2023-09-06 20:13:51
Clothing with vertical stripes or monochrome can make us look slimmer. They are optical illusions that we have all heard about or applied at some point. But there is a very curious one that probably no one has in mind when dressing and that affects shirts with numbers, like those worn by American football or basketball players and which are also part of the more casual sports style (a trend quite popular a decade ago that still survives). According to psychologists at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), clothes with low numbers make us look thinner than those with high numbers. That is, to achieve this effect, it is better to look 18 than 81. The key is in the expectations of the mind.
In 2019, a report by the television channel ESPN explored the reasons why many players prefer to wear jersey numbers between 10 and 19. Athletes simply believed that lower numbers made them look faster and thinner than taller ones. traditionally assigned to their position.
Ladan Shams, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UCLA, wanted to see if the players were right. In his experiments, published in the magazine PLOS ONEthey asked volunteers which American football players seemed thinnest to them.
In a first test, respondents were shown computer-generated images of players in identical poses, but with different body sizes and skin and shirt colors, and were asked to judge their thinness. Subjects saw each player twice, once in jerseys with high numbers and once in jerseys with low numbers. In general, players wearing jerseys numbered 10 to 19 were perceived as thinner than players wearing jerseys numbered 80 to 89, regardless of their body size and skin or jersey color.
In the second test, the researchers focused on the number 8. Since the 8 is wider than the 1, simply the amount of space on the jersey occupied by the numbers 80 to 89 could make the players appear larger. So, psychologists chose combinations of numbers that used the same digits, but varied which came first: 17 and 71, 18 and 81, 19 and 91.
In this second experiment, subjects still perceived players with higher numbers to be thicker than players with lower numbers, although the effect was somewhat smaller than in the first test.
Volunteers consistently said that players with jerseys numbered 10 to 19 appeared thinner than those with jerseys numbered 80 to 89 Multisensory Processing Laboratory/UCLA, PLOS One
learned associations
According to the researchers, the results suggest that previously learned statistical associations between numbers and sizes influence the perception of body size.
“The way we perceive the world is highly influenced by our prior knowledge,” says Shams. “In our daily lives, numbers written on objects (on a bag of sugar in the supermarket or on weights at the gym) usually represent the magnitude of the objects. The higher the number, the larger or more massive the object will generally be,” he adds.
As he explains, “Previous research has established that our brains are very good at detecting and storing associations and statistical regularities, without us knowing it, and those associations can shape future perception.”
According to an experiment, the player on the right wears the shirt that makes him look thinner Adobe Stock
An NFL rule required wide receivers (pass-catching specialists) to wear uniform numbers between 80 and 89, but the league changed the restriction in 2004, opening the door to receivers who preferred lower numbers on their uniforms. In 2019, when ESPN broke their story, nearly 80% of wide receivers wore a jersey number between 10 and 19.
Shams said the results strongly support the hypothesis that when processing the perception of body size, the brain relies on learned associations between numbers and the size attributes of objects. That finding is consistent with previous research showing that statistical learning is a fundamental and universal learning mechanism.
Those learned associations, Shams said, generally help the brain interpret sensory information (the pattern of light receptor responses in the eye, for example) because sensory information can be noisy, unreliable and ambiguous. The ability to perceive the world more quickly and correctly is critical to survival, she said.
How spectators perceive the body size of football players likely has little effect on the athletes’ performance. But in other areas of life, those perceptual and cognitive biases can be more damaging; for example, when they influence judgment, decisions and behavior towards people or social groups, a phenomenon often called implicit bias. If a group is frequently associated with negative qualities, others are much more likely to treat people in that group accordingly, whether they realize it or not.
“Our work highlights the importance of representation,” Shams stresses. “We need to see all kinds of people doing all the diversity of things that people can do. We can use the statistical learning power of our brain to reduce implicit bias.” If you think more trivially, the results of this study can be used to choose between two T-shirts in a shopping mall.
#illusion #shirts #numbers #slimmer