If you’re on the internet on February 26, 2015, you’ve seen The Dress. Prompted by a comment on TumblrBuzzFeed writer Cates Holderness posted one Simple low-quality image of a striped dress, with the title “What color is this dress?” Answer: Blue and black or white and gold. URL: “Help-I’m-Going-Crazy-It’s-Definitely-Blue.”
Do you really need to tell me what happened next? In just a few days, BuzzFeed The post received 73 million page views, inspiring debates around the world. Seemingly every news outlet (including this one) weighed in on the incident. How is it possible that this one image divides people so neatly into two camps? You’ve either seen — with zero hint of variability — the dress as black and blue, or white and gold. There was no ambiguity. A wonderful feeling of anger: how can one see it differently?
Looking back, posting “costumes” represented the high water mark of “fun” on the Internet in the mid-2010s. Back then, the entire media ecosystem was built around the social sharing of viral stories. This seemed like a promising path for the media. BuzzFeed and its competitor Vice And Vox Media (which owns this publication) was once worth billions of dollars.
The social-sharing ecosystem is built for websites that, for better or worse, can simply copy each other’s most successful content, hoping to replicate a viral moment. It has also created an internet monoculture. Which can be fun! No matter where you are on the Internet, no matter what news site you read, clothing will find you. It was a shared experience. As with many other irrelevant moments (in fact, on the exact same day as the dress, you probably also saw two llamas on the news). run away A retirement community in Arizona.)
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Since 2015, the engines of that monoculture have sputtered. Today, BuzzFeed’s news division no longer exists; The company’s stock is trading at around 50 cents a share (it debuted at around $10). Vice has ceased publication its website and lay off hundreds of employees. Vox Media Still standing (woohoo!), but his Reported value It’s a fraction of what it used to be (sigh).
Clothing brings us together. It was both a metaphor and a warning About how our shared sense of reality can be so easily severed.
Whether you saw gold and white or black and blue, the meme revealed a truth about human perception. Psychologists call this naive realism. It is the sense that our perception of the world reflects its physical reality. If we see a garment as blue, we assume that the actual pigments inside the garment are blue. It’s hard to believe it could be any other color.
But it’s naive because our perceptual system doesn’t work that way. I’ve written a lot about this on Vox. Clothing and other viral illusions like the similarly ambiguous “Yanny” vs. “Laurel” audio reveal the true nature of how our brains work. We’re guessing. I reported in 2019:
As much as we can tell ourselves that our experience of the world is truth, our reality will always be an interpretation. Light enters our eyes, sound waves enter our ears, chemicals enter our noses, and it’s up to our brains to guess what it is.
Perceptual techniques such as … “dress” … reveal that our perceptions are not absolute truths, that the physical phenomena of the universe are indifferent to whether our feeble sensory organs can accurately perceive them. We’re just guessing. Yet these facts make us angry: How can it be that our perception of the world is not the only one?
Scientists still haven’t figured out exactly why some people see clothing in one shade and others in another. Their best guess By now different people’s brains are making different assumptions about the quality of light falling on clothing. Is it in bright daylight? Or under an indoor lamp? Your brain tries to compensate for different types of light to guess the actual color of the clothing.
Why would one brain assume daylight and another indoor bulb? A strange formula Research has shown that people make assumptions by trying to associate colors Be with another dress Personal characteristics, such as how much time they spend in daylight. A paper found a Interesting correlation: The time you naturally prefer to go to sleep and wake up — called chronotype — can be correlated with clothing perception. Night owls, or those who like to go to bed really late and wake up early, are more likely to be seen wearing black and blue. Larks, aka early risers, are more likely to see it as white and gold.
In 2020, I spoke with Pascal Wallisch, a neuroscientist at New York University who has researched this topic. He believes that reciprocity is rooted in life experience:
Larks, he surmises, spend more time in daylight than night owls. They are more familiar with it. So when faced with illness–The brighter the image, like the dress, the more likely they are to assume it’s being bathed in bright sunlight, including a lot of blue, Wallish noted. As a result, their brain filters it out.
Night owls, he thinks, are more likely to assume the dress is under artificial light, and filter it out to make the dress look black and blue. (He admits that the chronotype measurement is somewhat crude: ideally, he wants to estimate a person’s lifetime exposure to daylight.)
Other scientists I spoke to were less sure that was the full answer (there are other possible personality traits and lifetime experiences that could factor in, they said). Even if there is more to this story than chronotype, there is an enduring lesson here. Our different life experiences can make us perceive the world differently than others. Unfortunately, as a collective, we still are There is not a lot of self-awareness about this process.
“Your brain makes a lot of unconscious assumptions, and it doesn’t tell you that it’s an assumption,” Wallis told me. “See what you see. Your brain doesn’t tell you, ‘I’ve taken into account how much daylight I’ve seen in my life.’
Moments like dress are a useful test for our interpretation. We need the intellectual humility to ask ourselves: Could my ideas be wrong?
The dress is an ominous one because, since 2015, the internet has become a worse and worse place to examine this humble gut (not that it ever was great place for it). It has become more siloed.
“What You See Is What You See”
Its users are seemingly less generous to each other (not that they were ever overly generous!) Shaming and mocking are the dominant conversational forms (though, yes, disrespect and fun can still exist).
All of this is important because our shared sense of reality is broken in many important ways. There was a huge divide over how people understood the pandemic, the vaccines that were developed to help us through it, the outcome of the 2020 election. Not all of this is due to the Internet, of course. Many factors influence motivated reasoning and motivated perception, the idea that we see what we want to see. There are leaders and influencers who fan the flames of conspiracy and misinformation. But in the same way that our past experiences can predispose us to dress in one shade or another, they can also distort our perception of current events.
Although, I will admit: maybe more silent off my understanding of the Internet! It is difficult to measure. Algorithm-based feeds are more popular today than ever. I can’t know for sure if my version of the social internet is the same as anyone else’s. A lot of people are redecorating their bathrooms on my TikTok feed. This can’t possibly be the average user’s experience, right?
I have no idea that we’re all seeing the same things – and even less of an idea if we interpret them the same way.
More chaos is coming, I fear. AI tools are making it easier and easier to manage images and videos. Every day, it becomes easier to create content that plays with people’s perceptual biases and confirms their prior beliefs — and it’s easier to distort current perceptions and possibly even alter past memories.
The outfit represents, arguably, a simpler time on the Internet, but also offers a mirror to our most depressing mental tendencies. What I always wonder is: What content is out there right now, creating different perceptual experiences in people, but we don’t even know we’re seeing it differently?
