Psychology of Surveillance
At the recent WGPC, Darwin Ortiz, one of the world’s leading sleight-of-hand experts demonstrated how an untrained eye can miss much of the card cheating going on in the casino industry. He emphasized that the only way not to be seduced by the “magic” of crooked gamblers is to look for patterns. His strategy got me thinking on the psychology of surveillance as I believe that looking for patterns is an importing starting point. Yes, patterns are just the starting point in an industry that receives a deluge of data.
Recent research on brain function has focused on four ways we’re able to deal with the significant amount of information we process each day. Firstly, we look for a difference. When we encounter something for the first time, we compare it to the status quo. If it’s not new, we ignore it. Frogs apply “the rule of difference” very effectively by only watching for changes in the environment. In fact it is so focused on this task at hand that it could be surrounded by dead bugs and still starve to death. The frog can only do one thing well and that’s watch for moving bugs. By ignoring the static environment and only focusing on what’s new, it can be far more efficient than humans when it comes to catching flies.
Humans use the same strategy far more often than we realize to keep up with the huge influx of data we wrestle with every day. Darwin’s strategy is not new to the human mind. He effectively made us aware of what the mind desperately wants to do when faced with the deluge of information flow. However, being like a frog is just the starting point as we will see in the next post on “what the mind wants to do when it notices change“.
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