The New Look Reality Distortion Field

In 1947, two psychologists, Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman, conducted a psychology experiment with children involving the perceived size of coins compared to the actual size. The children were placed in front of a machine that drew a circle on a piece of glass. The size of the circle was adjustable with a knob. Then the kids were shown coins and cardboard circles that were exactly the same size as the coins. When the children were asked to approximate the size of the objects by adjusting the dial on the machine, their coin diameter estimates were larger than their cardboard circle estimates. And poor children tended to exaggerate the size of the coins more than rich kids did.

This experiment, and others like it, were part of the "New Look" theory in psychology, which as Mind Hacks explains, "argued that our perception of reality could be directly influenced by our desires."

More recent experiments suggest that the New Lookers were right. Psychologists Emily Balcetis and David Dunning ran a series of tests which demonstrate that people perceive desirable objects as being closer than undesirable ones. One test involved setting a piece of paper on the ground. The test subjects were placed some distance away from the paper and were told to toss a bean bag as close as possible to the paper. Subjects who had been told beforehand that the paper was a $25 gift certificate tended to undershoot the mark, and those told that the paper was worthless tended to overshoot it.

The next time you desire something, remember that your perception of it might be subject to the "New Look" reality distortion field. I'm not sure there's an easy way to compensate for the bias, but if you have any suggestions, please post them in the comments.

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.