January 9, 2026
Your eyes are partisan
"They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction [pdf]
Study: We see protests through our tribe; commenters: "video can't speak for itself"
TLDR: Researchers showed the same protest video to different groups and got different “facts” depending on the cause they were told. Comments erupted: some say videos never speak for themselves, others claim people just spin reality, and one user called out hypocrisy—why this matters for courtrooms and everyday arguments.
Researchers showed one protest video but told half the viewers it was about abortion and the other half it was about the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Result: people didn’t just disagree on opinions—they disagreed on “facts” like whether sidewalks were blocked. The community erupted with a chorus of “yep, that tracks.”
User pmichaud dropped the blunt TL;DR: “people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.” Then bethekidyouwant added the kicker: “a video cannot ‘speak for itself’.” In other words, evidence gets filtered by your team jersey. Cue the cynics: bondarchuk argued folks aren’t mis-seeing at all; they’re relabeling reality—“they mean ‘protesters blocked the road and that’s good actually’.”
It wasn’t all ivory-tower talk. bad_haircut72 claimed they’ve watched this happen in team retros, turning office meetings into mini-protests where everyone rewrites the tape in their favor. And then came the drama: fzeroracer called out the poster’s alleged hypocrisy over an ICE shooting thread, sparking “practice what you preach” energy.
Jokes flew (“my bias has 4K HDR”), but the mood was clear: if our eyes are partisan, courts and debates that rely on “what the video shows” are standing on shifting sand.
Key Points
- •The study tested how cultural cognition affects perceptions of protest behavior relevant to the speech-conduct legal distinction.
- •Participants watched the same protest video but were told different protest causes (abortion vs. “don’t ask, don’t tell”).
- •Subjects’ cultural outlooks predicted divergent perceptions of key facts (e.g., obstruction, threats), even with identical footage.
- •Results matched hypotheses involving inversions, biases, and (semi)polarization effects across cultural groups and conditions.
- •Findings highlight implications for constitutional adjudication and liberal self-governance, given culturally motivated reasoning.