# Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives Source: [Unpacking the Eye of the Beholder: Social Location, Identity, and the Moving Target of Political Perspectives]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-05-14T05:00:05.131Z Authors: Elena Sirotkina Published: 2026-05-11T19:21:49.000Z ## 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. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Classification on PVPS Cross-party axes (test)](): Classification; PVPS Cross-party axes (test); Group A Accuracy: 83.6. - [Classification on Stack Social axes V2 (test)](): Classification; Stack Social axes V2 (test); Group A Accuracy: 70.5. - [Classification on PVPS Primary political axes (test)](): Classification; PVPS Primary political axes (test); Group A Accuracy: 81.6. - [Party Classification on Primary Political Axes (test)](): Party Classification; Primary Political Axes (test); Accuracy: 88.7. - [Ideology Classification on Primary Political Axes (test)](): Ideology Classification; Primary Political Axes (test); Accuracy: 87.1. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()