{"id":1851,"date":"2023-08-19T00:30:28","date_gmt":"2023-08-19T00:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/?p=1851"},"modified":"2024-10-08T14:09:03","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T14:09:03","slug":"perception-pt-2-evaluate-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/perception-pt-2-evaluate-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Perception pt 2 (evaluate & act)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Welcome back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Function 2: Evaluating things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Perception doesn’t stop at identify what things are<\/strong>, but also tries to work out what they are like<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recall from our intro to this chapter<\/a> that our very first mystery was what would make anyone choose the drink on the right over the one on the right?<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Coke
Sugar water A, and sugar water B<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

We’re guessing that your answer is “because it tastes better”. How did we do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It makes sense. You’ve probably tasted both, so you know which you liked more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well! That was easy. Job done!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How will we amuse ourselves for the rest of this page?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How about some (allegedly) true crime-ish stories? Don’t worry, it’s CB crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A crime(ish) stories<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Six people were charged for<\/a> allegedly selling millions of bottles of cheap wine for inflated prices, by fraudulently claiming they came from exclusive wine-producing regions. They allegedly made 14 million Euros per year between 2019 and 2021 by sticking fake labels on these bottles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They got caught because you obviously can’t pass (an estimated) 40 million bottles of cheap plonk as fine wine without large numbers of customers noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just kidding. That’s not how they got caught. An accountant noticed that they had sold more wine than the supposed wineries were physically able to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about those 40 million people who bought cheap wine with fake labels? Didn’t they notice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only a few batches were returned as inadequate, and no customers called the police. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #1 for you:<\/strong> If 40 million people couldn’t tell that expensive wine was cheap plonk, how confident are you can tell your Coke from your Pepsi?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story isn’t technically a crime, but some observers thought it was. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World’s Most Expensive Free Watch<\/a> (listen or read for free at the link) is an episode of the Popular podcast ‘Reply All’. They observed people buying expensive watches from the web, and being shocked at the cheap pieces of junk they received. They investigated and found a world of credulous would-be entrepreneurs being taught to set up fancy-looking websites to sell incredibly cheap watches. If someone bought a watch for \u00a3100 off their site they would order one for \u00a33 to be sent to that consumer’s address from a Chinese e-commerce website, and pocket the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Photo
An expensive watch? (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In reality, these sales sites spent rarely made any money as they spent most of their time dealing with angry customers demanding refunds (almost all the actual cash was made by the people selling training videos on this business model). The podcasters were mystified by this exotic internet exploit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #2 for you:<\/strong> How come these watch-sellers struggled, while the (alleged) wine fraudsters did so well?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pepsi Challenge<\/a> is a promotion that Pepsi has run since 1975 (and still does<\/a>). It works like this: a representative sets up a booth in a public place, offering passers-by the chance to do a blind taste test to see if they liked Pepsi or Coke better. The passer-by would get a little cup of Cola A and Cola B, and when they had announced which they preferred the Pepsi representative would reveal which drink was Coke and which was Pepsi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many companies spend money on promotions, but two things will bug Pepsi about this one particularly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A) They were inevitably going to have to tell a lot of consumers that they preferred arch-rival, Coke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B) To run this challenge they had to buy a lot of Coke, paying money directly to their nemesis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #3 for you:<\/strong> Pepsi runs the promotion anyway. Why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enough stories. I can’t live without more CB theory<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We knew you’d come around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let’s start with our familiar analysis but using a new example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take a fake brand of skin cream. If you see the package you know what it is (i.e., skin cream), but do you know what is it feels like<\/strong>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Package<\/td>\"mini<\/td>\"Ovals<\/td><\/tr>
Pixels you see…<\/td>Converted by your brain<\/td>To an activated thought in STM<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ok, let’s unpackage#up this for a minute. You see the box, and your perception starts identifying a bunch of bottom-up cues: There’s a stylized plant with a prominent green leaf, a brand name in green ink that looks hand-written, and lots of “white space” (which is designer-speak for all the empty areas with no pictures or text). Some of these clues are pretty subtle, but that is common in packaging.<\/p>\n\n\n

