Expectation Bias

[pkane2001]

11 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

The audio enthusiast's world is a strange one ... the aim of quality reproduction is to create an illusion of something happening that is not there; being, musicians performing in a space in front of you, without any sense of the mechanism which is performing this 'trick'. Yet, the concept of "being fooled!" is seen as something bad, an indication that somehow the listener is not smart enough to perceive how well, or poorly, the system is actually doing ... a case of wanting it each way, and probably failing at both, .

 

Anyone who has experienced, and enjoyed, a setup that allows one to enter the world of what is on the recording without quibbles about the technical qualities, and shuts down any nervous tension about whether some part of what is heard is right or not, most likely will wonder what all the fuss is about - the 'conjuring' is working, and that's all that matters ... .

 

Most people want a persistent illusion, not one that only works when you first acquire a system/device or install a tweak or listen to it at a dealer, that then dissipates because it is caused by something other than the actual sound. Expectation bias is much more complex than is usually portrayed on audio forums. It's very often not about price, looks, or what you've think about a device (although that enters into it).

 

It's mostly that you hear differences when you listen intently which happens with most audiophiles installing any new tweak. Not because any differences are there, but because you notice them when trying hard. When you relax over a period of time, settling in to extended listening, the initial differences often fade away, because they really weren't there in the first place.

 

Many temporary illusions are created this way, frequently resulting in the persistent upgraditis in audiophilia. After a while, the attention bias is gone and everything starts to sound plain again. Easy enough to test for this "attention bias", which is a form of expectation bias: have someone randomly remove or put in the device you're testing, without telling you what they did, but telling you that something was changed (even if it wasn't). If you hear differences even when the device is not there, you're suffering from expectation bias. Happens all the time and to everyone. If you expect a change, you'll hear it. And all audiophiles expect a change when replacing components -- after all, everything matters in sound quality, right, Frank? ;)

 

Like all black magic, conjuring works, but only for a little bit, requiring more and more sacrifice from the poor audiophile to keep the illusion going. That's my explanation for what's going on, and my "expectation" (bias?) is that very few here would agree with me ;)
 

[pkane2001]

32 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Oh, the illusion that's the real thing is most certainly persistent. But it can frequently fail simply because the setup goes 'out of alignment' - if you think of a reproduction system as a precision measuring tool, then most who deal with the latter know that it's an ongoing exercise to maintain that precision; simply expecting it to always perform to the highest level without care and attention to detail is just asking be disappointed at some stage.

 

 

If you have to listen intently to hear the improvement, then it ain't the real deal :) ... a key point about competent SQ is that it's effortless to listen to - like having a car engine that always responds to being asked to deliver more power, without ever hinting that it's starting to reach some limit. Being satisfying to listen to in every circumstance is a key marker for capable replay; and is achievable.

 

 

Yep, it matters - but the process of switching is quite likely to upset the balance ... let's say we have some magical creature hanging off the side of the James Webb telescope, who quite happily moves bits and piece of it around, so people can test the importance of various aspects; what do you think the chances are of the system maintaining optimum precision?

 

 

Good conjuring always moves things forward; which is why I only deal with resolving issues in what I have currently "on the stand" - if someone literally gave me speakers 10 time more expensive to play with, right now, I would leave them in the boxes in a back room for possibly years; until, "the next system". A major step sideways is a waste of energy, in my world - it's not how you get answers, as to what is important, and what isn't ... to maintain the integrity of the illusion being thrown up, .

 

As the chief conjurer, I defer to your skills in the space of illusions, Frank :)

 

[pkane2001]

2 hours ago, GregWormald said:

Ahhh, please don't fall into ad hominem attacks. I'm sure you know the saying about arguing with (choose a term)...

 

A question not answered (for me) is "How does expectation bias affect my perception when I go into a listening comparison to learn if I can actually hear a difference rather than with an expectation?" I'm sure4 there are many people who exercise curiosity rather than expectation. (BTW, I have 45+ years as a clinical psychotherapist and trainer.)

