Information Intelligence - The Gingery Sunglasses

The Gingery Sunglasses

My optometrist is a lovely person with a warm smile, a professional manner, and a good sense of humour. I especially like that she always cleans my glasses spotless after each eye check. However, she’s not the type to pay close attention to details. For example, a few months ago, when I ordered a pair of clear-lens sunglasses, I was surprised to find a pair of coloured lenses waiting for me at the pick-up appointment.

“Well, it is the exact same prescription. I am very sorry that I placed the wrong order. We can order the correct one right now, and it should arrive in 2 weeks.” My optometrist apologised a bit awkwardly.

“It looked alright,” I looked into the mirror with the gingery lens on. “I only use it when driving, so a coloured lens shouldn’t bother me much. I can take it.”

“That is very nice of you. If you do feel the need to change it to clear lenses, let me know and I will replace it for you,” My optometrist replied with a slight relief.

So that is how I ended up with sunglasses with a gingery lens. To my surprise, it was like a great adventure. When I wear them, the familiar world suddenly becomes foreign. When it is sunny, looking through the gingery lens makes the streets feel cozy and warm. The sun pours over everything with smooth and comforting light, a golden brush. Everything feels soft and tender. The air smells sweet, almost like calm after chaos, like the peace-and-love scene at the end of an action movie. When it is cloudy, the gingery lens renders the world with an apocalyptic touch. The wind becomes darker and heavier, and the grey clouds become almost dull and metallic. Buildings are covered with a heavy layer of dark brown dust. Even the birds seem to struggle with exhaustion. I have to admit I had a lot of fun with this accidental possession of sunglasses. It offered me a few small mental trips.
The colour of my sunnies distorts the light, causing my brain to receive filtered and altered information. My brain is clever enough to understand physics, so it won’t believe that the world has actually changed colour. However, when processing other types of information, our brain constantly tilts what it perceives. In other words, our brain always wears a pair of coloured sunglasses and can only see the world through this skewed view. The real world exists out there, but it can never be perceived without subjective filtering. To improve information intelligence, let’s examine how two psychological phenomena, priming and bias, shape perception.
Priming is a phenomenon where information the brain has already been exposed to unconsciously influences how it responds to other information. In other words, we think, feel, and act differently with the same trigger, simply because of what has been loaded into the brain beforehand. Let’s use an example to illustrate priming. In an experiment [1], participants exposed to money-related cues were about 50% less likely to help someone who dropped items nearby. The psychologist randomly assigned two groups of university students. One group viewed screensavers with images of money, counted money, and completed money-word unscrambling tasks, while the other performed non-money-related tasks. Then, both groups walked through a hallway to their next class. In the hallway, a psychologist pretended to drop some pencils. 34% of the money-cued group stopped to pick up the pencils, whereas 68% of the non-money-cued group helped. The money tasks primed the students’ brains, making them slightly less likely to help others unconsciously. In a similar study[2], one group of students completed a word-scramble task containing words associated with old age (“retired”, “wrinkle”). The second group received neutral words. The average walking speed of the first group was 12% slower than that of the second group when leaving the lab. In this case, the priming effect of old-age-related words slowed people’s walking speed!
Apart from money, there are many other forms of priming. Warm temperatures enhance feelings of closeness and connection[3][4][5]. For example, holding a warm cup of tea can make you feel that the person you’re talking with is slightly more easygoing. A warm room (not hot) will make you more inclined to trust the people you share it with. Clean priming, related to moral harshness, occurs when feelings of cleanliness increase the strictness of moral judgment. In an experiment with 40 participants[6], the psychologist asked one group to watch clips related to cleanliness, such as cleaning a dusty bathroom, while the control group watched neutral clips. Afterwards, both groups rated how immoral some minor social activities were (such as keeping found money in the wallet or lying on a job application). The clean-primed group showed 12% harsher moral judgments than the control group. Researchers also found that a room with a clean smell (like citrus) increased participants’ moral harshness, as evidenced by stricter judgment of unethical acts[7][8]. Additionally, scarcity primers (sales countdowns, empty supermarket shelves) speed up decision-making, and those decisions are more likely to be impulsive[9][10][11]. The scarcity priming effects are widely used in advertising, where we hear “only 3 left in stock,” “place order in next 15 minutes otherwise you will lose the chance to have a discount,” “3 out of 4 of the townhouses are sold, last one—chance to lock in your dream opportunity.”

