What you see.. is what you.....

An article I read recently referred to bias cognitive reasoning. The misconception of information by many people who thought they knew the answer without truly interpreting the information they received. To explain; one example given, that of  working out the cost of a bat and a ball, when the two cost $110.00 combined. The bat cost $100 more than the ball, so, how much did the ball cost? Practically every person answers $10. Which is (of course) wrong. People know how to do maths, but due to their skill, they ignore the necessary information. The answer is of course $5. The bat (which cost $100 more than the ball) costs $105.

It’s simple when it is pointed out. But it is a simple mistake, which creates evidence of the bias for your skills (reading, mathematics) on your information. This can often be similar to the poor image recognition by people. An interesting visual test offered in some visual experiments, has the words of different colours written in full (as in ‘BLUE’ or ‘RED’) however the word ‘blue’ may be written in green and the word red may be written in yellow. The test is to read the colour out loud, not what the word says. This is very difficult to do, as your brain tends to interpret the visual, over the actual information.

In some ways there is an entire marketing system that have the belief that people can be triggered to react to information through visual stimulus. This has been used (supposedly) for subliminal advertising and even product placement. Movies are famous for this. Encouraging people to buy certain products and they were not even being aware that it was being promoted to them. However there is also the drawback, and this is what I have noticed. People seem not to. People do not seem to notice much of the visuals being thrown at them. If it was that simple, everyone would be doing it and getting it right. You cannot deny there are many agencies in the world spending vast amounts of money to research what people think. Or trying to research what people think, but many times they revert back to a successful visual effect over other alternatives (ever notice how small the ‘small print’ is even on television?).

The other unfortunate technique is to saturate people with the same add (sometimes in the same add break). When my son was young and at about five years old, before we let him watch ‘Television’. We had only let him watch pre-approved VHS’s until then (Yes this was before DVD’s for those of you too young to remember even VHS). After his first day of watching it, he walked away singing a bouncy little number, “Call, Call, Carpet Call. The experts in the trade”. It was the jingle for a carpeting company. Yes within a day of watching he had absorbed an advertisement (Try and tell me children are not influenced by what they see on television or in films).

(Continued tomorrow)