 

For instance I bought some highly reviewed interconnects years ago and it didn't take me long to realise that they sounded much worse to me than the plain ones thrown in with the equipment purchase. I now cut them up when I need a bit of wire for something non-audio.

 

There may be good reasons why interconnects may sound different, like poor connectors, incorrect wiring, shields miswired, etc.

 

But, expectation bias isn't a conscious state. Whether you realize it or not, you are expecting to hear something when you're listening to any new device.  The knowledge of that device being in the circuit already sets up subconscious expectations. The act of careful, focused listening helps you notice new things. Even if these things were already there before the new device.

 

Audio memory is very short (seconds), and the tiny details in soundstage or airiness or pace, or musicality, or whatever you think you're hearing, are easily faked by our minds. These are not easy to test for and to compare unless you do fast switching blind test without the knowledge of what device is playing. If you do that, you'll discover quickly how frequently your mind makes s**t up.

 

Just like you can't easily examine your subconscious, you can't tell what influences you to hear one thing or another. Sometimes it's the subconscious mind making stuff up by filling in "new" details, sometimes it's what you had for dinner, and sometimes it's what you read online or what a buddy told you about it. Sometimes it's what you think about the whole idea of interconnects making (or not making) a difference. 

 

[pkane2001]

30 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Correct.

 

 

Ah, you're expecting to hear something, most likely 'new', meaning 'better', with some major change. And this is where I see most audio people largely not understanding the process - a change should reduce the presence of quite obvious faults in the reproduction accuracy; anything else is just shifting the ship's deck chairs.

 

 

The "tiny details in soundstage ...", etc, are evidence of the improved accuracy of the system - these are qualities that remain constant, whether you concentrate with bulging eyes intensity on what you're hearing, or suddenly notice that a highly attractive person of the opposite sex has entered the room, . Strangely enough, this is also how it works with live music ...

 

 

If you have to make it an exercise, to decide whether a setup is working better ... then it ain't. This is a remarkably effective touchstone - as soon as some track or music makes you aware that you are not entirely comfortable with what you're hearing - which is not related to the style of music, or musicianship, etc - then you have become aware of some subjectively audible misbehaviour of the system. The latter is what you don't want - any further changes should be aimed at resolving that lacking.

 

When you listen for "quite obvious faults", you're already subject to expectation bias. No way out of this other than to validate what you're hearing through bias-controlled listening. Sure, large differences can be quite obvious. But these are not attributable to interconnects unless these are completely broken.

 

Oh, and when you do notice a very attractive person of the opposite sex, you may find that there are many things that make her very unattractive once you get to know her better. That temporary illusion that wears off strikes again! And like with audio equipment, one is then likely to start looking for an upgrade, only to fall again for that same illusion 😎 [not based on my own experience - happily married with two grown kids who've been out of the house for many years]

 

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

Let's say you hop into a very expensive car, belonging to someone else. And as you go along, you hear various rattles and noises, from things loose in the cabin, and, from body parts not secured properly. And at a certain speed a pronounced vibration comes through the body. If you mentions these, er, behaviours to the owner, most probably an unwise choice , do think he would say, it's all in your head; a bias controlled experiencing session will demonstrate that my vehicle is, um, perfect?

 

If you hear a recording replayed very accurately, just once, and from then on it falls far short of this standard, then you have a reference experience - "faults" are all the shortcomings of the rig that you happen to be listening to, right now, that prevent that peak accuracy from being replicated.

 

Poor interconnects, etc, cause inaccuracy by allowing noise and interference to enter the reproduction chain electronics - these disturb the correct working of some part of at least one component; and the fine detail in the recording is blurred. It then becomes impossible for the ear/brain to decipher what's going on - and in the worst situation, you say, "This sounds a mess!". And this is an "obvious example" of a faulty rig.

 

 

Ah, you did well, getting on top of that "wearing off" issue ... 👍.

