My UNDER THE INFLUENCE: PUTTING PEER PRESSURE TO WORK will be published on January 28 by Princeton University Press. In this thread I’ll describe how contextual cues shape the ways we perceive and react to external stimuli. 1/
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd
@PrincetonUPress @a_f13nd
A central premise behind many of the claims I advance in the book is that the cognitive processes that influence our perceptions and motivations often operate completely outside of conscious awareness. 2/
This premise is affirmed by the ability of artists to create profoundly disorienting images by exploiting the rules of inference our brains employ to interpret what two-dimensional images convey about the three-dimensional objects they represent. 3/
Consider the Penrose Triangle, which was created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934 and later popularized by the British psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and his mathematician son Roger Penrose. 4/
When the brain applies its perceptual rules of thumb to the Penrose triangle, it hits a brick wall. The Penroses described this triangle as “impossibility in its purest form.” 5/
The Penrose triangle figures prominently in perhaps the most well-known of the many disturbing images created by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher: his 1961 lithograph, The Waterfall. 6/
The walls of Escher’s aqueduct clearly step downward, suggesting that the path of the aqueduct itself must slope downhill. But then the water exits the aqueduct at a point exactly above where it first entered. How can that be? 7/
The website opticalillusion.net goes behind the curtain to show how the Penrose Triangle underlies Escher’s magic. The right side of the illustration below depicts the essence of Escher’s aqueduct that our brains find so troubling. 8/
As the small image in the center of the illustration makes clear, the aqueduct at the right is just two Penrose triangles (ABC and CDE), one stacked atop the other, with an extra vertical member (BD) connecting them. 9/
The left side of the illustration renders the aqueduct again, this time with the vertical pillars sawn off at mid-height. With the posts thus truncated, our brains easily interpret the tops of them as lying in roughly the same horizontal plane. 10/
And with no need to connect them to other points in the structure, we interpret the path of the aqueduct as receding horizontally in an unambiguous way, rather than returning, impossibly, to a point exactly above where it started. 11/
The most important harms caused by behavioral contagion, I argue, stem from the tendency of our evaluations to rest on relative magnitudes. In the diagram below, for example, which of the three ovals is darkest? 12/
Suspecting a trick, you may say they’re all the same. If so, you’re right. But if you think they actually LOOK the same, you should schedule an appointment with your neurologist. 13/
Although the oval on the left is the same shade of gray as the other two, the context in which it sits makes it look darker. “Hot” means hot in relative terms. “Far” means far in relative terms. “Rich” means rich in relative terms. And dark means dark in relative terms. 14/
Failure to rely heavily on contextual evaluations of this sort would put you at a severe competitive disadvantage. Yet the link between context and evaluation is costly in other ways, giving rise to spending patterns that waste trillions of dollars annually in the US alone. 15/
The link between context and evaluation has also spawned energy use patterns that are poised to inflict almost unfathomable damage to our planet. 16/
The good news is that non-intrusive policies can exploit that same link to reverse much of the damage without demanding painful sacrifices from anyone. Or so I argue in UNDER THE INFLUENCE. 17/
