{"id":52942,"date":"2012-12-07T12:27:45","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T17:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=52942"},"modified":"2012-12-07T15:10:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-07T20:10:40","slug":"expectations-and-perception","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/12\/07\/expectations-and-perception\/","title":{"rendered":"Expectations and Perception"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A couple of months back I posted a video that illustrated the way that our expectations shape our perceptions. In it, Jimmy Kimmel gave people an iPhone 4 but told them it was an iPhone 5<\/a>. Believing they were holding a neat new Apple product, they identify a range of features that make it clearly superior — often holding it up to their identical iPhone 4s and perceiving significant differences between the two.<\/p>\n

Following up on this theme, Kimmel followed up<\/a> by asking people on the street to try two cups of coffee and tell him which one had the new $7-per-cup premium coffee from Starbucks and which had a cheap brand. Except both cups of coffee were actually full of the same, non-premium, non-Starbucks coffee. Nonetheless, a number of testers immediately identify striking differences in taste between the two options, providing specific differences in quality that they think distinguish the coffees. It’s a fun illustration of a basic aspect of human cognition — that what we expect to see or experience affects how we interpret the sensory information we encounter:<\/p>\n