 

Haha! Car and now women analogies. You're expanding your repertoire, Frank! 

 

[pkane2001]

6 minutes ago, GregWormald said:

Examining the subconscious may not be easy but it can be done, otherwise all counselling and therapy is not possible. A good part of subconscious processing is influenced by the conscious 'set-up' and pre-existing programming.

 

Know of many audiophiles going into therapy to determine if they can really hear changes in their tweaks?

 

8 minutes ago, GregWormald said:

To reiterate: A question not answered (for me) is "How does expectation bias affect my perception when I go into a listening comparison to learn if I can actually hear a difference rather than with an expectation?"

 

You hear things that are not there. 

 

[pkane2001]

33 minutes ago, Confused said:

Taking this back to Frank's car analogy, I once knew a woman who had things loose in the cabin, and body parts not secured properly.

 

Loose women are one of the primary sources of expectation bias, IMHO ;)

 

[pkane2001]

45 minutes ago, GregWormald said:

You guys are too deterministic for me. I guess your expectation bias is getting in the way of you seeing reality.

Not a problem. I'm gone from this discussion.

 

Not sure what kind of scientific training you've had, but in science, a large uncertainty in an experiment is to be avoided if the results are to be trusted. Expectation bias has been demonstrated to introduce a huge uncertainty in experimental results and in many informal trials.  If you want to live with the uncertainty, that's your business, but to deny the existence of a large bias in sighted testing is not scientific nor objective.

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

The powerful tool in audio is listening for tells - you ignore the flashiness of the the components, or the stature of the manufacturers; if some part of a track is made a mess of, it's not because "It's a bad recording!"; it's because the playback is faulty ... problem is, decades of building up a belief system about this has to be undone - and this could take a looong time, .

Science is not a belief system, Frank. Your approach to audio is.

[pkane2001]

36 minutes ago, fas42 said:

And all the times I don't hear a change - or the SQ gets worse, what's the 'magic' in my brain that determines which way the switches flick? You don't get to see the years and years I've been fooling around, doing this sort of stuff, getting extremely frustrated at not finding answers - and shutting everything down for long periods of time, because I'm too pissed off with it all ...

 

Could have avoided all the frustration if you didn't start out with the assumption that it's all magic, Frank ;) 

 

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

What I find remarkable is how "magical" this expectation bias is - it solves everything! It always gets the results one wants, whether to prove that someone else was fooled by this powerful force to believe in something "that wasn't there", or to ensure that one has the 'just right' reaction to something new that one personally is exposed to. I'm a bit of a sad soul in this regard - I have constantly been unimpressed, or irritated by rigs that are quite magnificent in their appearance, etc ... it appears that the universe was unfair to me, and didn't deal out the correct amount of this magic juice in my system ... bummer, eh?

 

If someone visits a famous tourist spot, and reports that a) it indeed was spectacular, was worthy of the fuss made of it; or b) that it was a disaster, because it had so many other tourists crawling all over it, like flies - how many times does someone say, "You're a victim of expectation bias!"

 

There's nothing magical about expectation bias -- it is a known and confirmed scientific fact. And you don't get the result you want, you're just reading too much into the name -- you frequently get the results that simply don't represent reality. The problem is, you don't know when those times are, so your magic is likely all in your head. 

[pkane2001]

41 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

"You don't know when those times are" implies that your senses are quite incapable of judging things, are completely untrustworthy. Yet we manage to keep ourselves alive for many decades, doing intrinsically dangerous things like driving vehicles; and much, much worse, in that if our senses fail us then we are in deep, deep poo. Why should audio be a strange exception, where the ear/brain is probably getting it wrong?

 

Are you really surprised? Human senses are fallible and inconsistent, especially because they are attached to a brain that frequently fills in the details that are not really there by interpolation and extrapolation. 

