Home / Concept of the Week / Perceptual set
Concept of the Week · Episode 17
Our tendency to perceive what we expect to perceive: our understanding of the world shapes, in advance, what we see and hear.
Explained by Professor Peter Kinderman, clinical psychologist · First published 11 November 2026 · Updated 11 November 2026
Perceptual set is the readiness to perceive things in a particular way. Jerome Bruner and A. Leigh Minturn showed it in 1955 with an ambiguous figure that people read as the letter B when it sat among letters and as the number 13 when it sat among numbers, and Bruner set out the wider idea of perceptual readiness in 1957. Expectations, context, culture and what we have just been primed with all shape what we perceive. The duck and rabbit drawing, first printed in 1892 and popularised by Joseph Jastrow, is the classic demonstration that one image can be seen two ways.
Perceptual set. We see what we expect to see rather than what is actually there: our understanding of the world shapes what we perceive before we perceive it. Bruner and Minturn showed it in 1955 with a figure that reads as a B or a 13 depending on what comes before it. It is close kin to confirmation bias.
Peter's description on the show is that you do not see things as the photons determine, you see what you expect. Say duck, duck, duck often enough and the drawing becomes a duck. The same process sits behind confirmation bias and the halo effect, and behind the cultural expectations we bring to other people. It also explains why we are so bad at judging ourselves in a mirror, and why we give better advice to friends than to ourselves.
Hear it in context
Perceptual set, the midterms and cosmetic surgery abroad
Why do we see what we expect rather than what is there? The Concept of the Week is perceptual set, and it runs through the US midterms and the polls, what a conviction means for a family, and the psychology of cosmetic surgery abroad.
The duck and rabbit drawing: told it is a duck, most people see a duck. In Bruner and Minturn's 1955 study the same shape was read as a B among letters and as 13 among numbers.
Both come from expectations shaping what we take in. Perceptual set works at the level of perception itself; confirmation bias works at the level of which evidence we notice and believe.
Peter's Psych Hack is self-distancing: look at your situation as an observer would, or ask what advice you would give a friend. Research on Solomon's paradox (Grossmann and Kross, 2014) found that distancing closes the gap between the wise advice we give others and the poorer reasoning we apply to ourselves.
The primary literature behind the idea, for anyone who wants to check it. Also on Wikipedia.
Kinderman, P. (2026). Perceptual set. Concept of the Week, Experience: Analysing Newsmakers, episode 17, with Hilary Jeffs. https://www.experiencepodco.com/concepts/perceptual-set.html
Mirror neurons · Authenticity · Confirmation bias · Attribution theory · INUS conditions · Variable ratio reinforcement · The illusory truth effect · Role exit · Motivated reasoning · The bystander effect · The halo effect · The spotlight effect · Attentional blindness · Conspicuous consumption · Social comparison theory · Attentional capture
Concept of the Week is a regular feature of Experience: Analysing Newsmakers, the weekly podcast in which clinical psychologist Professor Peter Kinderman and communications expert Hilary Jeffs take the news apart to see what is driving it. Peter picks a psychological idea most of us have half-remembered wrong and explains what it actually shows. New episodes every Tuesday. Where to listen.