Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

by Robert Wright

What’s less well-known than the study’s famous quantification of bias is that the authors raised questions about whether bias was really the right word. When we think of a cognitive bias, we think of a distortion of what would otherwise be a clear view of the thing perceived. But that presupposes that there is a thing being perceived. Hastorf and Cantril wrote, “It is inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different ‘attitudes’ concerning the same ‘thing.’ . . . The data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe.’ The ‘game’ ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.” Hastorf and Cantril weren’t talking about the movie The Matrix, of course. But, like the movie, they were raising doubts about how real “reality” is—about whether it makes sense to talk about “things” existing out there, independent of the minds that conceive them. They wrote, “For the ‘thing’ simply is not the same for different people whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”