Before You Look, Write Down What You Expect to See

Expectations help you make sense of incomplete information. They can also shape how something looks, sounds, or tastes. Naming what you expect creates an opportunity to notice where the experience doesn’t fit.

An expensive wine seems more enjoyable. A difficult-to-hear word becomes clearer after you see it written down. In both cases, information supplied before the experience can influence the experience itself. What you perceive depends partly on what you bring to it. PMC

You can’t approach every situation without expectations, and you wouldn’t want to. Experience gives you useful clues about what is likely to happen. The Observe habit starts with making those clues explicit: write down what you expect, then give the details that don’t fit a place in your notes.

What it looks like

You’re about to watch someone use a new page on your website. Your team has spent weeks discussing the main button. Is it prominent enough? Does the wording make sense?

You expect the person to have trouble finding it.

The session begins. They scroll down, pause, and return to the top. You write:

“Having trouble finding the button.”

Then they say something you weren’t expecting:

“I see where to start. I just can’t tell whether this is for someone like me.”

You look back at your note. You recorded a reason for the hesitation before the person gave you one.

The hesitation was real. But, the explanation came from you.

The detail that doesn’t fit your expectation may be the one most worth writing down.

The Same Wine, a Different Experience

In a wine-tasting experiment, Hilke Plassmann and colleagues changed the prices shown to participants while serving identical wines. Higher prices produced higher pleasantness ratings. Brain activity associated with experienced pleasure also increased, supporting the possibility that the price influenced enjoyment during tasting. PMC

A speech experiment offers another demonstration. Ediz Sohoglu and colleagues played degraded spoken words after displaying matching, mismatching, or neutral text. Matching text made the speech seem clearer. Providing useful prior information changed what listeners could make of a difficult signal. UCL Discovery

These examples make expectation easier to understand: information you already have can become part of how you experience information arriving now.

The Research

“Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
14 January 2008 (published online)
Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, Antonio Rangel

BY THE NUMBERS

A small group experienced the price manipulation while tasting. Twenty participants took part in the brain-scanning experiment.
One wine appeared at two very different prices. The same wine was presented as costing $5 or $45; pleasantness ratings were higher with the $45 price.
A second wine showed the same pattern. It was presented at $10 or $90 and received higher pleasantness ratings at $90. PMC

For Think Slower, the useful question is what you bring to an observation before it begins. A price, a colleague’s description, or a familiar explanation can give you a starting point. The challenge is remembering that you had a starting point at all.

Observe creates room to ask: What did I actually notice, and what did I expect it to mean? In the website session, that means preserving the hesitation without immediately deciding what caused it. In other situations, it may mean checking a first impression before allowing it to become your final description.

Same Song, Different Words

Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” gave some listeners an unexpected coffee reference. A lyric about her “long list of ex-lovers” was widely misheard as “Starbucks lovers.” A song about relationships suddenly seemed to include people particularly attached to their morning latte. abcnews.com

Once the coffee version has been suggested, it may become easier to hear. Reading the actual lyric can bring the intended words into focus. The recording stays the same; the listener brings different information to it.

That offers a playful connection to the speech research: matching written words helped listeners hear degraded speech more clearly. Prior information helped make sense of an unclear sound. discovery.ucl.ac.uk

Try the comparison with either of these songs. No familiarity is needed:

Taylor Swift — “Blank Space”: Listen to the chorus for the phrase about former relationships that some listeners mistake for a coffee reference.
Creedence Clearwater Revival — “Bad Moon Rising”: Listen to the final line of the chorus. The song warns of approaching trouble, but the line is famously misheard as directions to a bathroom.

Start by listening without the lyrics on screen. Write down what seems audible, including anything uncertain. Then read the official lyrics and replay the same passage. Does the intended wording become clearer? Can the misheard version still be heard?

The suggested alternatives have already introduced an expectation. Noticing whether they influence the experience is part of the exercise; everyone won’t hear the same thing.

An expectation gives us something to look for. A mismatch gives us something to investigate.

Beyond music, writing down an expectation before reviewing a report or observing a customer serves a similar practical purpose: it preserves a distinction between what was anticipated and what actually emerged.

DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE RESEARCH

“How Do Expectations Shape Perception?” (Trends in Cognitive Sciences) reviews how prior knowledge helps people interpret sensory information. The benefit is easy to appreciate: incomplete input becomes more useful when you have relevant experience to draw on. The review also distinguishes that broad finding from the different mechanisms that might explain it. UCL Discovery

One influential framework, predictive processing, proposes that the brain generates predictions about incoming information and uses mismatches to update them. In predictive-coding models, some neural signals carry the difference between expected and received input. That is more specific than saying the brain “mostly notices surprises,” and it doesn’t mean every unexpected detail reaches conscious awareness. The framework offers a possible account of how perception works; its reach as a general theory remains debated. UCL Discovery

The speech findings illustrate why expectations are useful. Relevant context helped listeners make sense of degraded words. Removing expectations would mean giving up information that can improve understanding. UCL Discovery

The workplace example involves interpretation as well as perception. A note about someone’s motives isn’t the same kind of evidence as a laboratory measure of speech clarity. The connection is a practical question to carry forward: how much of this description came from the event, and how much did I bring with me?

{Evidence flag: Specific expectation effects are well documented. They do not establish that expectations always override sensory evidence, or that one predictive-processing theory explains every effect.}

Make Room for What You Didn’t Expect

Before reviewing a report, watching a customer, or entering a conversation, finish this sentence:

“I expect to see…”

Then use the observation to check that expectation:

Record what happens. Capture the words, actions, or details before assigning a cause.
Mark what doesn’t fit. Give the unexpected detail its own line, even if you don’t yet know whether it matters.
Investigate the difference. Ask a neutral follow-up, check another example, or return to the original information.

Treat a mismatch as a valuable lead, not automatic proof that your expectation was wrong. It may turn out to be an exception, a misunderstanding, or the beginning of a better explanation. Keep it long enough to find out.