We've learned a lot from the viral image.
The viral image holds a lesson in why people disagree—and how we can learn to better understand each other.
It was not a tranquil time. People argued with their friends about the very basics of reality. Spouses vehemently disagreed. Each and every person was on one side or the other side. It could be hard to imagine how anyone in their right mind could hold an opinion different from your own.
I’m talking, of course, about “the dress,” which went viral on Feb. 26, 2015. To recap: A cellphone picture of a wedding guest’s dress, uploaded to the internet, sharply divided people into those who saw it as white and gold and those who saw it in black and blue—even if they were viewing it together, on the very same computer or phone screen.
The notorious dress, under natural lighting conditions, is unambiguously black and blue, for (almost) everyone who saw it in person, or in other photographs. It was just the one image, snapped by a mother of a bride and uploaded to Tumblr by one of her daughter’s friends, that caused so much disagreement. How can it be that there is such strong consensus about the colors of the actual dress, but such striking disagreements about its colors in this particular image? This is not a debate about people seeing different shades of gray: blue and gold are categorically different colors, not even in the same neighborhood on the color wheel.
