Psychologists managed to answer an ages-long philosophical question, whether people can be objective and discard their views when evaluating a fact of life. The answers is negative: No, we are unable to discount our views and be objective.

People cannot be objective even if they really want to

Cognitive  scientists and philosophers have long asked the question whether it’s even possible for people to see things objectively. Now the question has been answered and the answer it, “No”.

In the experiment conducted by researchers from John Hopkins University (Maryland, USA) people had to point out to an oval in a pair of shapes. One of the coins was round and the other was oval, and people, although they knew what they had to find, were unable to positively identify the shapes.

The task was complicated by the tilt: Both shapes seemed oval from the point of view of the subject. The person’s own perspective influenced how the object appeared to the viewer.

“It was really exciting for us to take an experimental approach to this question,” psychologist Chaz Firestone, one of the study authors, explained. The results surprised the psychologists, who expected that people would be able to identify the true shape of objects in the majority of cases. But it wasn’t the case.

In total, 9 experiments were conducted. Pairs of 3-dimensional coins were shown to experimental subjects who needed to tell a true oval from a circle. This had proven to be a hard task and when the shapes were tilted, the response time was substantially slower. This was the case when shapes were still or moving, both on computer screens and the physical coins in front of the viewer.

So, objects are ultimately stamped with our own perspective. We as humans are unable to see things objectively.

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