Notice anything odd?

I’ve written before about how our brains are extremely efficient pattern recognition machines, particularly when it comes to images which we encounter every day like human faces.

Studies have shown that even newborn babies are comforted even by a few dots and a line arranged in an appropriate facial pattern and our recognition abilities only increase as we get older.

It’s this ability that leads us to spot the man in the moon, faces on Mars or visions in toast.  We have a schema image of what we expect a face to look like and have a tendency to map what we see onto that template which often makes it difficult to see anything else if reality isn’t actually quite what we expect.

With that in mind, let’s go back to the photo.  Spotted what’s wrong yet?

It’s actually an example of what’s become known as the Thatcher effect.  This was an example of how we can be fooled by images with misleading cues which was discovered by Peter Thompson, a senior lecturer in Psychology at the University of York.  It’s known as the Thatcher effect as the photograph he used to demonstrate it was a picture of Margaret Thatcher.

Ok, time’s up.  Perhaps if I flipped the photo above and showed it the right way up?

Eep!

No, that’s not just me on a bad day (and I’m ignoring any comments from people who know me who just think that’s a normal picture).

It seems that we’re really bad at spotting facial elements which don’t meet our template.  We don’t generally run into people with upside-down mouths and eyes in real life, so they don’t fit our schema and we don’t interpret what we see correctly.

Interestingly,  people who have Prosopagnosia, a lack of the ability to recognise faces, aren’t effected by this illusion, suggesting that they’re not processing faces against a template in the same way.  There’s some other nice examples of the effect on the internet, as well as this more subtle version [warning the last link contains adult language].

Ok, that’s completely made up, but how many of you just tried it?

What I actually wanted to talk about today was free will, and how much of the time we spend just blindly following cues and justifying it afterwards.  As animals we are all apparently very easy to manipulate, particularly when we’re not really concentrating.   Ok, the opening paragraph to this blog was just a silly trick, but marketing professionals, politicians, salesmen and certainly magicians are adept at making us behave the way they want us to behave, no matter how much in control we might think we are at the time.

It is important to remember that our survival instincts have grown up from evolutionary routes, where making the wrong decision at a critical moment could well have devastating consequences.  We often don’t have enough time to evaluate all the options available to us, so we fall back on rules of thumb, short cut behaviours which have proven to be successful in the past and so we rely on to help us in the future.  Of course, as soon as you have a short cut behaviour, then you have something which can be manipulated.

As an example of this Ellen Langer conducted a series of experiments to test the potential rule ‘asking for favours will be more successful if you provide a reason’.  In her experiments she attempted to jump the line at the photocopier by asking if she could push in front and asked for permission in a variety of different ways.  She found that how the request was phrased had a radical effect on the responses she got.

If she asked “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine?” only 60% of people would let her jump the queue.  Phrasing the same request differently, “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” allowed her to jump the queue in 94% of cases.

What is really interesting however was her third attempt.

Asking “Excuse me, I have five pages.  May I use the Xerox machine because I need to make some copies?” was still successful in 93% of cases, even though she didn’t provide a real reason!  It seems that the rule is sound and can be triggered simply by the appropriate phrasing, irrespective of the actual content.

Now that particular example doesn’t demonstrate why you might follow instructions like the one in this first paragraph, but I would speculate that it has something to do with the authority suggested by a claimed university study, along with a desire to gain an independent affirmation of your own intelligence.  The power of the former was demonstrated in the famous experiments by Stanley Milgram.

His most famous experiment consisted of a pair of subjects, one of whom was apparently connected to a machine which dispensed electric shocks.  The other subject was then instructed by a supervisor, dressed appropriately in a white scientists jacket, that the experiment was looking at how memory changed in different circumstances, and asked them to teach the first subject a set of word pairs.  When the subject got a pair wrong, the second subject was instructed to administer a series of electric shocks.  These shocks increased in voltage for every further incorrect answer.

Of course, in actuality there were no actual shocks administered and the first subject was an actor, but what was telling was how far people were prepared to continue administrating the supposed shocks just because they were told to by an authority figure.  Even when the supposed failing subject began banging on the wall and screaming in pain, many participants continued the experiment.  Most expressed discomfort about the effects to the supervisor, but seemed to require his approval before they would stop, demonstrating the power of the effect.  This would also suggest a need to maintain consistency with previous actions as another manipulating force, but this post is already long enough so I’ll save that for another time!

Now send this post to a friend and see if they put their thumbs in their ears.