The Blue Dot Effect
What is The Blue Dot Effect and what could it have to do with not only the end of S2 but the fact that the Chengs' Chinese restaurant is all over the S3 promotional stuff?
In psychology, The Blue Dot Effect is a theory that relates to many Good Omens-y things: recognition/discernment, a person's concept of reality, and how people approach both safety and relationships.
The Blue Dot Effect holds that the more often people are exposed to something? The less they will actually be able to nice and accurately discern the truth about that thing-- sometimes with dangerous consequences.
The name comes from the initial experiment, where researchers took a whole bunch of non-colorblind people and showed them, over time, round after round of pages of dots in shades of blue to purple. They asked the people in the experiment to circle all the dots that were a shade of blue. What they found is both fascinating and terrifying.
For about the first two hundred or so rounds of this? People did great. They easily picked out which shades of the dots were blue without a problem. When there were thousands of dots to choose from and the conditions of the experiment were largely the same, repeatedly, over and over? People were picking out those blue dots without issue. But when, after about 200 or so rounds of this, researchers disrupted the pattern? The participants' ability to recognize colors began to seriously decline.
Even when the researchers told them that blue dots would be less frequently occurring in these next batches? People still began to circle dots that were actually purple and claim they were blue. Even when prompted with motivation, like money, for being able to accurately recognize the blue dots? The ability of nearly everyone in the experiment to determine the blue dots had changed.
The people participating in the experiment had essentially slowly come to become convinced that what was, to anyone else, shades of blue were actually shades of purple. Naturally, when the results of this study kept being the same upon repeated experiments? Psychologists conducted it with different things in the place of the dots.
They showed faces with neutral or innocent expressions and ones with almost comically sinister ones and told people to circle the threatening ones, for instance. They measured information and discovered that the prevalence of things like fake news can be helped along by the Blue Dot Effect. Every single thing they measured like this yielded the same results as the dot experiment. Why?
Because people are hard-wired to look for patterns. It's an innate trait designed to help us be able to recognize the difference between safety and threat so we can survive. The problem becomes that our pattern-recognition capabilities can also be hijacked and weaponized against us-- either by people seeking to deceive us or by our own over-confidence in our ability to accurately judge a situation.
The Blue Dot Effect proved that, even when we might otherwise feel safe, we have a tendency to seek out patterns-- whether or not they are actually there-- that we believe fit our interpretation of what has been presented to us as true.
If we can go from easily recognizing blue dots, over and over, without issue, to then being conditioned from repetition into seeing those blue dots as purple dots to such a point that we're convinced that blue is purple? That explains an awful lot about how people come to believe things that are objectively not true, right-- even in the face of evidence to the contrary?
To give you an example of Blue Dot Effect in action that is relevant to the "what do you see?" discernment-happy Good Omens that this post is about?
Most of this fandom seems to believe that Aziraphale does not drink coffee. This is not true and can be easily disproven without a shred of doubt by no less than three separate scenes in Good Omens, including one of the biggest food-related ones:
In 1.01, Aziraphale is shown to have drunk a half a coffee while lunching with Crowley at The Ritz. Later on in S1, on the way back from Tadfield, he and Crowley are shown to have stopped at a diner at night. Aziraphale has a mug in front of him with no tea accessories and he's eating a dessert. As we saw in The Ritz scene in 1.01? He likes a coffee with his dessert.
So, that's two scenes of Aziraphale drinking coffee, and that's all before we get to S2 when his entire argument while gobsmacked by the offer just presented to him to return to Heaven was summed up by him immediately asking: where would I get my coffee?
Put that way? It's clear that Aziraphale is like most humans and drinks multiple kinds of hot beverages, right? So, why does most of the fandom think this clearly blue dot is a purple one? Because the discernment experiment that is this story was designed a bit that way.
Because, as The Blue Dot Effect shows? We humans of Earth are designed to look for patterns from what we observe in front of us and we can be easily distracted away from recognizing at what it is that we are truly looking... This is, of course, also how magic works, and Good Omens is a narrative magic trick with magic itself as a recurring element.
