Exceptionally Average
What supermodels teach us about places.
Humans are pattern animals. We are good at identifying regularities, structures and relationships, and we then use this to make sense of complex habitats. Our pattern recognition skill helps us categorise and quickly recall information when it has some similarity to what we have experienced before. This kind of mental dot joining draws deeply and rapidly on our past to help us understand a new situation. It’s amazing.
It seems obvious to say but recognising and therefore understanding things has huge advantages in life. Way back in the caveman days, pattern recognition in our big Neanderthal brains helped avoid what could kill us and use what didn’t. We could learn from experiences.
🦬 = 🍖
⚡️ = 🔥
🍄 = 🤮
🧌 = 👀
Now we live in apartments. Our brains are smaller and more efficient than our ancestors’, but pattern recognition is still instrumental to how we understand the world. We move through the complex habitat that is life in the 21st Century, identifying patterns and using them to our advantage pretty much the same way as we did 200,000 years ago.
💃 = 🔪
🩴 = 🫣
🧘🏽 = 🧚♀️
🦠 = 😷
The big implication of pattern learning is that people like what they easily understand. Cognitive fluency is the term we use to describe the ease with which information is processed by the brain. High fluency situations have recognisable patterns that make them easier to think about and comprehend. Low fluency situations are difficult to understand because our brains can’t recognise any patterns to help make sense of what is happening.
Pattern recognition and cognitive fluency is powerful psychological stuff, and it affects us in subtle and profound ways:
People are more likely to trust or agree with the proposition of a sentence that is written in a simple and legible font (think instructions on the back of a box)
Repetition increases fluency so seeing something repeatedly makes it seem more true or familiar (think political ads)
Rhymes, which are a type of pattern, are easier to remember. We like them and they are more likely to seem true to us (think what rhymes is what climbs)
Our concept or sense of beauty is also deeply rooted in pattern recognition. We are more likely to find something beautiful if we easily understand it. A good example of this is the first wave of supermodels in the 90s: Claudia Schiffer, Elle McPherson, Cyndi Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christie Turlington who all have ‘perfect’ features. This sense of perfection, and therefore beauty, comes from the fact that their features and face are all very easy to understand because they are like the nose, the eyes and the lips that we have in our mind – this is pretty noodly but in some sense they are exceptionally average.
Kate Moss is the odd supermodel out in the 90s. By comparison she has low fluency because her features are idiosyncratic and harder to understand. Kate’s eyes are feline, she’s angular and jaunty and so our brain is working harder to understand what is going on, but we become beguiled by the differences rather than the similarities and we find a different kind of beauty in her. A psychological payback circuitry kicks in for our effort and we feel rewarded for our new understanding, so we learn to like her.
Understanding the fundamentals of pattern recognition is useful for life in general, but I find it particularly useful in placemaking, especially at a large scale like a whole street, neighbourhood or city. People like the place that they easily understand, and so there is no shame in putting some predictable elements, shapes and experiences into the mix.
Maybe it’s the street grid, maybe the workplaces look like the office in peoples’ minds, maybe your retail offer doesn’t ‘surprise and delight’… it just sells people what they want and expect. Places that are legible and obvious provide psychological comfort and people even find them beautiful, how else do we explain the suburbs? BUT most places deserve or need a bit of Kate Moss in there too. The paradox of our psychological machinery is that we like what we easily understand but we can love what is harder to grasp and makes us think more deeply.