Ideas

Before you go any further, please take a look at this colour changing card trick from Richard Wiseman. This video is another demonstration of inattentional blindness – you’re probably aware of the video with the gorilla dancing in the middle of the basketball game – showing that it is perfectly possible for someone to be physically looking at something and not consciously process significant information. This is one of the reasons that consumer research using eye tracking equipment is potentially misleading. Just because someone has looked at something doesn’t tell you what they’ve mentally processed. [The other big problem is that attaching special glasses to someone and then asking them to go and “consume” is not a recipe for normal behaviour.] Inattentional blindness was of particular interest to psychologists wanting to understand air accidents: with all the information available in a cockpit they realised it’s very easy for a pilot […]

Car manufacturers are always trying to solve a conundrum; how do you make a small car feel less small? Everyone knows that big cars are associated with all the positive stuff; power, comfort, luxury, status, indulgence. Small cars are associated with practicality, frugality, compromise, convenience.  Worthy, certainly. But truly desirable? To overcome this car manufacturers do one of two things. They make small cars physically bigger until they reach a point where no one can pretend it’s still a small car. Then, at some point, they have to bring out a new model that really is small again. Or else their marketing tells us that their small car is really a big car in a small body so it’s OK to buy it and not feel bad. “Honestly”, they say, “you’ll never realise that this car is small once you’re inside.” Of course no one is suggesting that when they […]

Whilst I was listening to the final of the Australian Open on the radio a brief debate emerged between the two commentators, Jonathan Overend and Pat Cash. Overend, who does extraordinarily well keeping the listener in touch with what’s happening in the rallies, made a passing reference to the colour of Roger Federer’s shirt, describing it as “purple”. Cash queried this, suggesting it was more of a blue. Overend, with a delightfully flawed piece of logic, pointed out that, since the court was blue and since Federer’s shirt wasn’t the same colour as the court, the shirt could not be blue. For the record Nike, who make the shirt, describe the colour as “concord”, whatever that is! I’ve quite often experienced similar situations: one person innocently labels a colour and another counters with an alternative. It makes you wonder if we all see the same thing? With colour labelling being […]

A nice bloke called Jamie has just installed a heating system in our house and he’s done a wonderful job too. It’s particularly impressive given the scale of the task: he was replacing three separate heating systems, none of which worked very well and he did it, with two assistants, in just nine days. Only one thing doesn’t work as planned. The house is divided into three zones, with the office on its own heating loop so that we’re not heating 3000 square feet that we’re not using a lot of the time. Each zone has its own wireless thermostat, which controls the business end of the system down in the cellar. Despite having a theoretical range of 30m (presumably requiring the clear lines of site you tend not to find in houses with rooms) the thermostat can’t reach its base unit. Jamie phoned the manufacturer for advice. The first […]