If we're in a place where we are only looking at what is immediately, very blatantly observable? We will do things like ignore the coffees in front of Aziraphale in S1 that he had clearly been drinking but that we didn't directly see him sip in favor of, say, the drink that we did see him sip: tea.
Most people ignore the fact that tea is a drink that is meant to calm people down and Aziraphale was stressed by Muriel's arrival. He made Muriel a tea because a cup of tea was also what he wanted himself in that moment-- just as he made himself a hot cocoa in S1 when he settled in to read Agnes Nutter's book. None of this says that Aziraphale never drinks coffee but our cognitive biases are triggered into thinking 'this proper Englishman only drinks tea' which is nonsense. Plenty of English people drink coffee and plenty of Americans drink tea.
What has happened is that a couple of people came to the conclusion that Aziraphale doesn't drink coffee and started posting that as fact. They put it into fanfics. They put it into meta posts. And other people who maybe hadn't thought about it as much saw that and said 'oh, ok, this person who is posting a lot about Good Omens must know its canon well' and assumed that Aziraphale Doesn't Drink Coffee was an established thing in the series... and then they started to analyze the story using that thing that is not at all true as established fact in their analysis.
Aziraphale Doesn't Drink Coffee is the 'humans only use 10% of their brain' of the Good Omens fandom. If you don't really think about it much, it seemed true enough and so got repeated enough that it became something most believed to be true, even though it's easily disproven and mah point is dolphins that if we humans of Earth got something in this story as simple as Aziraphale's beverage preferences wrong because we didn't look at it close enough?
What else do you think the show with themes of discernment and structured with the innocent deception of a magic trick just put right in front of our faces for two seasons that some failed to notice? 😉
The Blue Dot Effect is also related to that other big, famous experiment mentioned in Good Omens: Pavlov's Dogs.
They say the ducks are so used to being fed by secret agents that they've developed Pavlovian reactions to them... and all the angels and demons responding to Aziraphale ringing a bell in S2 are references to Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning experiment, in which he trained dogs to associate the sound of a bell with food, causing them to salivate whenever a bell was rung. Humans are no different.
Anyway, this is where I mention the importance of the fact that, in addition to the bookshop, there is a business on Whickber Street in Good Omens that we have seen on repeat, over and over, throughout many different scenes-- in both seasons and across a bunch of different recent time periods.
Like the bookshop, it is a fixture in the neighborhood-- the most noticeable and visually arresting business that has never changed in the whole of the modern era of the story: the Chengs' Chinese restaurant.
This is also the business that has been all over the promotional stuff for S3-- where we are seeing the first hints of just how important it is. The first changes we've ever seen related to this business are, eerily, just happening now in the story. The lanterns that have hung just outside the front of their restaurant are, in the S3 promotional stuff, now coming all the way up the alley towards what we think of as Whickber Street proper.
Some of the lanterns are on the side of the bookshop. Entire businesses-- the Bilton Skaggs hat shop; Goldstone's magic shop-- are gone. Goldstone's is replaced by a place called Star Luck that also features Chinese characters on its sign. The effect is that the mysterious businesses to the south of the bookshop-- the Chengs' restaurant and Oriental Delight/Lucky Snake Grocery-- are slowly consuming Whickber Street.
It's like the Chinese restaurant is now the center of the neighborhood and is slowly eating the rest of it alive.
And this is where we get back to the screenshot of Ms. Cheng in S2 standing in front of that restaurant with some blue dots that I put at the top of this post about The Blue Dot Effect.
If I wanted in a story to make a point about how mindful living can help us avoid things like The Blue Dot Effect and make us more discerning people?
If I already had a story in which basically every major plot moment was the result of someone being so in their own heads that they were calling blue dots purple and getting it all completely fucking wrong? Where much of the humor is derived from just how much we humans of Earth can fail to have the slightest Clue as to what is happening in front of us?
And if I were doing that in a story with a magic motif where the entire thing is a narrative magic trick telling its story out of chronological order and where every conceivable trick was being deployed to ultimately expose the audience's own cognitive biases to underscore these themes?
