Okay, big deal, right? People mis-see stuff all the time. And besides, when
you’re staring at dots for hours on end, you might start to go cross-eyed and
see all sorts of weird shit.
But the blue dots weren’t the point; they were merely a way to measure
how humans warp their perceptions to fit their expectations. Once the
researchers had enough data on blue dots to put their lab assistants into a
coma, they moved on to more important perceptions.
For example: next, the researchers showed the subjects pictures of faces
that were some degree of threatening, friendly, or neutral. Initially, they
showed them a large number of threatening faces. But as the experiment went
on, as with the blue dots, they showed fewer and fewer—and the same effect
occurred: the fewer threatening faces subjects were shown, the more the
subjects began to misread friendly and neutral faces as being threatening. In
the same way that the human mind seemed to have a “preset” number of blue
dots it expected to see, it also had a preset number of threatening faces it
expected to see.
Then the researchers went even further, because—fuck it, why not? It’s
one thing to see threats where there are none, but what about moral
judgments? What about believing there’s more evil in the world than there
actually is?
This time, the researchers had the subjects read job proposals. Some of
these proposals were unethical, involving some shady shit. Some proposals
were totally innocuous and fine. Others were some gradation in between.
Once again, the researchers began by showing a mix of ethical and
unethical proposals, and the subjects were told to keep an eye out for
unethical proposals. Then, slowly, the researchers exposed people to fewer
and fewer unethical proposals. As they did, the Blue Dot Effect kicked in.
People began to interpret completely ethical proposals as being unethical.
Rather than noticing that more proposals were showing up on the ethical side
of the fence, people’s minds moved the fence itself to maintain the perception
that a certain number of proposals and requests were unethical. Basically, they
redefined what was unethical without being consciously aware of doing so.
As the researchers noted, this bias has incredibly upsetting implications
for . . . well, pretty much everything. Governmental committees designed to
oversee regulations, when provided with a dearth of infractions, may start to
perceive infractions where there are none. Task forces designed to check
unethical practices within organizations will, when deprived of bad guys to
accuse of wrongdoing, begin imagining bad guys where there are none.
The Blue Dot Effect suggests that, essentially, the more we look for