Examples Of Perception In The Movie Crash

Crash, a film about how people’s misperceptions shape their reality had me focus on the character Farhad, a Persian store owner. He experiences people racially profiling him and his behavior is effected from people’s misperceptions. Through Farhad’s story we can see the different stages of perception, attribution biases, and the effects of misperceiving.
Perception is how an individual filters information, interprets it, and then creates a meaning for their views. How people perceive, and misperceive, is influenced by all sorts of stimuli and the perception trio selection, organization, and interpretation all lead to inferences. The first stage is selection; the direction of stimuli we choose to focus on. In this case the intensity of stimuli …show more content…
The anchoring effect, the fundamental attribution error, and the actor-observer effect are all types of attribution biases all affecting Farhad’s situation. The anchoring effect uses the most obvious piece of information displayed to snap to judgement. The first scene that introduces the character Farhad to the film is the arrival at the gun store. The gun clerk assumes Farhad is Arabic because the trait supporting that notion is the foreign language Farhad speaks. However, unbeknownst to the gun clerk the actual language is Persian. Regardless the judgement escalates and has the gun clerk assume the worse, that Farhad is a terrorist, causing him to kick him out the store. In this scene another attribution bias present is the fundamental attribution error. Fundamental attribution error is an emphasis on internal characteristics to explain an individual’s behavior instead of taking into consideration external factors. Farhad speaks his native language because the English language is too difficult for him. The gun clerk assumes he speaks this language because he is trying to hide something, possibly that he may be a terrorist. This misperception affects the gun clerk’s actions again causing him to kick the Persian man out of his …show more content…
Daniel tried to warn him about the need to fix his door, yet the warning was ignored. Farhad reasons since the lock was not fixed the robbery was enabled and since fixing the lock was Daniel’s job the robbery must have been Daniel’s fault. This type of attribution bias is an example of actor-observer effect. The actor-observer effect is placing the fault of our own behavior on external causes. This mentality, this perception of Daniel has Farhad end up pulling a gun on the man. Fortunately, the gun was loaded with blanks, but it comes to show how misperception can lead to irrational thinking and negative