Upside Down

Tonight's dinner included chicken strips and ketchup (by Organics). But the ketchup container is the type that is placed upside down making the top cover act as the bottom so that the ketchup flows down to the cover thus making it easy for a person to squeeze ketchup out. This way, the user does not need to bang the container to force the ketchup down as would occur in a regular container where the top is the top and the ketchup settles to the bottom.

My four-year-old son could not figure it out and kept placing the container in the traditional position and I had to reposition it. I had to explain to him that the container was designed to be placed upside down. But this appears counterintuitive to a young child who is used to seeing similarly-shaped containers placed right-side up with the cover on top. This shows the power of habit, familiarity, and ingrained perceptions. We see what we see in part because we are shaped by what we have seen before. It appears we do create frameworks and models and modes of perception that regulate what we see. Only with effort do we see beyond our established modes of perception, and thereby see that upside down ketchup container as it really is.