Selective perception

Selective perception is the tendency of people to pay attention to those elements of the environment that are consistent with their expectations and ignore the rest.

An example of this phenomenon may be the selective perception of facts from news reports.

Selective perception can refer to all cognitive distortions in which expectations affect perception. Human judgment and decision-making are deformed under the influence of a number of cognitive, perceptual and motivational distortions, and people, as a rule, do not see their own mistakes, although they easily notice (and even overestimate) the power of distortion on the judgment of others.

One reason for this behavior may be that people are too overwhelmed by the amount of information that is dumped on them every day to pay the same attention to everything; instead, they take what suits their needs.

Because of this, when observing a phenomenon, an eyewitness may miss significant details by focusing on the main observation.