The Effect of Our Emotions and Sense Perception on The Way that We Collect Information

As we know, there are many forms of knowledge and information that can be gained from our own lives. We are able to collect knowledge from second-hand knowledge such as books, reports from professionals, the media that we observe every day and even from communicating with others; Yet we are also capable of collecting knowledge from our own experiences over the routes that we take and the things we do. Knowledge is how we have our own judgment because we mostly base all of our actions on the knowledge that we have gained. Sometimes, we let our emotions and personal views (or biases) get the better of us, thus making us turn a blind eye to certain given information while centralizing our thoughts and approval on other topics that we agree more with. This essay will explore how our human emotions and perceptions of the world affect how we collect information and knowledge by different forms of research. Topics such as objective knowledge and personal knowledge will be shown here. AOKs that will be used will include Human sciences and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

WOKs that will be used will include: Sense perception, reason, and biases. As for my research question, it is “To What Extent Do Our Emotions and Sense Perception Affect the Way That We Collect Information?”Claim: Emotions Barely Affect Information Collection (Objective Knowledge) The collection of historical knowledge can be claimed as a form of an objective type of knowledge. History has built the basis of our society and all events from the past have all lead to today, so it is no surprise that researching such a topic is useful. The claim here is that objective historical knowledge is achievable. Since history has to be recorded accurately to correctly present the information to others, the method of researching it has to be as objective as it can be, as many historians have said before. It is also crucial that the information must not be affected by any outside influences such as opinions and biases. There is some evidence which shows that such objective historical knowledge does exist and can be collected. In history, some of the knowledge found is obvious and is highly undeniable.

Documentations of the events that were written in that time period can also be used as effective forms of gathering needed information about that era. Some other methods of gathering their historical knowledge include interviewing eyewitnesses of past events and discussing with many other historians about an event. A real-life situation that can be used as an example here, is that there are many ancient recorded historical events.

Ancient artifacts, writings, and documentation can be recovered and analyzed to prove the existence of ancient societies and historical events. One example is the oracle bone script, the earliest recorded history in China. This proves the existence of old civilizations (this was recorded in the Shang Dynasty) along with the evolution of culture. Evidence such as this cannot be denied. Counterclaim: Emotions Highly Affect Information Collection (No Objectivity)Although many historians aim to strive for objective historical knowledge, other evidence may claim otherwise, saying that it does not exist. It has been claimed that all historical information is biased, even if the information itself is primary information from the time period itself, it is still recorded from a person with biases about the situation. It is possible that a historian’s personal views and opinions can be reflected in his/her documentary work.

Writing styles and personal views vary from person to person and are different between everyone. A historian’s perception and understanding of historical events is based on and formed by information given to them, so the historians themselves will have to analyze the information and select information that is considered to be “useful” or “correct” by their own standards and interpret them to fit their own understandings. This also means that when presenting this interpreted information to other people; such as the readers in the general public, they will also have to interpret the given information also including selecting “important areas” and analyse the given “facts” with their own political, ideological, and moral values along with their perceptions of the situations. And once they present it to another person with their own words, the cycle keeps repeating again.

Therefore, we can determine here that all information has to go through human tampering in order to become recorded, obtainable information for all to use. For an example, we can use historical knowledge gained from World War 2. There is a quote from Dan Brown, where he says: “History is always written by the winners.” This translates into our example. We all know that World War 2 was won by Allies and because so, most of its history is told from the point of view of the Allies. This information is, of course, biased. They get to choose which information becomes widespread and which information get censored since they have a larger reputation and worldwide influence after the war compared to the Axis powers. This is seen in many forms of media such as book, films, documentaries, etc. Another case that shows how our emotions and sense perceptions affect our perception of our surroundings is another type of research that also requires many observations, analyzations, along with documentation, and that is scientific research. Many researchers also claim that having scientific objectivity in scientific research is important to obtain accurate information, but in many cases, it cannot be truly achieved. Because of the many interactions needed to document new found information; such as redoing experiments, jotting down notes, along with observing the outcomes, it is highly likely that our own human nature can get in the way of accurately representing this information and will, therefore, lead to inaccuracies .

One real-life example of this is from an article by a research scientist turned writer, Richard P. Grant. He writes about how scientific misconduct, which is an act of breaking the honesty of scientific research willingly, can negatively affect scientific research and collected information itself. Scientific misconduct relates back to human emotions since we would be the ones to alter the information to our own likings just for our satisfaction. This further proves the point that objectivity in research is highly unlikely to exist and that our emotions and sense perception have a large role in affecting our collection of knowledge. After looking at all the given information, we come to a final conclusion; Even though there are only a few rare cases where objectivity factually or arguably exists, it is also proven that true objective information does not completely exist because of the inevitable human interaction of the interpretation of collected information which ends in a modified result, which includes some or more misinformation in certain pieces of given information. This all comes down to determining how we humans collect our information and how we choose to view it.