To What Extent is Sense of Perception an Accurate Way of Knowing?

In psychology, perception is defined as the interpretation of information received through our sensations.

When we see things it is not our eyes that 'see' but our brain. The way we 'perceive' or in other words, interpret things can be distorted by our previous knowledge or by our surroundings. Prejudice and discrimination are also based on this - we generalise what we've learnt in the past and then judge things by the same basic simply on the way they look. When thinking of it this way, perception becomes an inaccurate and biased way of knowing. In addition, it is a common belief that we 'see' only what we want to see and what we are told to see.

This belief leads to quite frightening thoughts. How much of what we 'perceive' in everyday life should we believe and trust in? And how much do we manage to miss without noticing such as in the gorilla experiment and the card colour changing experiment? When looking at it in this perspective our perception is not accurate at all and we are easily tricked by it.

In conclusion, I don't think that we can measure to what extent perception is accurate as there are also many other factors that may affect what we know. As mentioned before, we have past experience first of all and when put in different situations the things we see or notice will also be different.