New paradigm for psychology : everyone is stupid

The article describes how expectations influence perception. This is ironic, since I wasn't expecting very much from the title (and the even worse subtitle, "Why we’re better off giving up the myth of perfect rationality" - who thinks anyone is perfectly rational anyway ?) but it turned out to be very good. Unless the author is playing a very deep and clever game of reverse psychology... Maybe the article is objectively crap, but my low expectations have caused me to more impressed than I thought I'd be, so I perceive it as good. Or something.

Aaanyway :

We are influenced by various cognitive biases that we are not aware of. The music we are listening to influences our opinion of the wine we drink, the weight of the spoon influences how creamy we find the yoghurt and our moral assessment of strangers depends on what movie we have just watched. I call this paradigm of empirical findings the ‘We’re All Stupid’ paradigm.

Adrian North had a wine-shop play accordion music in the background and this made the sales of French wine shoot up. But when he had Oom-pah band music played, the sales of French wine plummeted, and people were more likely to buy German wine. And this is not a minor change. With the accordion music, people bought five bottles of French wine for every bottle of German wine and the ratio was two bottles of German wine for every bottle of French wine with the Oom-pah band music. Strictly speaking this result says nothing about savouring or about taste or flavour, but it is an important reference point for the ”we are all stupid” paradigm. I mean, how stupid can you be to buy German wine just because you hear Oom-pah band music?

The standard move in response to these findings is that while the reasoning abilities of the “ordinary people” may be subject to these biases, academics, philosophers and experts are safe: psychiatrists are not fooled by warm coffee or teddy bears. Only amateurs are. And professors of moral philosophy could watch as much Saturday Night Live as they want; this would not change their moral assessment of anything. This move is sometimes called the ‘expertise defence.’ But I’ll call it what it really is: the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm.

Even more importantly, the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm, however we interpret it, is factually incorrect, at least in some fields of expertise. It is definitely factually incorrect when it comes to food and wine perception. As we have seen, even wine experts are fooled by the changed colour of wine (and, remarkably, they are fooled more than ”ordinary people”).

Perception in general depends on these top-down expectations, as does the perception of food and wine. And experts have way more, and more precise, top-down expectations than novices: They have spent years developing exactly these expectations. So in unusual scenarios when they are misled (by artificial colouring), they rely on their expectations more than novices do. Novices may lack any specific expectation about the odour of wine on the basis of its colour.

But, maybe it's only incorrect for certain specialists ? As the old saying goes, if all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. If you've been trained to expect wine to be a certain way then you might perceive it that way regardless of how it actually is. If, on the other hand, you've been trained to expect the unexpected and to consider multiple possibilities, maybe you'll be less biased. Or as Archchancellor Ridcully once noted : "We're wizards. We can see things which are really there." It would be very interesting to test if people have different levels of how much their expectations influence their perception.

Here is a famous illustration of how experience depends on expectations. Parmesan cheese is very different from vomit. And they don’t really smell the same either. But their smell is similar enough so that if you are presented with a nontransparent box full of parmesan cheese but you are told that it is vomit, you will in fact smell vomit (and the other way round). The top-down information is winning out and trumps what your senses in fact tell you.

We know that perceptual experience in general is multimodal : Information from a number of sense modalities is combined when you see or hear something. And given this deep multimodality of our perceptual system, what we should expect when it comes to the enjoyment of food and wine is that all the sense modalities can be involved in these experiences.

If there is a flash in your visual scene and you hear two beeps while the flash lasts, you experience it as two flashes. This is one of the few examples where seeing does not trump hearing. The two beeps we hear influence the processing of the one flash in our visual sense modality and, as a result, our visual experience is as of two flashes.

What is the lesson of all this for the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm more generally? Assuming that we should be good at assessing the taste of food only, independently of all other sense modalities sets the bar way too high. We are creatures with multimodal perception. That’s what we’re good at. Expecting us to be good at blocking all sense modalities but one would just set us up for failure.

Similarly, we are remarkably good at navigating our complex emotion-infused social environment. We are not very good at screening out all emotional and other biases. Does this make us stupid? In some sense, it does – it makes us less than perfectly rational beings... And just as it is only in very special circumstances when our taste perception is not influenced by all the other senses, it also happens very rarely and exceptionally that we can achieve perfect rationality. As scientists and academics, we should of course try and try hard. But one important step of trying is that instead of fighting the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm, we should just make peace with, and learn to cherish, our stupidity.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/psychology-tomorrow/201806/stupidity-is-part-human-nature