[BLANK_AUDIO].

One of the most basic questions we can ask about two people is whether they share the same reality. Whether they see the same thing when they're both looking at it. Whether they hear the same thing when they are both listening to it. In daily life, we typically assume that other people share our reality and to a great extent they do, but not always and not completely. Our perceptions are powerfully influenced by where our attention happens to be, by context, by past experience, expectations, motivations, and many other factors. In other words, our experience of reality is psychologically constructed. I spoke about this principle in the video on our course sign-up page, when I pointed out that the cards in our course image contain a surprise that most people don't notice. A black ten of diamonds instead of the normal red. You can see the same sort of thing in this photo of a drive-through sign that says over 99 billion served. See anything strange? Most people don't see anything wrong with this photo until it's pointed out that the restaurant's name says McDonlad's, rather than McDonald's. When we look at restaurant signs we don't usually spell check them any more than we need to check the color of playing cards, or, take a look at this photo. Most people see this image as showing an ordinary handshake and leave it at that. Why? We don't usually need to count the number of fingers in a handshake. [SOUND]. We often see what we expect to see, and don't see what we don't expect to see. But perception isn't just a matter of expectations, it's also a matter of motivations. That is, we often see what we want to see and don't see what we don't want to see. This dynamic was illustrated in a classic 1954 study of two American football rivals, Princeton and Dartmouth. After an especially rough football game with lots of penalties, the researchers asked students in each school to watch

the very same film of the game and record each rule violation that they saw. The results? Princeton students saw Dartmouth break the rules over twice as often as Dartmouth students did. That is, they saw a different reality. According to the researchers, it's inaccurate and misleading to say that different people have different attitudes concerning the same thing, for the thing simply is not the same for different people, whether the thing is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach. That's a colorful way of putting it, but again we come back to the psychological construction of reality, the idea that our perceptions are affected by what we expect to see, by what we want to see, by what we're paying attention to and so forth. One of my all time favorite examples illustrating this point comes from British psychologist and professional magician Richard Wiseman, who has generously made available to our class a video of his color changing card trick. So let's watch a master magician both entertain and educate us at the same time. Hope you enjoy. [BLANK_AUDIO]. >> Hi, I'm Richard. This is Sarah and we're going to perform the amazing color changing card trick with this blue-backed deck of cards. Now, the idea is very simple. I'm just going to spread the cards in front of Sarah and ask her to push any card towards the camera. >> All right. Okay. Let's see. I'm going to go for this card here. >> Okay. Now, Sarah could've selected any card at all from the deck, but she selected the card, which is now face down on the table and what I'm going to ask her to do is show us which card she selected. >> Right. So the card that I chose was in fact this three of diamonds. >> The three of diamonds. Okay. Excellent choice. That card goes back into the deck.

Now, I'm just going to spread the cards face up on the table, do a little click of the fingers [SOUND], and you'll see that Sarah's card here has now got a blue back. Not particularly surprising. What's slightly more surprising is all of the other cards have got red backs, and that is the amazing color changing card trick. [BLANK_AUDIO]. Hi, I'm Richard. This is Sarah, and we are going to perform the amazing color changing card trick with this blue backed deck of cards. >> Now the idea is very simple. I'm just going to spread the cards in front of Sarah and ask her to push any card towards the camera. >> All right. Okay. Let's see. I'm going to go for this card here. >> Okay. Now, Sarah could have selected any card at all from the deck, but she selected the card, which is now face down on the table and what I'm going to ask her to do is show us which card she selected. >> Right. So the card that I chose was in fact this three of diamonds. >> The three of diamonds. Okay. Excellent choice. That card goes back into the deck. Now, I'm just going to spread the cards face up on the table, do a little click of the fingers [SOUND], and you'll see that Sarah's card here has now got a blue back. Not particularly surprising. What's slightly more surprising is all of the other cards have got red backs, and that is the amazing color changing card trick. >> Isn't that terrific? The color changing card trick is an example of what psychologists call change blindness. In this case, it was blindness to changes in color made while our attention was focused elsewhere. But perceptions can also be influenced even when our attention is focused directly on the item of interest. Here's an example that I created specifically for this class.

