Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Male and female pictures

Last night a dinner in a Moroccan restaurant with good friend, psychologist and acclaimed conceptual trend guru Susanne Piët.

She has published over a dozen books and her most recent one is called "The Emocode".
About designing branded personalities and bringing them to life.

It was a fascinating conversation while eating the exotic food and drinking mint tea.
One of the things Susanne Piët claimed was that she could see from a picture whether it was made by a female photographer or by a male photographer.
Because, in her opinion, women are seeing things very different from men.
More precisely, women see things around them more in a balance and harmony.
While men see things more in terms of competition and values of good and bad or strong and weak.

What to reply to these kinds of rather bald statements?
Statements that might be true.
That might be humbug.

Therefore it was proposed to Susanne Piët to do a test.
To put in a room on tables a set of different pictures.
Unknown pictures.
That have not been published yet.
And to decide which picture is made by a man and which picture is made by a woman.
To later check how correct the assessment is.

In this way, almost scientifically, it can be determined whether Susanne Piët's statement is true, a little bit true or not true at all.
If on average, several persons, men and women, will guess over 75 % correct for the picture to have been made by a man or by a man, we should be convinced that one can see the gender of the photographer.
But if it is less than 50 %, Susanne Piët's claim is not serious.

Now it is just a matter of setting up the experiment.
Stuff for another posting.


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
"The Emocode" by Susanne Piët
ISBN 90 430 1233 5
www.pearsoneducation.nl



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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You have proven yourself a man by setting up a "competition" with the author instead of letting her comments just exist.