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#down. No pun intended. Or was it?<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Assuming the perceiver is familiar with ‘mainstream’ (for lack of a better word) Western consumer culture, these bottom-up cues are likely to prompt some top-down associations from their LTM. Specifically, The green, plant, and hand-written imagery are likely to resonate with ideas of being ‘natural’, which is linked to notions of being healthy#up. Both of these (plus the ample whitespace) are also linked to ideas of being ‘upmarket’ (i.e., positioned somewhere above cheaper bargain items).<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. These links are cultural associations, not scientific truths. Nature is brimming with things that are bad for us (e.g., sharks, black widow spiders, botulism poisoning), but Western culture links nature with ideas of an escape from noise, air polution, highly processed food, etc<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
But what happens if our hypothetical consumer, with these associations activated in their head, scoops a big dollop of cream onto their fingertip and starts rubbing it onto their face?<\/p>\n\n\n
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\"Relaxed
“Nature!” (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Nerves in their fingers and cheeks will report feeling cool and soft. This bottom-up sensory input will merge with the top-down awareness that this cream is healthy and natural, and these, presumably, assimilate into an experience of cool, healthy, glowing#up skin.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Not glowing you can see in the dark. You know what we meant<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Their skin will feel better (or so they believe) than it would have if they had used an old dusty jar of moisturizer from the back of their cupboard… even if the two creams do the same things to skin-biology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of you who are reading this (mostly the boys, if we had to guess) are thinking “oh those suckers and their skin creams. They will believe nearly anything.” If this is you, you may even be rolling your eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Boys & beer<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
So let us tell you about a famous study that was done exclusively on boys <\/span>. Specifically, this study was done on beer drinkers, which, the researchers defined as “males who drink beer at least 3 times a week” (1964 might not have been a simpler time, but it was certainly a more casually sexist one). Three hundred and twenty-six lucky male participants received a free six-pack of beer bottles containing a mix of national and major regional brands. The researchers even tried to orchestrate this so that each person got ‘their’ brand (i.e., the one they drank most frequently) in two of their bottles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The twist here is that the researchers had carefully soaked the label off all the bottles, and wire-brushed the lids to remove any outward sign of which brand it was. These “nude” bottles (this is really what they called them; We are not making this up) had tags placed around their neck on which the participants could rate the beer’s overall quality, and also some of its attributes: aftertaste, aroma, bitterness, body, carbonation, foam, lightness, strength, and sweetness.<\/p>\n\n\n
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\"A
A nude beer bottle. Oh, behave! (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
After a week the nude bottles were collected, and the participants were given a new six-pack that was identical to the previous one in all ways except that the identifiers (labels and tops) were left intact. This time they made the same ratings while knowing exactly which beer they were drinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what happened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When they were drinking the beers blind, the various beers were given near-identical ratings. The drinkers could not tell them apart! They couldn’t even recognize their own preferred brand, giving it the same ratings as all the other beers. Across the board, the beers were all rated as not having sub-optimal amounts of aroma, body, foam, and strength, and they were all rated too bitter and not sweet enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Things changed, however, when they tasted the same beers the next week, with the brand labelling attached. The first change is that all the beers tasted better. It turns out that beer’s flavour is much improved by glueing a colourful bit of paper to the side of the bottle. Second, the brands no longer all tasted the same – some improved more than others, suggesting that some glued-on paper improves the taste better than others. Third, “their” beer (i.e., their own preferred most commonly used brand) now tasted better than all the other comparison beers (it obviously had the best paper).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beer & not just boys<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Now perhaps you are thinking “that was a long time ago”, and perhaps you also have chauvinist thoughts about the quality of major brands of American beer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let’s take you 52 years forward, and across the Atlantic ocean to a test using an obscure Scottish craft brew on the streets of Ediburgh#up. Here 151 lucky people of both genders were asked to rate a cup of beer that they were handed <\/span>. All the beer came from the same batch, but some participants watched it being poured into their cup out of a bottle, while others saw it poured into their cup out of a can (they were handed this packaging and encouraged to inspect it).<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. If you challenge 2016 Scotland on its drinking culture, it *will* fight you<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Wouldn’t you know it? Participants thought that the same beer tasted better if it had been poured into their cup from a glass container than if it had been poured out of a metal one. Perhaps the glass somehow changed the flavour? They gave beer to a smaller (much smaller) sample of people without showing which container it was poured out from. Here they observed no difference between beers poured from bottles and cans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In news that is surely not a coincidence, it is a common belief among beer drinkers that beer tastes better out of bottles. In this case, that belief looks like a self-fulfilling prophecy – they believed it would taste better, so it did taste better. Or, more exactly, a top-down belief was assimilated into their apparent reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is there an example that’s not about food or drink? Preferably with lots of bubbles?<\/h5>