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If priming is like wearing outside-in sunglasses, then biases are the inside-out sunglasses we all wear. Biases are inherent tendencies that influence how we recall, judge, and perceive information. Bias results from our brain’s effort to save cognitive energy. In other words, we use bias as a shortcut to understand the world more easily, although it reduces accuracy. Using availability bias as an example, it demonstrates how our perception can be distorted. When asked how often an event occurs, our brain tends to interpret this as a measure of how easy it is to find evidence of that event in memory. For example, when asked “Do you think there are more traffic accidents recently in your suburb?” instead of searching for official statistics (which can be hard to find), we recall “the accidents I saw myself or on TV.” If there are only a few traffic accidents in our neighbourhood, we might quickly think traffic is increasing in our suburb. But in reality, the total number of accidents across the entire suburb might have actually fallen—it’s just luck that we’ve seen a few nearby. Similarly, availability bias explains why people might think the risk of smoking is high when a celebrity is diagnosed with lung cancer, or believe global warming is worsening when a famous tourist spot catches fire. The news coverage of the celebrity’s health issue and the burning of the tourist site makes related information more readily available, leading people to believe these events are more common.[12]
Apart from availability bias, many other biases prevent us from approaching objectivity. To name a few:

- Recency bias places a higher weight on recent information. A typical recency bias occurs during performance reviews in corporate settings, where achievements close to the review date tend to be given more credit (managers need to work hard to avoid this by deliberately examining earlier projects).
- Anchoring bias happens when the first piece of information becomes a reference point, even if that initial information is of low quality compared to later data. For example, when selling a property, the first offer received influences the vendor’s expectations of the final selling price, even if subsequent offers are significantly different.
- Hindsight bias describes our tendency to emphasise evidence that supports a known outcome while overlooking proof that contradicts it. Many “I knew it” moments are full of hindsight bias. For instance, when a car company recalls a certain model due to design defects, our memory of hearing negative discussions about that car becomes clearer, while reports on its reliability are quickly forgotten. Hindsight bias reflects our instinct to believe the world is predictable and makes sense.
- Framing bias concerns how the narrative of data can influence our perception. When reporting war statistics, “90% survival rate” will suggest to the reader that most soldiers survived, whereas “10% mortality rate” will make people feel it is a brutal war with many casualties.
- Confirmation bias describes the tendency to prefer hearing what we want to hear and seeing what we want to see. In other words, instead of interpreting data and facts objectively, we tend to seek validation for what we already believe or know. Anyone with experience in corporate meetings is fully aware of this bias: “I hear what you say” usually means “I hear the part you said that matches my understanding; other parts I did not hear at all.”

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So, what can we do to improve information intelligence and pursue objectivity, aiming for originality free of distortion? We need to recognise that our perception is always filtered through a pair of ginergy sunglasses; therefore, we should constantly adjust our perception based on priming and bias effects. Priming and bias are unavoidable due to our brain’s physiology, but we can be self-aware and adjust our perceptions, thereby minimising their negative impact. For example, when perceiving a person as hostile, cold, selfish, or immoral, recall whether we were exposed to a cold cue, a cleanliness cue, or a money cue. If so, tell ourselves to judge the person a bit later, when different cues are available. When processing data from multiple sources and time periods, increase attention on data from the distant past (fight recency bias), data that comes later (fight anchoring bias), data that contradicts our established view (fight confirmation bias), and try to frame data from different angles (90% correct vs 10% wrong, fight framing bias). These conscious actions will bring us closer to the truth.

1. Vohs, Kathleen D., Nicole Mead, & Miranda Goode (2006).

Title: The Psychological Consequences of Money

Published in: Science, 314(5802), 1154–1156.

2. Bargh, John A., Mark Chen, & Lara Burrows (1996).

Title: Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action

Published in: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2), 230–244.

3. Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008).

Title: Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth.

Journal: Science, 322(5901), 606–607.

4. IJzerman, H., & Semin, G. R. (2009).

Title: The thermometer of social relations: Mapping social proximity on temperature.

Journal: Psychological Science, 20(10), 1214–1220.

5. Kang, Y., Williams, L. E., Clark, M. S., Gray, J. R., & Bargh, J. A. (2011).
Title: Physical temperature effects on trust behavior: The role of insula.
Journal: Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(4), 507–515.

6. Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008).

Disgust as embodied moral judgment.

Journal: Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1096–1109.

7. Liljenquist, K. A., Zhong, C.-B., & Galinsky, A. D. (2010).

The smell of virtue: Clean scents promote moral behaviour.

Journal: Psychological Science, 21(3), 381–383.

8. Helzer, E. G., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011).

Dirty deeds and dirty bodies: Embodiment of the moral-purity metaphor increases harshness of moral judgments.

Journal: Psychological Science, 22(3), 313–319.

9. Shah, A. K., Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2012).

Some consequences of having too little.

Science, 338(6107), 682–685.

10. Cannon, C., Goldsmith, K., & Roux, C. (2019).

The vigilant watchdog: Resource scarcity increases threat vigilance and decision impulsivity.

Journal of Consumer Research, 45(4), 673–692.

11. Roux, C., Goldsmith, K., & Bonezzi, A. (2015).

On the psychology of scarcity: When reminders of resource scarcity promote generosity.

Journal of Consumer Research, 42(4), 615–631.

12. Schwarz, N., & Vaughn, L. A. (2002).
The availability heuristic revisited: Ease of recall and content of recall as distinct sources of information.
In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 103–119). Cambridge University Press.