Cosmic Habituation

The idea of cosmic habituation is a very new and obscure idea. However, our story does not start here. It starts with a study done by a man by the name of Schooler. His study showed that when participants were shown a video of someone robbing a bank. They got a clear shot of his face and then afterward they were asked to give a description of the man. Then seperate participants were shown the same video and then asked to pick the person out in a police line-up. What Schooler discovered was that people were, on average, 30%-40% less accurate when they were forced to pick the person out in the line up. Now this is where things get weird. When Scooler went to repeat the study months later, the findings went down. There was still a difference in accuracy but it was not near as significant as the first time. So he repeated again and again the experiment came back less and less significant. Schooler had some ideas. One of the ideas was that regression to the mean. Regression to the mean basicaly means that over time your results will get closer and closer to the actual average. In essence it meant that Schooler had simply gotten lucky, and that his new test results were going back to the actual average. However this didn't explain why it continued to get smaller and never stopped. Also other studies that were being repeated at the time were having this same problem. Not that there studies were regressing to the mean or even getting smaller, but that what they had found the first time was changing overtime and the studies, as they were repeated, were starting to prove against their findings. It was at this point that Schooler hypothesized that maybe as we study the universe around us it changes as if it were changing because of our studies. This affect was coined as cosmic habituation. There are undoubtedly problems with the theory. For example, if this affect does exist then if we study the affect we should discover that it to would change, maybe making our second and third recreations of a study, perhaps more powerful or with more proof. Also, it too would probably change making it impossible to track or study. So there really is no way to study this or even see if its real, it's always going to be a hypothetical assumption and there will most likely never be any proof. I believe it's a very creative idea but it advocates that there is no point studying the universe around us because it will be always changing.