of information, instead of providing us with a more holistic view of the world, is really just allowing us to misinterpret the wealth of information we have access to. It is firing too much at us, too fast. It’s very hard not to choke if you’re drinking from a fire hose.

This is not only true for news, but for our personal interactions as well. Scientists have shown that only a thin sliver of our communication occurs through spoken word. The majority of it is attributed to body language and other things such as tone of voice. Yet none of these things is expressed when you send a text message, write on your friend’s wall, or shoot an e-mail—and still we are so reliant on such forms of communication to maintain our relationships with the people in our lives.

Where once we were afforded lag time to process all that we hear and see, life and its fast pace now facilitate our misjudgments. Although it is easy to make assumptions and then move on as life speeds past on a jet stream, an awareness of our tendencies and a brief pause before we categorize could make the difference between a desolate child and a family’s little princess.

Shaomin C. Chew ’13, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Thayer Hall.