The Dress

Why this oddly viral meme is actually an important lesson for the world

I usually stay off social media while stupid things are trending, and wait for the storm to pass, but this dress mania actually points out interesting science and sets up a perfect, and very important, lesson in general cognitive bias. This is the my spin on the deeper implications of the dress. If everyone learned the lesson that ‪#‎thedress‬ indirectly teaches, we would literally solve most of the world’s conflicts, here’s why:

The conundrum of the dress is a visual bias, a limitation and distortion of something that happens in our eyes and brain—these distortions of perception happen all the time in various ways, but when presented visually, they are easiest to understand and recognize. The cognitive biases and distortions we face everyday are not so easy to recognize, sometimes nearly impossible, and that is why they are so pernicious and detrimental in affect.

Compare the exercise of the dress to the way you think about politics, religion, science, other cultures, economics, business, relationships, and just about every process of decision-making that you can think of. Everyday, we navigate the world in a way that makes sense to us based off what we know and have learned since we were children. Our brains are built for energy efficiency, and that means the easier we can categorize and associate what we see and make sense of the world (regardless of wether or not our perceptions are correct interpretations) the faster the brain will adopt those categories and modes of thinking we’ve created. Scientists call this “cognitive ease” and it’s the brain’s way of taking in complex information and making it as simple and coherent as possible so that we don’t have to think hard about every detail of everyday life and can focus on bigger, tougher decisions. It’s crucial to survival, but comes with its costs.

So back to the dress. Look around social media and you will see that people are absolutely confident in what colors they see. So sure, in fact, that they refuse to believe its true colors even after they have been presented the science and the facts.

Sound familiar?

Eventually most people will come around, they will have to accept the fact that the dress is black and blue, because this won’t pose a huge problem to their world view. They’ve never held deep seated beliefs on the colors of dresses, they’ve never affiliated themselves with a party who advocates one color over the other, never been taught from a young age that one is right and one is wrong, never been influenced by culture or media to have a preference one way or another.

The eventual acceptance of black and blue will be relatively easy. But what about when these biases in perception have very serious implications about who we are, how we make sense of the world, how we identify allies vs. enemies, how we spend money, how we solve problems, how we categorize people? We take our views and beliefs for granted because they are easy for us to understand, to challenge them would be hard, and the brain prefers easy, efficient, coherent. It uses cognitive ease to judge and label the world around it in under a microsecond. We see things one way even though the facts may point to another. If we have trouble reconciling the true colors of a dress, how can we force ourselves to admit when we see things incorrectly in everyday life when they are SO CLEARLY white and gold, and to admit otherwise undermines the core of what we believe? When the cognitive dissonance these alternative views present are simply too much for us to handle that we are not able to oblige the facts?

I challenge everyone today to take one look at a view, a system, or belief that they believe to be white and gold, and apply the dress effect to it. Imagine it truly is black and blue, and you’ve been wrong this whole time. It’s not easy, I know. But it is a fact that we all have these distortions, all the time, so if you can’t find one in yourself to at least begin to reconcile with, you’ll never be able to change your mind on important issues, and will always be part of the problem.

There it is, my way of spinning an oddly viral meme into a lesson I’ve learned over the years that I think is massively important. I couldn’t have gotten a better example to make this point.

Anyone interested in reading over 50 years of robust research on this topic, with references to all the studies done over the years, check out this book by Nobel Prize in Economics winner Daniel Kahneman.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00555X8OA…