This is just a black and white field with a tree and a fence. Not very interesting or colorful, so I'll add an apple to the tree. Well, that's a little large. There, that's better. Now, there's an old expression about the grass being greener on the other side of the fence, meaning that the things we don't have often seem a little better, and that's what I want you to focus on. I'm going to cover up the grass on the other side of the fence with a nice bright color and I want you to keep your eyes focused on the apple and your thoughts focused on turning the grass green. And let me be clear. I'm not going to change the black and white photo in any way. I'm not going to add more apples to the tree or do anything to the fence. I just want you to look at the apple and concentrate on the part of the photo that's covered up. In a few seconds, I'll remove the cover and when I do, please continue looking at the apple in the tree and you should see something interesting. Ready, here we go. And again, please continue looking at the apple even after I've removed the cover. One, two, three. If you have color vision the grass should indeed be greener on the other side of the fence. At least for a little while. If you look away from the apple for a few seconds, the effect will start to fade and you'll see that the photo is just the same one that I showed you at first. What happened is that staring at the magenta colored background temporarily fatigued your eyes' photoreceptors for that color, which knocked your color perception a little bit off base. If before this demonstration I'd asked you whether there was any circumstance, under which your eyes would have seen half of a black and white photo as green, you probably would have said no. It sounds kind of crazy. Why? Because we generally regard photographic images as generating fixed perceptions. We don't think of our visual perceptions as a combination of something out there with what's going on in our visual system at the time of perception,

but in fact, that's exactly what vision is, and it's not just a matter of color. Here's a black and white example of how our view of the world can be warped in under 30 seconds. This example comes from professor Michael Bach at the University of Freiburg in Germany. All you need to do is stare at the center of the spirals and don't look away. Keep looking even though it's a little bit hard to do, you don't need to concentrate. Just let your eyes comfortably rest on the center of the spirals. As you do this, your neural motion detectors will adapt to the movement, and in just a few seconds, when you look away, your visual system will be basically thrown into reverse, and you'll temporarily experience what's called a motion aftereffect. Okay? You can look away now. Pretty amazing, huh? Let's pause for a wavy pop-up question. So to summarize, our perceptions are a joint function of what's going on out there and what's going on over here. An optical illusion that offers, I think, a very nice metaphor for this interplay is the rotating snakes illusion that was created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Japan. The coils that seem to be moving are supposed to be snakes, but I actually think of them as gear wheels. If you focus on just one corner of the image, you can see that the gears aren't actually moving, but our mental gears turn when we look at the image as a whole. Even something as basic as line length can be distorted, as the famous Ponzo illusion shows. Here you can see that the two lines are identical in length, but when you change the context, most people see the top line as slightly wider than the bottom line. Illusions like this work in part because our visual system is evolved to see a particular world, a world in which, for example, converging lines indicate distance. Our visual system isn't neutral, and when we give it a world in which converging lines don't indicate distance, it still makes the correction that the lines aren't of equal length even when, in fact, they are.

And this too is a good metaphor for how people function with one another in daily life. That is, people aren't neutral. Instead they come in with certain predispositions, certain tendencies that lead them to process social information in very particular ways. When you show people a photo of children, they naturally process facial information to see whether the children are happy or sad. When we see a close up of someone's face, we wonder automatically what the person might be thinking. Whether the person seems dangerous or friendly, and so on. Usually these processes are automatic and beneficial. Certainly there's an evolutionary benefit to knowing as rapidly as possible whether your kids are okay, or whether a stranger poses a threat, but when we're focused on one thing, that means we're not focused on another. It means we can miss things, even fairly large things. If we don't notice that someone's mouth is upside down or that someone's eyes have been flipped around, what else are we missing when we try to read each other's faces for much more subtle things and interact with each other on a day-to-day basis? It's a question we'll explore in the next two videos when we discuss confirmation biases and a close cousin, self-fulfilling prophecies.