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Bubbles? It’s ok. We don’t judge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, so, everyone knows that the way to get your dishes sparkling clean is to squirt enough dish soap into the sink that you get a nice big fluffy pile of bubbles, then you drain the water when the bubbles are gone and pour a new bowl. The bubbles disappearing is how you know that all the soap has been used up, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Right???<\/p>\n\n\n
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\"closeup
What it looks like when you pour more soap than you technically need<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
What if I tell you that bubbles have nothing to do with soap’s ability to make things clean#up. Seriously. Did you ever notice how washing machines can get dishes spotless with few to no bubbles? Hm?<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Source: Both the author's parents were chemists (not the drug store kind)<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
From a chemistry point of view, bubbles are made by molecules that tweak the surface tension of the water, whereas cleaning happens because soap molecules have one end that is attracted to grease and another end that is attracted to water (so it makes your dirt stick to the dishwater). Chemically speaking, those are two different functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The companies that make these products know, however, that people perceive bubbles to mean cleanliness, and that people project this perception, top-down, onto the dishes that emerge from their sinks. With this knowledge, they carefully orchestrate the chemistry of their dish liquid to produce the maximum possible bubbles, while engineering their dishwasher machine soap to produce the fewest possible bubbles#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. The truth: Your dishes will be fine if you keep plugging away with that grey no-bubbles water - so long as you rinse them with clean water they will sparkle just the same<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
And here is the crazy part: Even though you know this now, you are still going to keep draining away your perfectly functional grey dishwater, aren’t you… because it feels <\/strong>like it won’t make your plates clean. Even though it will. Top-down perception can be intense.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Concepts time!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Let’s pause for a moment and look at that last line:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 “… a top-down belief was assimilated into their apparent reality.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There are two key ideas that need unpacking more closely here: “assimilated into” and “apparent reality”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s start with the second one first (got to keep you on your toes here).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Apparent reality”: a key insight about working memory: <\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Good news: This section doesn’t hold any deep new ideas for us. We’re just reminding ourselves of a few things that we already know, and consolidating them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So. We know that Working Memory is more than just a store of 5-9 bits of information – it’s our ‘bubble of awareness’, the ‘world we live in’#up. And we know that when we see things, our brain makes a representation in our working memory (“oh it’s a hammer”).<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Psychologists would argue that consciousness is more than just the contents of our working memory, and they'd no doubt be right. But its close enough for the purposes of a CB textbook<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
The point is that when we perceive a thing (through some combination of bottom-up and top-down perception), our evaluation of that thing is our truth (not the<\/strong> truth, but our<\/strong> truth). It’s what it is<\/strong>, in the cosy confines of our subjective internal world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s add this to one of our old diagrams:<\/p>\n\n\n
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\"Minor
You would be mostly accurate in reading bottom-up perception as running from left to right, and top-down as running from right to left (or just re-circulating things in the middle)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Examples: Understanding the face cream we are using as natural makes us experience our skin as feeling healthier. That healthiness is<\/strong> our truth at that moment. When our dishes emerge from that pile of fluffy white bubbles, they are<\/strong> sparklier to us. The beer with my favourite label is<\/strong> yummier. That smiling cheerful barista in my favourite coffee shop is<\/strong> friendly, and the smiling cheerful barista from the shop I hate is<\/strong> insincere and patronising (“ugh, I can’t even look at that fake grin”)#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. It's usually an open question whether or not any of this concords with external reality. Maybe the barista really IS lovely, or maybe they are faking it for their job - anyone who has worked in retail will tell you that \"How can I help you today\" often means: \"what stupid stuff do I have to do for you now?\". We may never know the real truth, but we feel our own personal truth in that moment<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
As Daniel Kahneman <\/span> puts it, system 1 is our default mode of thinking, and as far as system 1 is concerned, WYSIATI (“What You See Is All There Is”). Naive realism is our natural home, as a species.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CONCEPTS: Assimilation, Contrast, & Zones of ambiguity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
The second thing we were unpacking from that quote above was “assimilation”. This is a key term that we’ve used a few times already so far (did you notice?), but it’s time to define it properly now, along with a handful of related ideas<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Assimilation <\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
All the examples of top-down perception we have discussed so far involved assimilation. This is a term describing what happens when your brain merges two understandings into one combined synthesis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s review some of our examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n