The Rawness

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I have been recording American Idol on my DVR, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet. I’m really not enthused about the show anymore after an incredibly lackluster last season. I prefer the criminally underrated sister show So You Think You Can Dance, but since Idol is the show people talk about at the water cooler, I feel obligated to keep up with it.

I’m not always good at picking who’ll win, but I can usually tell at least one type of singer who’ll always lose, and that would be the dominating strong starters. Whenever people start incredibly strong early on in the auditions, whether it’s Paris Bennett or Melinda Doolittle or whoever, they’re usually doomed to lose. The people who usually win Idol or any reality competition show for that matter are usually the ones who started off under the radar and consistently gave the impression of improvement. And the people who dominated or were frontrunners from the start usually don’t win. But why?

I think it has something to do with how our senses work. See, our senses aren’t geared toward noticing objects, smells and temperature. They’re geared toward noticing changes and contrast in objects, smells and temperature. It’s a subtle but important difference. The more the external stimuli change, the more our senses pick them up. For example, have you ever noticed that if you are sitting in a room, you don’t notice a certain smell? Yet if you leave the room and come back in, suddenly the smell is suddenly obvious? Same with temperature. If you just walk into a room, you’re more sensitive to the temperature because it’s a big change from the temperature outside, but once you’re in the same room long enough you notice the temperature less. With sound, we’re picking up vibrations, or movements in the air. Even when we’re watching still objects, what’s actually happening is that your eye is vibrating across the image. That’s right, our eyes are constantly vibrating on a minute level that we can’t notice, and this vibrating movement is what helps us see still objects. To illustrate this, there’s actually a laser projector that can project images onto an eyeball while tracking and matching the eyeball’s vibration. And what happens is that your eye only see the images for a split second and then they disappear. Color doesn’t exist by itself even. What we see as color is created by contrasting relationships - what the color is next to, what surrounds it. Fixed colors don’t exist. In a different context they will be changed completely.

As a survival mechanism, it makes sense for us to be more aware of things that are changing than things that are remaining the same. Paying extra attention to the changes in your environment lets you know when danger is afoot. At one point in human history there may have been human beings who gave static conditions the same importance as changing conditions, and if so, they’d have ended up weeded out of the gene pool. A new predator could have entered their field of vision and started moving toward them, and they wouldn’t pay extra attention to them. The smell of toxic chemicals could have entered a room and they wouldn’t have given it the exact same importance as the smell already in the room. Natural selection would have weeded them out. The fact that our senses register changes in conditions more than they register static conditions was an important survival tool that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce. We wouldn’t be here today if our ancestors’ senses didn’t work this way.

To our bodies, if a condition exists in our environment, remains there over time and still hasn’t injured or killed us, it starts getting categorized as safe.  By categorizing it as safe and ignoring it to a degree, this frees up our senses to focus on new elements that enter our environment or changes that happen around us, the things we have not categorized as safe yet. 

Here’s another way to illustrate it if you don’t believe me. Say I show you a pair of shoes, describe the brand, materials and craftsmanship and tell you the cost is $100. Then I tell you they were originally $700 last week. That $100 shoe would register as a great value. Now say I gave you the same description of the shoes, down to the brand, materials and craftsmanship, and told you the cost was $100, but I told you instead that the original price was $50. Now you’d feel like you were getting ripped off. Same shoe, same quality, same price, but you can’t judge it in a vacuum, you can only judge it in contrast to something else. How many times have you bought something at a price you normally wouldn’t just because it was a huge drop in price? Advertisers and retail people call this the contrast principle.

Or imagine two sibling students. One gets straight As. The other gets straight Fs. One day the A student comes home with her usual A, while the F student comes how with a surprising C for once. The A student has the higher grade, an A, but the F student’s latest grade will register more strongly and be more noticeable because it’s a greater change. This is unfair to the A student, because given that she’s already at the top, how much more can she improve? Maybe get an A+? That’s about it. It’s all about change, change, change, and when you start off with perfection, the only change you have available to you is downward change. So those are your two choices when you’re perfect: stay perfect and get taken for granted, or change in the downward direction and have it register negatively with people.

Despite thousands of years of technological and societal advancement, our senses still work the same way as they ever did.  And that goes a long way to explaining why top performers don’t win American Idol.  When we first see them, they overload our senses.  We go right from seeing a mediocre applicant and low-key moments to incredibly powerful vocal.  Our senses are incredibly stimulated.  Week after week of that brilliance, our senses categorize it as “safe” and become less responsive to it.  Since the room for improvement is so small, the only option they have to register as strongly with our senses is a drastic drop in quality, except that will register in a negative way, which further defeats the purpose of winning.

And this is why I actually cringe when an American Idol contestant knocks it out of the park too strongly during the audition phase. The judges will gush at first, rave, make a huge deal, and then their senses adjust to it and it all becomes a little less impressive each time. They start criticizing them for not improving as much as the other people (which is unfair because it’s harder to improve on excellence than it is to improve on mediocre or average). The audience also takes their greatness for average and starts voting for the improving underdogs instead. In every season of American Idol that I’ve seen (I haven’t seen them all), it’s never the early leader that wins the whole shebang. It’s the biggest improver. Because as I described, we’re programmed to primarily notice change, and it’s harder for excellence to change in a positive direction. Even Kelly Clarkson, the most successful Idol to date, did not dominate right away. She was considered underwhelming by the judges at first and improved a lot every week. There was a recent marathon of America’s Next Top Model during New Year’s and I noticed the same phenomenon. The early favorites faded into the background in favor of the biggest improvers.

So when I finally get around to watching Idol on my DVR, and I see the knockout supertalent that gets pegged early on to win the whole thing, I know they’ll end up losing eventually. Expectations get set too high, and the possibility of much positive change happening in their performance are slim.

As unfair as it seems, overachieving and early excellence don’t always pay off.

(2 votes, average: 2 out of 5)

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