Model behaviour

When it comes to determining human behaviour, objective reality is a surprisingly irrelevant variable, writes Rory Sutherland. 

Tv screen multicoloured_crop

You probably don’t know this, but your television is cheating you. The same applies to the computer screen on which you may be reading this article (and, in a different way, the colour pictures in magazines). 

When the screen shows pure blue, green or red, it is more or less telling the truth. Blue lights produce pure blue photons, green lights produce green ones and red lights produce – yes – red photons. Each pixel on the screen contains three LCD lights – one in each of these colours. If the red lights alone are displayed, the screen is red. And it really is red. 

But yellow – TV yellow is a big fat lie. It looks yellow. But it isn’t really yellow. Not like a banana is yellow. It’s a mixture of red and green light that hacks our optical apparatus.

The yellow is created in our brains – not on the screen.

TV screens only need to emit three colours because there are only three types of colour-sensing cones in the human retina. By perceiving the relative strength of light by these three cones, we extrapolate and interpolate the whole of the visual spectrum. 

Colour mixing is a biological, not a physical, phenomenon. 

By sending the brain a mixture of red and green photons in the right ratio, it is impossible for your brain to distinguish the stimulus from that of yellow photons. So, yellow is what you see.

And because it is a biological phenomenon, it does not depend on universal and unchanging physical laws, but on the species doing the perceiving.

If lemurs and lorises bought televisions, you could sell them a much cheaper dichromatic LCD TV because you could omit the third component of each pixel – the one that generates red light. They construct their colour spectrum from green and blue alone. By contrast many birds, which detect ultraviolet light as well as the three RGB colours, would look at a human television and think it was broken. To a bird, your TV would look like reality seen through a very strong filter. Pigeon televisions would be hugely expensive as you would need to produce five colours per pixel.

Why does this matter to the market research industry?

In recent years, a number of scientists performed visual experiments to discover more about the vision of birds. They showed them printed pictures (which, like TV screens, are created from composite colours) and registered their reaction. Much of this was a waste of time. 

Seen by a bird, a printed (or televised) picture that looks exactly like a ripe banana to a human, doesn’t look remotely like a ripe banana to the bird. Many flowers that look plain to humans look amazingly decorative to an ultra-violet-sensitive bee.

What they were measuring was the connection between the object displayed and the bird’s reaction. But this approach only works if what the picture ‘shows’ and what the bird sees are one and the same.

If I were an alien, and showed human test subjects pictures that looked, to my alien perception, exactly like yellow bananas, and asked ‘would you eat this?’, people might reply yes or no. What would determine their answer would depend on whether the bananas look ripe to them. If the pictures of bananas looked green (or blue), they would answer ‘no’. But from this it would be wrong to infer that ‘humans do not like ripe bananas’.

This distinction applies to almost anything. There is the thing and there is the perception of the thing. 

Why does this matter? Because most models of human behaviour, most big data models, most economic models are blind to this distinction. And this applies to other stimuli. Price, for instance.

To the human brain, ‘£9.95’ is not perceived in the same way as ‘Now £9.95 – Was £15.99’. On a shampoo bottle, 50% extra free does not feel the same as 33% off. A £50 T-shirt feels expensive in TopShop but cheap on Bond Street. Brands, in the same way, act as a reality-distortion field. Coke from a Pepsi bottle doesn’t taste like Coke.

If your algorithms and models are comparing objective reality with human behaviour without including a decent human-specific model of perception, your conclusions may end up just as useless as that bird research. In determining human behaviour, objective reality is a surprisingly irrelevant variable.

Like televisions, research needs to be species-specific. 

Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman, Ogilvy & Mather, UK

We hope you enjoyed this article.
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