Chapter 7
Pain Is the Universal Constant
One by one, the researchers shuttled the subjects down a hall and into a small
room. Inside was a single beige computer console with a blank screen and
two buttons, and nothing else.^1
The instructions were simple: sit, stare at the screen, and if a blue dot
flashes on it, press the button that reads, “Blue.” If a purple dot flashes on the
screen, press the button that reads, “Not Blue.”
Sounds easy, right?
Well, each subject had to look at a thousand dots. Yes, a thousand. And
when a subject finished, the researchers brought in another subject and
repeated the process: beige console, blank screen, a thousand dots. Next! This
went on with hundreds of subjects at multiple universities.
Were these psychologists researching a new form of psychological
torture? Was this an experiment into the limitations of human boredom? No.
Actually, the scope of the study was matched only by its inanity. It was a
study with seismic implications, because more than any other academic study
in recent memory, it explains much of what we see happening in the world
today.
The psychologists were researching something they would call
“prevalence-induced concept change.” But because that’s an absolutely awful
name, for our purposes, I will refer to their discovery as the “Blue Dot
Effect.”^2
Here’s the deal with the dots: Most of them were blue. Some of them were
purple. Some of them were some shade in between blue and purple.
The researchers discovered that when they showed mostly blue dots,
everyone was pretty accurate in determining which dots were blue and which
ones were not. But as soon as the researchers started limiting the number of
blue dots, and showing more shades of purple, the subjects began to mistake
purple dots for blue. It seemed that their eyes distorted the colors and
continued to seek a certain number of blue dots, no matter how many were
actually shown.