Salience and Visibility

If you have traveled extensively, you may have experienced being in a country where the people look very different from you. Perhaps you’re black and you’ve traveled in Asia. Perhaps you’re white and you’ve traveled to Africa. You may have had the experience of people staring, seeking you out to make contact, or take pictures with you. People notice what stands out, what’s right in front of them. This makes them easily distracted by the obvious, the salient. ‘Salience’ refers to how much something differs from its surroundings. Whether it sticks out. To what extant it’s an outlier. With regard to people, it’s often physical features that stand out – an exceptionally tall or short person, a person of a different skin color to others, an unusual hairstyle, a prominent mole or birthmark. For objects, it could be unusual materials, shape or size.

Non-physical things can also have salience as well- including memories, events, writing, etc. Years later a person may strongly remember the smell of paper napkins catching fire at a barbecue, but not remember what was served. In personal relationships, things that are unusual also stand out- a friend may be remembered for a time that they went above and beyond to help out in a time of need, but the numerous times that they underpaid a bill at a restaurant may get forgotten.

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains may have evolved to be sensitive to salience as an efficient mechanism for identifying and sorting relevant information, such as threats on the landscape, or attractive partners, etc. It’s yet another heuristic that we use to evaluate information: when something is salient (e.g. different, unusual) we place a greater weight on it, to the exclusion of other, sometimes more-relevant information.

People remember what they notice, and they notice things that are unusual, or rare. I sometimes think that the perfect disguise for a spy would be a loud outfit, brightly-colored wig, and cartoon glasses. The visibility of the disguises would make them so salient at the expense of everything else – such as basic features such as height, weight/build, and gait – that witnesses would be unable to identify them outside of the costume. Conversely, the movie cliché of two spies talking on a bench, back to back, always seems like something that would attract more attention, since rarely do people communicate without making eye contact.To the casual observer it would appear that each man is talking to himself, which is surely to attract more, not less, scrutiny and therefore be more, not less, memorable.

Recognizing that something is salient is a good first step to being more critically aware. As humans we have a tendency to over-emphasize salience in forming assessments. We can over-weight a salient feature and under-weight non-salient features, regardless of their respective relevance.  To counteract this, identifying what is salient and therefore over-weighted for noticeability and memory can allow you to better neutralize its influence in your decision-making.