How Do We Judge Things According to Their Context?

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In one of Lovari's previous studies, he asked subjects to identify threatening faces. Whether or not the face was identified as threatening depended on how it compared to other faces in their recent memory. So when these three psychological phenomena combine, concept creep, evaluation by comparison and the change in prevalence over time, brains do something very odd. And to demonstrate this in the lab, LaVari and his team came up with a really nifty experiment that you'll hear all about after this commercial break.

In this episode we explore prevalence induced concept change. In a nutshell, when we set out to change the world by reducing examples of something we have deemed problematic, and we succeed, a host of psychological phenomena can mask our progress and make those problems seem intractable -- as if we are only treading water when, in fact, we’ve created the change we set out to make.

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