Experiment to Influence Perception

By: Yuna

The researcher is interested in color. At the first, the researcher has an assignment about making an experiment. The researcher is thinking about the experiment that she can do, and then she sees her candy on her table. Candy has a lot of different colors. The researcher thinks about the color, how color affects people's expectations about food quality. The researcher believes that color will affect people’s appetite, and also the expectations of the food. The researcher has a hypothesis, before she does her research, she thinks that when people see darker colors they will expect the food to be better. Everytime the researcher goes to a restaurant and the color of the restaurant is dark color, she will think that this restaurant’s food might taste good. She think that darker color let people feel more texture(質感), and that will make people feel the food quality will be higher. For testing if a hypothesis is accurate, she works on this experiment.

The researcher wanted to test that the dark color and light color affects people’s expectations about food quality. This experiment is testing the organization step of the perception process. The researcher is also testing will the darkness and the brightness of the decoration of the restaurant will affect people's expectations of the food quality. The variable being change in this research is the darkness or the brightness of the color. The result under the observation is if people's expectations of food quality will change. The researcher found a picture of a table in a restaurant. Then she changed the color of the tablecloth on the table using an app called “GIMP”. She edited the picture in GIMP, and selected the part with a tablecloth and changed the color of it. The researcher changed the tablecloth color to light green and dark green. The researcher made a scale of what people think the taste of this restaurant, “very bad” to “very good”. The researcher put the scale and the picture together. She chose to divide the research subject into two groups to ask, so one group saw the light green tablecloth, and another group saw the dark green one. The question is “你覺得這家餐廳的食物的味道會不會好吃？” The question is asking about what those research subjects think “will the food in this restaurant taste good”. After the research subjects were shown the picture they needed to choose their answer of the 5 choices under the picture. The researcher asked 59 people, there are 31 research subjects in the dark tablecloth group, and there are 28 research subjects in the light tablecloth group. Because there were 28 people in the light tablecloth group, and 31 people in the dark tablecloth group, so the researcher had to mathematically adjust the values for the light tablecloth group in order to be able to compare the data result.

The picture that the research subjects see.

Light Tablecloth Group

Dark Tablecloth Group

[Histogram.]

Looking at the data, this two group, they both have the answer “不難吃也不好吃” the most.

[Need a graph here.]

The researcher thinks that might mean that most people don’t really feel so much about the color that affects their appetite or food expectations. The reason that the researcher thinks that way is because there is only one table of the restaurant in the picture, so people didn't have so much feeling of darkness or brightness of the color. They didn’t eat the food in that restaurant before, so they can’t really tell what they think about the food. Compare two group, dark tablecloth group have 8 out of 31 people said that they think the food might be “好吃”, and light tablecloth group have 7.742 out of 31 people said that they think the food might be “好吃”. The dark tablecloth group have more than 1 person say it might be “好吃” then the light tablecloth group. From the result of the data, it seems like the difference from these two subjects group is not so different, it is quite similar. That means, the darkness or lightness of the color of the tablecloth doesn’t affect people’s expectations of the food quality.

In this research, the data shows that the darkness or brightness of the color of the tablecloth doesn’t affect people’s expectations of the food quality. For people that want to start a restaurant or people that have a restaurant don't really need to care so much about the darkness and the brightness of the color in the restaurant.

In order to improve the accuracy of this research, the researcher will make more difference in the darkness and lightness of the color, and also make the number of the subjects group the same. Also, she can try to get the numbers of the males, and females in the subjects group the same. The researcher didn't explain well to the research subjects, so the research subjects might have misunderstood that the restaurant belongs to the researcher, and this could have affected their responses. They might not want to say that it is bad because they think it is not really good to say it out. Some people will think that if you say something bad to the person that asked you, they will think it is not good, it might make people feel sad. The picture that the research shows to the research subjects only have one table, that might make people don't have so much feeling of the darkness and brightness of the color. Next time, the researcher will show the picture of the bigger section of the restaurant to the research subjects.