And if I were doing that by intentionally setting up a story to ultimately play the audience for suckers to get across the point that we humans of that pale blue dot Earth tend to get overwhelmed by our unmet needs and find ourselves fooled if we let our insecurities and anxieties overrun our curiosity and intellectual abilities?
I would sure as hell not just have the main character be the trying-to-live-mindfully The Angel of The Eastern Gate but I would show every single person in the audience that-- speaking of mindfulness?-- Chinese restaurant with its blueish lights constantly on in the front windows so many times that they would then basically all fail to recognize it when, in S2? They met the owner of the restaurant for the first time as she was standing in front of her business and around her was what? Not those front window lights...
...just a bunch of fucking blue dots. 😂
And I would also very much then make the point of this same scene be how the person most easily tempted into coming to The Meeting Ball was then Blue Dot-laden Ms. Cheng, who signed herself and her husband (and, ultimately, also their kid) up for what she thought was a business association meeting without a single hesitation. Her only question was what time this total disaster was going to start lol. Why?
Because Ms. Cheng is a human of Earth, too. Because she didn't stop to think about why her rich neighbor who had never once in all the couple of decades that Ms. Cheng has been running this restaurant decided to host the monthly business association meeting. Or why he was going around the neighborhood, desperate for attendees. She didn't think about how there was something weird about this pattern. She just identified a blue dot as really purple because it fit her needs in that moment-- just like we all sometimes do.
The Covid-19 pandemic is canon in Good Omens and, during it, a lot of anti-Asian hate began to increase. Among the most targeted people across Western countries were people exactly like Ms. Cheng-- owners of Asian restaurants, who had absofuckinglutely nothing to do with the pandemic. Ms. Cheng and her husband have a business they need to succeed to survive and a young daughter to provide for and protect.
Aziraphale is her neighbor. He's always been kind to her. He speaks perfect, fluent Cantonese to her in what Ms. Cheng can recognize is an effort to show her respect and make her feel like she and her family fit in their community. He lives right near her and is a frequent customer. He is undoubtedly kind to her daughter. He has money and status in the community and his personalized attention to her makes her feel like her and her family are safer if they associate with him.
In general, she is not wrong but it's worth mentioning that someone providing you a bit of personalized attention should not stop you from asking what, exactly, is in it for them-- especially when something about the situation is a bit odd. After all, while Aziraphale didn't mean anyone on Whickber Street any harm? That's not always true of people who single out the lonely, the afraid, and the frustrated with a bit of attention...
...it's literally the story of how Crowley got involved with an abuser and wound up in Hell.
Just an interesting thing for Good Omens to reference with Ms. Cheng and the Blue Dot Effect because not only is she and her business suddenly leapfrogging over all the rest of Whickber Street to take center stage in a sea of "what do you see?"-themed teasers and promotional stuff for S3? But she was actually also the focus of another major discernment-themed scene in S2-- one that went straight for what was coming in the end of that season, which then set up S3. This scene:
Ms. Cheng is the only character who noticed what was happening at the other blue dot on Whickber Street-- Give Me Coffee or Give Me Death. What stops Ms. Cheng on the doorway is not what our eyes are first drawn to in the scene. Our eyes are trained to follow Crowley and his movement over to Nina sets our eyes on these two, recognizable characters. Ms. Cheng does see them-- but they aren't what she is looking at.
Look closer and you see that a demon from Shax's group is standing in the bottom right of the frame. He's a big guy, wearing weapons, a gas mask, and a Kevlar vest, and he's staring at Crowley, who doesn't see him there.
To Ms. Cheng, this guy looks like a terrorist-- because, really, he was. He was fixated on Crowley, and the level of militarization of his look suggested that he posed a threat not to just to Crowley and Nina but to all of Whickber Street.
Again: Ms. Cheng saw a demon in the street in front of the coffee shop that posed a threat to all of Whickber Street and was stalking Crowley... but which Crowley was too distracted to see was right there...
Seems a bit relevant to the end of S2, eh?