 

[pkane2001]

11 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Yes, "frequently filling in the details that are not really there by interpolation and extrapolation" is exactly what we want to exploit - the field of Auditory Scene Analysis is exploring this vigorously; how one can create an illusion by feeding hints to the brain - leaving the mind to do the rest. But, and it's a very big but, the hints have to have, adequate integrity. If not, then it's just noise - and no illusion forms.

 

Which is why it's essential to scrupulously reveal everything on a "bad recording" - if enough is in place, then the mind "allows itself" to be fooled - this is one of the markers of fully convincing SQ; that the brain refuses to give up the illusion that "something real is happening", no matter how much you try and show it that it's wrong. It was the most amazing thing about what happened to me 35 years ago - for comparison, my current setup is teasingly close to this at its best, but still reveals itself if I put my ear close enough to a driver.

So you want to fool people into thinking they hear something that doesn’t really exist? Personally, I’d much rather use  something that makes a real difference, rather than imagined. If only because everyone is different and has different imagination and a different brain. No magic and no fooling. That’s what scientific method provides.

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

If you do any research on how the body/brain works, you discover that the real world is a fraud, too . What the senses convey to our thinking part is a terrible facsimile of "what is real"; if there was no interpretation and "filling in the gaps" then you would be incredibly handicapped in everything you did; the amount of "in the moment" data is so poor you would struggle to remain alive. A pretty decent example is driving a car; you barely pay attention to the road, yet you can navigate quite safely down it - only the tiniest glimmer of information is required from time to time - because your mind is keeping a superb "virtual concept" of what's around you in focus, and relying on that.

 

All true, Frank, and this is exactly why relying on the brain to tell you anything about the audio system performance is taking chances of being fed a fake without even realizing it. Instead, we have access to much more dependable, repeatable, precise and sensitive measurement devices that don't generalize, don't interpolate or fill in the gaps. They just measure. 

 

[pkane2001]

10 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Wha?? I just said above that the brain is very good at picking 'fakes' - which is why when you stand right in front of a normal hifi going at a fair clip, you just laugh if someone asks if you're fooled - of course you're not! What matters is whether an illusion is manifested; anything else is just admiring the paint job on a bomb of car, the sort of thing teenagers do, .

 

The trouble with the concept of these great measuring devices, is that they are hopeless at separating out, and registering those qualities that the human hearing system is so sensitive to, that allow it to be able to tell its owner whether music coming from behind a curtain is the "real thing". Until measuring evolves to the standard that is necessary for these factors to be given numbers to, fairly easily, then no progress is going to be made in better understanding ...

 

The brain is very good at generating fakes, the part you're missing, Frank ;)

 

[pkane2001]

1 minute ago, botrytis said:

But, it could be in his head also. 

 

This part is not hard to determine, even without scientific instruments. One must be willing, first, to entertain the idea that not everything that one hears might be real. Blind faith in one's ability to hear staggeringly small differences blinds one to the facts, unfortunately :)

[pkane2001]

5 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

It's not "staggeringly small differences" that matter ... it's the absence of giveaways. The rule is, that if you don't notice any deficits in the SQ then it's, "good enough". So, what's a deficit? ... Anything, absolutely anything that reminds you that you're listening to a hifi rig - a sustained, effortless suspension of disbelief.

 

Added goodness is never the point ... it's the removal of all illusion breaking badness ...

So you no longer advocate resoldering connectors? In my book, that’s an example of a staggeringly small to non-existent difference in 99.9999% of the cases. Just to give you an example with a precise probability estimate :)

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

 

If the connector can be shown to add contact noise, then solder it. If it doesn't appear to be a problem, then leave it alone, until more urgent things are sorted.

 

How do you find out if it's a problem or not?

 

[pkane2001]

21 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Use the system, with a variety of albums, CDs - until you find a track that has an edgy, uncomfortable, irritating quality about it. Listen to it enough to get a good handle on how it sounds - and then reseat the specific connection and play the track again; best if you can do it while the music keeps playing. If there is any change to the SQ, in any manner, whether for better or worse, then you have located a weakness. Typically, the rough edge to the music will be sweetened to some degree; if there are many poor connections, then the improvement may be very subtle, because all the sub-par contacts need to fixed, for the full benefit to be heard.

