Techdirt. Stories filed under "perception"

DailyDirt: People Colored

Michael Ho — Thu, 8 Nov 2012 17:00:00 PST

There used to be Crayola crayons labeled "flesh" -- which was re-named to "peach" in 1962, and now Crayola has a pack of eight crayons specifically called "multicultural" that includes: black, sepia, peach, apricot, white, tan, mahogany and burnt sienna. However, there are other colors that have been used to label people, like red and blue. The history of these color associations isn't so black and white. Here are just a few interesting links on how we've changed looking at colors over the years.

Red states and blue states didn't always refer to Republican and Democratic electorates, respectively. Red and blue were frequently used to describe American political affiliations, but which color represented which party was not consistent until relatively recently (ca. 2000) -- for instance, during the Cold War, who wanted to be described as "red" in American politics? [url]
Studies of how linguistic descriptions of color affect the way people perceive colors have rekindled the idea that language can shape how people think. And that's doubleplusgood. [url]
Babies used to be dressed up in all white, but then little boys started only wearing blue... and girls would wear only pink. Again, this convention wasn't settled on for a long time, and it could have easily gone the opposite way (boys in pink, girls in blue). The real loss is in gender neutral colors for children's clothing.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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DailyDirt: Blue-Green Or Green-Blue Crayons?

Michael Ho — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 17:00:00 PDT

Human perception can be pretty strange sometimes. People with synesthesia experience some mixing of their senses, so that they can hear colors or taste colors. But the English language even contains some interesting phrases to describe various feelings, such as "green with envy". Here are just a few more interesting examples of sensory perception.

The vast majority of people are trichromats who can perceive about a million shades of color, but there are also dichromats who see fewer colors -- as well as tetrachromats who can see a hundred million colors. But even if you can see those extra millions of colors, it's a bit difficult to describe them to others in words. [url]
Movie posters from 1914 to 2012 are mostly blue and orange. The distribution of colors isn't too even, and the spread of the use of blue appears to be growing over time. [url]
The color of food can really affect how it tastes. Red-colored drinks seem to taste sweeter for some people, and people are pretty bad at tasting flavors when the color of a drink doesn't match its flavor. [url]
Adults and infants may perceive colors very differently -- with babies seeing colors directly, but adults seeing colors based on language interpretations. Interestingly, some Russian speakers may be able to see more shades of blue than English speakers. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

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Even If You Know About The Gorilla, You Might Not Catch The Unexpected

Mike Masnick — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:39:00 PDT

There's a very famous perception experiment, which many of you have probably seen. If you haven't, you should watch it here before reading on: I will admit that the first time I saw it (at a conference), I totally missed the gorilla. Totally. Of course, once you've seen it or know about it, it's hard not to see it. And, by this point, so many people have seen it, that the overall video test has lost much of its power. So the folks behind it decided to see what would happen if they knew you were looking for the gorilla, and came up with the following: Basically, they assumed that people were now looking for the gorilla, and got people to more or less focus on that, and miss the "new" changes. Once again, I have to admit I totally missed the changes. As the researchers are pointing out, this suggests that even if you're "expecting the unexpected," it's often difficult to notice it actually happening. As the researchers behind the videos note, many of the folks out there who use their original video to teach people to "expect the unexpected" are missing the point:

"A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study to be that people don't pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and 'expecting the unexpected,' we will be able to notice anything important," he added. "The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn't suddenly help them notice other unexpected things."

The guys behind the videos have done some other unique experiments as well, which you can find on their website. The other one I really like is this experiment involving a guy asking a pedestrian for directions, where the guy asking for directions is secretly "switched" with someone else in the middle, and 50% of people don't even notice:

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Has Google Reached The Perception Tipping Point?

Mike Masnick — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:55:00 PDT

Last week, Anil Dash wrote up a thoughtful post wondering if Google had hit its "Microsoft Moment," which I'll loosely paraphrase as the moment when more people were afraid (or, at least, were marginally distrustful) of the company than that loved the company. For many years, part of Google's success has been based on its ability to "not be evil." That mantra -- often misinterpreted -- tried to get the company to focus on putting the user first, which, in turn, led many people to trust Google and its quirkiness. And yet, the company has grown bigger and bigger and bigger. And the fear over what that means has only grown -- some of it reasonably, some of it certainly driven by competitors and critics. While I believe that the folks at Google really do still think of themselves as being totally customer focused and still try to present themselves as that quirky Google, they're reaching a point where they need to do a lot more to support that perception outside the company. Because it's really not getting through in many cases.

We've noticed this a bit ourselves, with some of the moves the company has made in the last few years showing a distinct change in tone. Whereas there was a point that Google seemed to be defending legal battles on principle, when the company capitulated with the record labels about YouTube, with the Associated Press and, most recently, in its (still in court) book settlement, a different story emerged. In all of those cases, the deals made Google stronger -- while making competitors weaker by not standing up for some key principles. Google started to use its massive cash coffers not to defend key principles, but to dump the problem off on smaller players. Of course, I believe this has already started to come back to haunt the company. The fact that publishers knew they could get a book settlement out of Google was because it had given in on the YouTube and AP deals without standing up for fair use.

Either way, it became quite clear that Google was no longer Silicon Valley's defender. It was Google's defender. And, of course, some will argue that's exactly as it should be. Google has no responsibility to stand up for the principles of others. At the same time, many will claim that Google would be silly not to use its money to harm competitors. But these all showed a particularly un-Google-like view of the world. It was that "don't be evil" stand that made people trust them. It was that belief (real or perceived) that Google was entirely focused on making the world better for everyone that built up that trust. These moves (and some of the moves Anil discusses in his piece) may make the shareholders happy in the short-term. But they end up harming reputation in the long-term.

As Google is fighting accusations of antitrust, the message it keeps trying to spread is that competition is only a click away. The company would be wise to remember that itself, because sometimes it doesn't actually act that way.

That said, I don't believe the company is acting "evil" or that it should be accused of any sort of antitrust violations. But the company has certainly acted a lot less "Googley" lately, and Anil is correct in saying that it appears a lot of folks internal to the company don't really recognize that (or want to believe it). It's definitely hard to keep that kind of culture and attitude as a company gets bigger (and, as some of its earlier employees sail off). And, to its credit, Google has certainly been able to keep a "good" reputation for a lot longer than other companies (and longer than many suspected Google could keep it). But that message has been drifting, and Google would do well to recognize how the external world is perceiving it.

Longtime Googler Matt Cutts responded to Anil's analysis in what I'd consider to be an open letter to other Googlers to take Anil's words seriously, rather than angrily (or just dismissing it as idle criticism). Hopefully that message gets through.

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Wishing For A Mental Rewind Button

Mike Masnick — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:13:59 PST

In a recent blog post by Scott Adams, he notes his desire for a rewind button on life. The post starts out by talking about seeing something through a window that he didn't quite catch, and wishing for a rewind button on the window -- like a DVR (the post then goes off on an angry tangent about auto repair these days that doesn't actually seem connected to the rewind part). That struck me as interesting, because I've caught myself wanting the same thing recently. The more I've used a DVR, the more I get annoyed at things that don't have such a capability. For example, when listening to the radio or just talking to people, there are moments when I find my brain asking to rewind, in part because it's become so accustomed to the possibility of rewinding TV. I wonder if this will lead to more demand for devices that record everything you see. Traditionally, such "backup brain" devices have been talked about for the purposes of recalling and categorizing stuff -- but if there's increasing demand to simply replay what you just heard or saw, it could become useful in unexpected ways.

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