It’s midterm election season in the U.S., and some of the senate races that will define the legislative balance of power over the next two years are starting to take shape. For better or worse, most of us are political partisans of one stripe or another and have trouble getting fully into the mindset of the voters who prefer not just one other candidate, but candidate after candidate, across the board.
In my recent work on interpersonal interpretation and conflict, I’ve been especially interested in how the way that we interpret and misinterpret one another can feed into and drive many aspects of conflict—often but not always by facilitating the illusion of hostility. The component of interpersonal interpretation that has absorbed my attention the most is our skill at distinguishing what I have come to call ‘signal’ from ‘noise.’ An action, mental state, or trait is signal, in my sense, when it reflects on someone as a person, and it is noise when it reflects merely on the way in which they are embodied or situated.
Suppose, for example, that when you ask me a clarificatory question about this (vague-sounding) distinction, I snap at you. You might first be embarrassed about whether you made a mistake, or angry at me for being rude. Alternatively, it might occur to you that I missed lunch and am merely hangry. Instead of getting embarrassed or angry, you pass me a Snickers bar and ignore it. The third of these interpretations is not like the others. Instead of setting up my snap as something that merits a response, it characterizes it as something to be seen through, in order to relate successfully with me. On this interpretation, it is noise, rather than signal.
The distinction between signal and noise cross-cuts the main psychological categories that we use in understanding one another. Behavior can be signal or noise, as in the hangry snap case. So can mental states—intrusive thoughts, perhaps, or non-autonomous desires. Even enduring traits can be either signal or noise. You and your friend might agree that a common acquaintance gets angry easily, while one of you sees it as central to his character and the other sees it as the cross he has to bear—a legacy, perhaps, of his mistreatment as a child.
But although it cross-cuts these other distinctions, the distinction between signal and noise is central to how we relate to one another. We don’t really listen to someone when we know it is just the alcohol speaking. We don’t really give one another credit when we think it was really the situation, and not them.
Understanding people whose moral and political sensibility is very different from our own can be hard! It takes incredible imagination to put yourself in the shoes of a sincere and heartfelt defender of antebellum slavery in 1856. But at least you have a firm grip on how different their life experiences were from your own. When you peer at a distance across the political divide, it is hard to avoid reminding yourself that the people who you see there grew up in the same century (or centuries—sorry, millennials!) as you did, and have gotten to stand witness to the same current events. How is it that they could bring themselves to vote that way?
One telltale clue, for me, that something in the neighborhood of the signal/noise distinction is at play here, is that we sometimes oscillate in our interpretations. We can be torn between seeing people who are willing to tolerate something championed by the political party that we oppose as evidence that they are bad people, and wondering whether they are merely just so deeply brainwashed or indoctrinated. Are they really decent people unlucky enough to find themselves in a difficult situation, or are they just straightforwardly bad people? This is the oscillation between seeing their voting preference as signal and seeing it as noise.
In some of my work I’ve argued that because signal/noise interpretation tries to commensurate two competing values by seeking to maximize both agency and the good. There can sometimes be two very different interpretations of someone that come close to doing equally well—on one of which they are better but have less agency, and the other on which they have much more agency but at the cost of being much worse people. The closer these interpretations are, the more sense it can make to oscillate between them.
But I’m also interested in a powerful illusion that can arise when our interpretations of one another across the political divide are too strongly informed by our knowledge of one another’s politics. This illusion, like all illusions, is a result of a mostly pretty helpful heuristic getting extended too far. The heuristic that we extend, in this case, is the tool of triangulating.
We triangulate in our interpretation of someone else when we infer something about them on the basis of their reaction to a third thing of which we have both had some common experience. For example, you read in someone’s dating profile that their favorite actor is Dylan McDermott, and you anticipate bonding over a shared appreciation of Steel Magnolias. You’ve learned something about them by inference from their reaction to something that you both know something about.
A lot of what we know about one another comes from triangulation in this way. But it can also misfire. If on your first date they seem not to have ever seen Steel Magnolias and keep trying to change the topic to My Best Friend’s Wedding, it may take you a while to sort out that they have mixed up Dylan McDermott with Dermot Mulroney. We can only really learn about one another by triangulating if we genuinely share an understanding of what we are each reacting to.
In February of 2015, Cecilia Bleasdale posted a photograph of the dress that she intended to wear to her daughter’s wedding. Her photograph soon became so famous that a 2024 Vox article identified it as the definitive moment when “the internet peaked.” If you are like me, the first time you saw it, it struck you as obviously a photograph of a white and gold dress. And if you are even more like me, your first thought, on learning that this was supposed to be a mother-of-the-bride dress, was that she must be trying to upstage the bride.
The photo of “the dress” became internet famous because there were millions of other people who are not like me, and who thought it was obviously appropriate for the occasion. But although this was hard to grasp at the time, these people are not as unlike me as it seemed at first. Many of them might agree that, at least given suitably conventional Western wedding conventions, wearing a white dress to your daughter’s wedding is a bold choice that requires judgment and sensitivity to carry off. My interpretive mistake about the people who defended the dress arose from the fact that the dress did not look white and gold to them at all—on the contrary, it looked blue and black.
In the era of Donald Trump’s dominance of the limelight of American politics, it is hard to avoid filtering our interpretation of those with whom we politically disagree through the lens of our knowledge of their different responses to the elephant in the room. But each of our responses to Trump is filtered through the way that we apply the signal/noise distinction to him. And Trump is—famously—imperfectly embodied. Depending on who you ask, he is (at least) a pathological narcissist or (at least) addicted to social media.
Trump’s patent struggles with his imperfect embodiment make him the perfect “dress” photo for the political age that launched just a few months after Bleasdale’s photo went viral, when he descended that escalator to announce his candidacy. Because it is so easy to see what is signal and what is noise in his conduct and character in different ways, triangulating our understandings of one another through our personal responses to him is bound to facilitate the illusion that we are more different from one another than we really are.
Does that mean that we don’t have real differences? Of course not. But if we ever want to do better at listening to one another, we need all the reminders that we can get that we might actually have more in common than it seems. Midterm season is the perfect time to keep our attention on a wider range of things.
Mark Schroeder
Mark Schroeder is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, where he is the founding director of the Conceptual Foundations of Conflict Project. His latest book is When Things Get Personal: A Philosophical Guide to Conflict.