Except… we already discussed how what you hear may not be real. So how do you find that you’re really hearing what you think you are?

[pkane2001]

7 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

Yes, it may not be real ... but repetition, over as long a time frame as you want, as many times as you want, will end up confirming if there's an issue. 35 years ago, I was driven nuts because I would clean the contacts, as recommended, but the corrosion conditions, and noise come back very quickly - try reseating, yep, it's gone bad again! It made sense that soldering would finally cure things, since all the rest of the circuit was working fine using this method - and, yes, the problem then went away.

 

If the SQ at some point is making you uncomfortable then that's a giveaway - you might try gritting your teeth, and putting up with noise and interference degradation ... but personally I want to solve it, permanently .

 

Repetition just ensures that you continue to hear the same thing, since your brain learns to listen (and to hear) what you want it to hear, regardless of what's actually coming in to the ears. Expectation bias... the subject of this thread.

 

[pkane2001]

2 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Or, it ensures that you don’t hear anything, since your brain learns to hear what you want to hear. Expectation bias… the subject of this thread. 
 

I couldn’t resist. 

 

I totally don't disagree 😄 Expectation bias is not a conscious process. 

 

[pkane2001]

5 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It's also the classic way objectivists convince themselves that certain things can't be heard :~)

 

That argument isn't new. Science knows how to objectively eliminate the influences of subconscious bias, or at least how to factor it out from test results. Saying that the "other side" is also subject to expectation bias simply says that everyone is human. Everyone is subject to it, and that's hardly news. Admitting that such subconscious influences are a fact of life and trying to act on this is something that appears to be foreign to the subjectivist side. Frank being an extreme example of this ;)

[pkane2001]

46 minutes ago, davide256 said:

I'm sorry but you just demonstrated you haven't developed proficiency with any musical instrument... no musician learns their craft without a lot of repetition.

Which is done to fine tune playing, weed out imperfections. develop repeatable fine quality performance.

 

I did, did I?  As one who's been playing the piano most of his adult life, I'd have to disagree. But I don't get how this is an argument (assuming it is one?) against building an expectation bias through repetitive reinforcement learning.

 

[pkane2001]

1 hour ago, fas42 said:

How about just saying, that the human organism is an extremely complex mechanism. Objectivists just want to reduce all behaviour to robotic, mechanical processes - so that they can get a handle on what's going on. Which is an excellent way of understanding some aspects - but it doesn't explain, everything.

 

We humans use a combination of processing to get through life - some things are set in concrete, like how to drive the same route to work each day; and other things "blow us away", because they are so outside the normal, yes, expectations. The smart thing to do, is to take notice, really take notice, of the latter - because that's how the human condition evolves ... .

 

The learning then occurs - as an example, how convincing SQ presents true mono recordings. Sub-par reproduction means the image will collapse into a side speaker when you move off centre; competent replay maintains the illusion even directly in front of one of the speakers. This happened to me decades ago; and repetition  taught me that I had to improve the integrity of a rig to achieve this; which is where I have pushed the current active speakers to. Now, I can stand in front of some impressive rig, and heave and grunt internally to try and force myself to believe that this setup should do this, because "It's so good!!" - but if it ain't happening, then it ain't happening.

 

How about just admitting that science has won over magic as an explanation for natural phenomena centuries ago, and leave it at that? ;)

 

[pkane2001]

58 minutes ago, fas42 said:

https://lab.cccb.org/en/arthur-c-clarke-any-sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic/

 

Or, "Any sufficiently advanced method of achieving something is indistinguishable from magic" ...

 

Clarke was talking about very advanced civilizations in that quote. Unless you’re an alien (are you?) your method simply doesn’t qualify.