This circle of purple or green: Evidence that people will never be happy

LiveScience, a recently published illusion study, has become the clearest evidence that people will always be in pain with wrong decisions.

Specifically, a research group from Harvard, Dartmouth and New York University gave a few groups of students in the United States a look at 1,000 circular dots stretching from "very blue" (very blue) to "very purple "(very purple) (you can follow the entire color range in the video below). Participants just answer one question: Is the dot on the screen green or not?

It sounds very simple, and at first it is. In the first 200 attempts, participants saw equal amounts of green dots and purple dots, and most of them realized the difference easily. However, in the remaining 800 times, the number of green dots is reduced until participants almost see shades of purple. However, their answers do not reflect this.

"When the number of green dots drops, participants begin to tend to look at the purple dots in green," the research team wrote. Indeed, in the last 200 attempts, the dots that previous participants have identified as purple are now green to them. Participants even continue to confuse the purple dots into green even if they have been warned that the number of green dots will be reduced, or when they are offered a $ 10 bonus to repeat the answer. My words are like the beginning of the experiment.

Test green-purple dots.

So, why do their perceptions change so dramatically? According to the researchers, it is possible that the human brain does not make decisions based on cold, rigid rules, but rather the stimuli that the brain previously encountered . When the balance between the dots changes, participants expand their definition of what "green" really looks to match expectations formed from their previous attempts. .

What is the purpose of this test?

Like the vast majority of illusions, this blue-violet dot test shows that the human brain, though powerful, is easily fooled. This is not a new discovery. But to describe the true consequences of this real-life flaw, researchers went deeper and made two more tests, but replaced the choice of "green or purple" with something "heavy." more " .

Faces are created from computers, divided by two groups "threat" (threatening) and "non-threat" (nonthreatening).

In the next test, the researchers showed participants 800 computer faces created, divided by two groups "threat" (threatening) and "non-threat" (nonthreatening). . And like a dot test, when the number of attempts to cross the 200 mark, participants began to tend to call "non-threatening" portraits as "threats."

These results were also repeated in the final test, when participants were viewed 240 fake research proposals. They range from "ethical" ( eg, "making a list of the cities they want to travel to and writing about what they want to do there") until "very unethical." " (really unethical) (for example:" licking a piece of human feces . and measuring the amount of mouthwash to use ").

After that, the participant will have to decide whether these proposals should be allowed. As the number of unscrupulous proposals diminishes, participants once again change their perceptions and begin to evaluate ethical proposals into unethical.

"These results may have serious implications," the team wrote.

If your brain constantly adjusts your perception based on previous experience, how can you be sure that you are looking at everything in its true nature? Looking at the overall picture, whether human society ever really solves its problems - crime, poverty, prejudice, . - if we continually expand our definition of those That problem to include new sins?

"Although modern society has made tremendous progress in addressing a range of social issues, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and mortality of infant mortality, most people still believe that the world is getting worse , "the team concluded. In other words, the more a society solves many problems, the more it expands its definition of "what is a problem" and creates new problems. Perhaps the most important thing is not half a cup or half full of water, but the fact that the cup is getting bigger and bigger.