A Cognitive Psychologist Reflects on #TheDress
The morning that #thedress broke the internet I was elated. I work as a professor at Indiana University teaching Cognitive Psychology, and was slated to begin lecturing on color processing in the brain and optical illusions. It was absolute kismet. You can typically find good examples of cognitive phenomena embedded in headlines: (Brian Williams and false memory or the efficacy of brain games like Luminosity) but popular culture rarely captures such sudden and intense curiosity like #thedress.
That morning I got to live the life that academics dream about. Former students contacted me out of the blue, asking for my interpretation of what was going on with #thedress. Several friends and colleagues were interviewed for television and newspapers, giving detailed explanations of the complexities of color constancy. Family members finally had reason to be interested in the finer points of perceptual psychology. The world had a question and we, as perceptual psychologists, have the nuanced and complex answer. When faced with explaining how #thedress worked we prepared complex and detailed explanations our colleagues would be proud of.
Little did I know, the marketplace of explanations was already flooded.
Almost the instant that #thedress started trending, social media was filled with opportunistic bloggers and journalists writing about #thedress. Even the ham-handed attempts at psychological explanations were drowned in a sea of static. Nonsense theories splashed across the web, with people proposing that the dress color diagnose your outlook on life or reflect your true belief in God. People split into warring factions, arguing which interpretation was superior. In short, our nuanced and complex answers, although they may have been correct, never stood a chance.
“While it’s easy to complain that our knowledge of the brain is too complex and nuanced to be tweeted, the fact remains that people aren’t going to veraciously absorb our journal articles.”
By late afternoon, the world was over #thedress. People walked away with the knowledge that the actual color of the dress is blue and black, and we never got to show the world that there’s no such thing as an actual color. We never got to talk about the wonderful biases and tricks the brain does to generate our view of the world. I can’t help but feel that psychology-at-large missed an opportunity.
While it’s easy to complain that our knowledge of the brain is too complex and nuanced to be tweeted, the fact remains that people aren’t going to veraciously absorb our journal articles. They’re going to go to Buzzfeed, Facebook, or Instagram. If we care at all about how the masses understand our science, we need to find a way to meet them where they live. Isn’t is up to the academe to try and educate the public? Why do we feel uncomfortable when asked to make our research accessible, even if it means leaving something out?
Although #thedress was ultimately nothing but a silly meme, it serves as an important microcosm for how we interact with the public. It’s easier to stay in our labs, not caring about what the world thinks about us and our research. It feels natural as scientists to collect and analyze data in a vacuum, properly understating our findings and remaining above the fray of public interest and opinion. Our self-imposed sequestration seems profoundly scientific, but when we remove ourselves from the public conversation we leave the door open for pseudo-scientists and charlatans. When discussing #thedress this may seem trivial, but it is easy to see that the consequences of sitting on our hands could be dire when the discussion is about depression or Alzheimer’s.
It seems to me that we can no longer wait for the world to politely ask our expert opinion. We need a strategy to interact with the public which reflects how today’s world operates. In about a year some conference hotel will be littered with posters about #thedress, but it’ll be too little, too late.
