Web Users Judge Sites Instantly

Ant writes "This Nature.com news article reports that potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds: 'Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions...'"

Comments

Oh Dear

[HotmanParisHiltonKam]

Quoth TFA "Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny."

The human reaction time is about .25 seconds. This study erronseously assumes that the judgement is made during the time the image is displayed - of course, the image retention time on the eye end the lasting photographic imprint on the memory means that the judgement can happen well after the image is gone.

Re:Oh Dear

[SnowZero]

You are definitely on the right track, though its not clear if its the article summary that's botched or the study itself. Trained cognitive psychologists at least should know better, so I'd lean toward an innacurate summary. The title should probably read "users can judge websites after seeing them for only 50 msec". The "photographic" effect you are referring to is called after-image, and can last long after the initial stimulus is gone. They could make a stronger claim than I stated above if they put up a visual distraction image after the 50 msec (visual memory studies do this a lot). But the summary doesn't mention it so we can't know for sure.

Regarding human reaction time, it varies depending on the task, but rarely is less than 100 msec (usually when you expect something to happen, such as runners starting a race). That means some tasks can be completed faster than 250 msec thouch, so that's not a good lower bound to quote if you are trying to debunk something. 50 msec certainly is too fast for anything I'd call "judgement" though, as people usually cannot even press a button that fast in response to an event.

At any rate, the slashdot summary is far from an accurate description of the phenomenon, but since when is that news...

P.S. I am not a psychologist, but I do have a B.S. double in cognitive science.

Wrong word choice

[johncadengo]

What you're referring to is prejudice, or prejudgement. Racism, as defined on wikipedia, is: Racism refers to beliefs, practices, and institutions that discriminate against people based on their perceived or ascribed "race". Primarily, it refers to an assumption that the human species can meaningfully be divided into races, together with hostility to people of certain races or a belief, conscious or unconscious, that people of different races differ in value. Some people whose thinking about others uses racial categories believe that different races can be placed on a ranked, hierarchical scale.

While prejudice on the other hand is: Prejudice is, as the name implies, the process of "pre-judging" something. It implies coming to a judgment on a subject before learning where the preponderance of evidence actually lies, or forming a judgment without direct experience. Holding a politically unpopular view is not in itself prejudice, and politically popular views are not necessarily free of prejudice. When applied to social groups, prejudice generally refers to existing biases toward the members of such groups, often based on social stereotypes; and at its most extreme, results in groups being denied benefits and rights unjustly or, conversely, unfairly showing unwarranted favor towards others.

Well documented by:

[grolaw]

Malcolm Gladwell in, "Blink." See, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316172324/sr=1-1 /qid=1137394659/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-1304227-3896858?_ encoding=UTF8/

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:Web Site Peeves

[Zontar The Mindless]

Thank god the W3C deprecated the blink tag

W3C never did any such thing. In order for the BLINK tag to be deprecated, it would have had to be part of the HTML specification at some point in time, which it never was.

That's the good news. The bad news is here.

Re:They shut that one down.

[Morlark]

Actually, the goatse.ca mirror is incomplete. It lacks a great deal of content that goatse.cx (and goat.cx) had. The most complete goatse mirror you are likely to find is goatse.ragingfist.net

Re:Web Site Peeves

[Justin205]

Hint for Firefox users... about:config -> browser.blink_allowed

Set it to false. It unfortunately defaults to true, at least on 1.0.7.

Re:Funny...

[gangien]

as a funny offtopic info. apparently playboy mirrors files for eclipse, apache, freebsd, and some other stuff! coolness. I fuond this out in some other article clicking around. look for yourself

Re:Fair and balanced

[jZnat]

I think he prefers BBC News instead. We all do.