#Dressgate and the Power of the Emotional Collective

I'm feeling a bit emotionally drained today. Last night was a bit of a rollercoaster.

My partner and I were relaxing on the sofa, catching up on our social networks and news when we started to notice that many of our friends were posting photos of a dress:

The dress was unremarkable and not very attractive in my opinion, but it had attracted all sorts of attention. All I saw was a poorly shot white and gold dress. Meh. I showed it to my partner and he shrugged:

"What's the big deal about a black and blue dress?"

I was perplexed, "Huh? That dress is white and gold."

He laughed at me like I was trying to trick him, "Very funny. It's black and blue. There is no white nor gold in that dress."

For the next few hours, we argued with one another and many others on Twitter, Facebook, Vine, and other platforms over the actual colour of the dress. It seemed ludicrous to both of us that that dress could be any colour other than what we individually perceived.

This was mind-blowing and I felt a rush as I dug deeper and deeper into trying to figure out what was happening. The phenomenon was hitting every pleasure centre of my brain. My heart raced, my cheeks flushed, I focused deeply in on the task, and I felt a sort of high. When it was revealed what was happening - the dress is blue and black and it was the psychology of colour constancy that tricked some of our brains to believe the dress was a different colour - it was almost a let down. As both of our levels of dopamine fell, we completely crashed.

I tweeted:

In his 2013 book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger points to High Arousal Emotions physiologically encouraging sharing. We are actually more prone to sharing when we are in this states of high emotional arousal, and awe - the emotion that was definitely triggered from the discovery our eyes were deceiving us - is one of the highest states of emotional arousal we can possibly feel.

The power of #dressgate is in the arch of the experience:

1. We see a dress and have no expectation (in fact, many people's first thought was, "What's the big deal?");
2. We find out that someone else sees a different dress, which throws our own perspective into question;
3. This leads us to share our dilemma in order to make sense of it all and find answers;
4. We then connect with a broader real-time discussion where there are people who align with our perspective and people who don't, creating a sense of group and belonging. We make alignments and use things like #teamwhiteandgold to create Social Currency;
5. Which leads to the phenomenon spreading even further through networks as the Social Currency grows and the idea becomes more and more Public.

#Dressgate was almost a perfect storm of contagiousness. Social Currency, Emotion, Public, and even Storytelling was involved (the phenomenon became even more interesting when we found out the back story on the dress). Could it be recreated? Probably not. But what it does demonstrate beautifully is the power of an emotional collective - what happens when we experience something mind-blowing or emotionally arousing in real-time.

At the heart of it, the internet is about human connection. And it really doesn't get much better than this.

-------------

post-script: As what happens when our dopamine rush subsides, prolactin levels rise and androgren receptors fall - in other words, we're all feeling a little 'dirty' about this today - we're going to want to withdrawal from this for a while. I'm seeing lots of the irritability happen on Twitter and Facebook today, post-high. Don't worry, it's natural. ;)