Question

what term do historians use to describe the personal preference people have that affect their interpretation of events?

Answer 1

Although we may think of papers and books as objective forms of stimulation, we respond to stimulation differently based on our different histories. Even within the same person, any stimulus presented twice will yield different responses from the first presentation to the second. For example, some neurons in the perirhinal cortex will respond differentially to subsequent presentation allowing recognition performance.

Anecdotally, when we read a book the second time we respond to it differently compared to the first time we read it. The first encounter with the book has changed us in numerous ways, and we are not the same person the second or the third time around.

So while in a paradigm grounded on the laws of physics the book is an objective entity that exists independently, within a psychological and neural perspective there is no such thing as a stimulus existing independently from a response, and multiple stimulus presentations lead to differential responding.

This leads to the common problem that arises when discussing the value of art. We assign value to the stimulus (book, song...) while we are really talking about the way respond to those forms of stimulation, and the way we respond differs because we have different histories. So we are describing different things under the illusion that we are talking about the same thing, leading to endless discussions.