To understand a mirror you have to change your psychology. Why does a mirror seem to invert left and right but not top and bottom? That is, when you hold an open book up to a mirror, why are the letters of the text backward but not upside down, and why is your left hand the double’s right and your right the double’s left?
When we look into a mirror we imagine ourselves reversed left to right, as if we had walked around behind a pane of glass to look through it. This conventional perspective is why we cannot explain what is happening with a mirror. To understand a mirror’s image, you have to psychologically reverse the way you perceive your image. Imagine your nose and the back of your head reversed, through the mirror. You have to imagine yourself reversed, “squashed” back to front. Stand in front of the mirror with one hand pointing east and the other west. Wave the east hand. The mirror image waves its east hand. Its west hand lies to the west. Its head is up and the feet are down. Once you look at a mirror with this perspective, you gain an understanding about the axis of the mirror, which is the imaginary line on a mirror about which a body rotates. We have difficulty understanding the mirror until we change our perspective. Similarly, we sometimes have difficulty coming up with ideas until we change our psychology. Early nomadic societies were all based on the principle of “getting to the water.” Only when they reversed this to “how can we get the water to come to us” did civilization begin to flourish.
An easy way to change your thinking patterns when faced with a problem is to first list all your assumptions about the problem. Then reverse your assumptions and try to make the reversals work.
Following is a thought experiment about reversing a store policy. After you read the problem, try to come up with ideas before you read further.
Thought Experiment
A clothing retailer is concerned about the rate of garment returns. According to the store policy, a customer who returns a garment must receive a cash refund. Reverse this policy so that it says: if a customer returns a garment, the store doesn’t have to give a cash refund. Can you come up with ideas to make this reversal into a practical solution?
What idea can you suggest?
SCROLL DOWN TO COMPARE YOUR IDEA
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What can the store give the customer instead of a refund? One
idea is to offer the customer a gift certificate worth 110 percent of the
original purchase price. In effect this gives the customer a 10 percent
reward for returning the unwanted garment.
The policy would allow the store to keep most of the cash, and the
customers would likely be happy with the reward. The real payback
would occur when the customer returned with the gift certificate. A
customer who returned a $100 garment would receive a gift certificate
for $110. Psychology predicts that, when the customer returns to the
store, he will go to the higher priced garments. For example, instead
of shopping for a $100 garment, he will be attracted to the $200 garments
because, in his mind, it would “cost” him only $90. What a deal!
MICHAEL MICHALKO
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