Looking at a tough hill to climb? Depends on your point of view

Looking at a tough hill to climb? Depends on your point of view
People tend to overestimate the steepness of slopes -- and psychologists studying the phenomenon have made a discovery that refutes common ideas about how we perceive inclines in general.

For more than a decade, researchers thought that our judgment was biased by our fatigue or fear of falling, explained Dennis Shaffer, associate professor of psychology at Ohio State University's Mansfield campus. We perceive climbing or descending hills as difficult or dangerous, so when we look at an incline, our view is clouded by the expected physical exertion or danger of traversing it.

For a study in the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, Shaffer and then-undergraduate student Mariagrace Flint uncovered a contradiction, when they compared how we perceive the angle of stairs versus escalators.

"We found that people tend to overestimate a slant even when they are looking at an escalator, and climbing or descending it