[2605.11166] Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives
[Submitted on 11 May 2026]
Title:Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives
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Abstract:Political and social identities structure how people evaluate political information, a finding decades deep in political science and routinely discarded by computational tools that often produce single scores that treat a piece of text, an image, or a video as if it means the same thing to everyone. This paper shows that it does not, and that the difference is consequential. To address this problem, I develop the Perspectivist Visual Political Sentiment (PVPS) classifier, which learns from approximately 82,000 evaluations by 5,575 U.S. adults to predict how audiences defined by political and social identities will evaluate the same image. Unlike standard tools that average systematic disagreement away, PVPS preserves it, returning an evaluative profile that records who agrees, who diverges, and along which identity lines. Applied to several influential studies of visual sentiment, PVPS shows that perceived violence in protest imagery and the emotional mechanisms behind protest image engagement both change substantively once audience identity is taken into account. It follows that what a political image conveys is a moving target, and measuring it requires knowing whom it is moving.
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
ACM classes: I.2.7; I.4.8; J.4
Report number: 61 pages, 10 figures, 9 tables
Cite as: arXiv:2605.11166 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2605.11166v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.11166
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Elena Sirotkina [view email] [v1] Mon, 11 May 2026 19:21:49 UTC (6,635 KB)
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