Have you ever felt that the problems happen one after the other? That just solve a problem appears another, and then another, and another ...? The answer, or at least a part of it, could be in blue and purple dots.
Scientists from the universities of Harvard, Dartmouth and New York have designed a curious optical illusion that goes far beyond the deception of the senses to fall into a more philosophical question: Why do problems seem to multiply? Are we condemned to a life of dissatisfaction?
How expectations alter our perception?
These researchers showed a group of people a series of a thousand points, which varied their color in the ranges of blue and purple. The participants had to answer only one question: Is the dot on the screen blue or not?
It seemed a very simple, even banal, task. And so it was at the beginning. During the first 200 trials participants recognized fairly well the differences between the blue and purple dots. But from that moment something changed.
More purple dots began to appear on the screen, so the blue dots practically disappeared. However, the responses of the participants did not reflect that color change. When the blue dots became rare, people began to classify the purple dots as blue.
The strange thing is that participants continued mistaking purple spots with blue even when the researchers warned them that the number of blue dots would diminish or when they offered a financial reward if they were right.
What is the reason for this change in perception? Scientists believe that our brain does not make decisions based on cold, rational and completely objective rules, but takes into account the previous stimuli it has received.
In other words, as the proportion of blue dots on purple changed, participants who expected still see blue dots, they expanded their idea of how it should be blue, so that their responses were consistent with expectations that had formed in the first trials. They stopped reacting to reality and adjusted their perception, without realizing it, to their expectations.
We do not see the world as it is, but as we expect it to be
This experiment shows us that our mind is easy to deceive. In fact, that small "defect" in our "mental calculation" goes far beyond perception and can have serious consequences in our lives.
The researchers showed it with two other much more complex experiments than choosing between purple and blue.
In one of them, they showed the participants 800 computer generated faces that varied on a scale from "threatening" to "non-threatening". Once again, when the number of menacing faces diminished, participants began to label non-threatening portraits as threatening. This shows us that if we expect a threat to exist, we will effectively see a threat.
The last experiment moved to the plane of ethics. Participants had to assess whether more or less ethical studies should move forward. Again, as unethical proposals decreased, people changed their perception and decisions, beginning to label ethical proposals as unethical.
These results have enormous implications for our lives.
If our brain constantly recalibrates our perceptions based on our previous experiences, how can we be sure that we see things as they are? And if we can not see things as they are, we can not respond adaptively.
It is likely that, the more problems we solve, the more our concept of problem will expand and, therefore, more problems will be detected around us, so that situations that previously went unnoticed, now we perceive them as problematic. In other words, when we have no problems, we invent them.
In practice, it is not that the glass is half empty, but we perceive that it is getting bigger and bigger, so that it will be increasingly difficult to fill it.
So, that ability to see problems and threats everywhere would condemn us to a state of permanent dissatisfaction and unhappiness? It is probable.
Unless we are aware of that bias in our perception and are able to protect ourselves. It would be enough to ask ourselves if we are being objective, or at least as objective as we can be, when we encounter a problem, obstacle, threat or conflict.
Only then can we make more objective, balanced and adaptive decisions
