Richard Shotton

speaker

1,228 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 27 Jun

Richard Shotton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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So he did a super simple thing.

He shows people pairs of ads and he uses eye tracking to see which of the two ads they look at.

What always happens is one of the pairs has a pareidolian image.

There's something that looks a little bit like a face.

It could be a tree stump or a cloud, but it looks a little bit like a face.

And what he finds is that 80% of the time, people pay more attention to the ad that has this pareidolian image.

And his argument is it's about evolution.

We are the descendants of people who are very quick at recognizing faces because faces often meant danger.

And if you just snap decision, spotted that a few seconds before other people, you had an advantage.

So we're hardwired to spot these face-like patterns very, very quickly.

And this is one of those experiments that varies by culture.

So absolutely in America, there is an association that healthy foods are poor tasting.

So there's a lovely study by a guy called Ragunathan, who's at McCombs School of Business.

And he gets a group of Americans together, serves them an Indian buffet, loads of different foods.

and gets the diners to rate how much they like each of the items.

So they rate the Nans, the Balti, the Lassi, the Indian yogurt drink.

Raghunathan doesn't care about any of the results, apart from what people say about the Lassi.

He's just asking lots of questions as a bit of a smokescreen.

But when it comes to the yogurt drink, the Lassi, sometimes he tells diners it's an Indian health drink.

Other times he tells them it's

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