“Too much of a good thing” and “it’s all relative” now take
on new meaning. A new research report of seven studies suggests an explanation
for the paradox that humans misjudge the extent of a changing situation. This
report, published in the June 29th issue of the premier journal, Science, demonstrated that people often
respond to diminished prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their perception of
its prevalence. For example, when looking at a matrix panel of blue and purple
dots, if the experimenter reduces the percentage of blue dots, the subjects
began to see purple dots as blue. Or when shown panels of threatening faces
mixed with neutral faces in which the percentage of angry faces became rarer,
they began to see neutral faces as threatening. Or when unethical requests of
the subjects were made rarer, subjects began to regard innocuous requests as
unethical. In other words, reduced prevalence of a certain stimulus created a
bias for finding more of that stimulus than actually existed.
The investigators began with the blue/purple dot test. When
they saw the biasing effect of reducing incidence of blue dots, they wondered
if this same principle applied to other kinds of stimuli and to more abstract
comparisons. The bias showed up also in their test with angry and neutral faces
and in the test with unethical and innocuous requests.
Everyday experiences suggested this research. For example,
others had reported that when unprovoked attacks and invasions decline, the
perception of new instances receive magnified judgement. I might speculate that
the empowerment of women by the women’s rights movement has made recent
incidents of sexual harassment more notable than would have been the case years
ago when it was not so unexpected. Or perhaps the current outrage over illegal
immigrant children separated from their parents and attempts to close the
border are magnified by the fact that so many have been already reunited and
set free in the U.S.
The authors rightly concluded, “These results may have
sobering implications. Many organizations and institutions are dedicated to
identifying and reducing the prevalence of social problems, from unethical
research to unwarranted aggression. But our studies suggest that even
well-meaning agents may sometimes fail to recognize the success of their own
efforts.”
They add reference citations that show that societies have
made “extraordinary” progress in solving a wide range of social problems, but
that the majority of people think the world is getting worse. In prosperous
countries, like the U.S., social problems usually continue to improve. However,
many people in such environments seem to keep finding more and more things to
complain about. For example, as the economy improves, it seems increasingly
easy to find poverty or wealth gaps. As civil rights improve, it seems easy to
find abuses and even to misinterpret neutral events as abuse. Thus, despite all
progressive efforts, the problems seem intractable, when in fact they are not.
Politics is contaminated by flawed judgment caused by changed prevalence of social
problems contaminates our politics.
We tend to cling to old myths when they no longer apply as
well as before. This diminishes appreciation of the successes of government
policy. In the U.S., the growing hostility of citizens toward their country may
actually be the result of the improvements in the country. Compounding the
problem is the common feeling that it is not politically correct to consider
that this kind of bias might exist. Even when a person knows of this bias,
sometimes it is of political benefit to keep contentious issues alive.
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Levari, David E. et al. (2018). Prevalence-induced concept
change in human judgment. Science. 360(6396), 1462-1467.
