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This post was co-authored with John Vervaeke
I (Gregg) was driving down the highway the other day, and was behind a truck advertising for Walgreens. It described the pharmacy as being at the corner of where you could find Instant Points and Endless Rewards. I thought it made for an interesting contrast with their more common slogan, which is that Walgreens exists at the corner of Happy and Healthy. It is a contrast that enables us to make the point we want to make in this post, which is to help you see the difference between salience and relevance, and why it is so important for these two aspects of your experience being aligned.
Let us first introduce the concept of perspectival knowing. Although you may not have heard the term, you are nonetheless already intimately familiar with the process. Simply put, it refers to knowing via taking a perspective. Take a minute, look around you. As you do so, you are engaged in perspectival knowing through vision. What do you see? We call that the “salience landscape.” And the objects or patterns or movements that caught your attention were the most salient things in that landscape.
Salience refers the quality of being noticeable or prominent. Relevance means the quality of being appropriate, connected, or important in a particular context. These two concepts are closely related, and we want what is relevant to be what is salient. However, that is not always so. To get a hint as to why, consider the following two questions: What is salient in my attentional landscape? What should I be paying attention to, given my core values?
As you consider these questions, let’s be clear about a basic feature of how perception works. You perceive the world via a combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up” elements. Top-down elements include things like directing your attention and the schema (i.e., maps or models) that one has for perceiving the world. The fact that you decided to shift your attention and look around is an example of top-down processes.
Bottom-up elements refer to the input data that is coming in through the senses. Have you ever been frightened by an unexpectedly loud “bang”? An unexpected large shift in sound is a bottom-up signal that grabs your attention. Before you are even conscious of hearing anything, your body will already have started to react, orienting toward the sound and adopting a defensive stance. This is called the “acoustic startle response,” and it is a built-in reflex. Our bottom-up sensory systems also learn to become sensitized or habituated to elements over time, depending on our drives and the experiences that we have.
We now have the background we need to make the point we want to make. To live life well, it is crucial that, overall, what is salient in your attentional landscape is relevant to how you want to live your life. This is a crucial point for living well in the modern world because you are constantly being bombarded by many things, including advertisements and other “click bait” designed to be salient and grab your attention, but which are not relevant for wise living.
Now let’s return to the Walgreens ads. What is the message of instant points and endless rewards? Clearly, the basic message is that Walgreens is associated with getting all your needs met. Points are money, and rewards are pleasures, and the raw message is that Walgreens is where you find endless amounts of both.
Of course, you know that is not literally true. But that does not matter. The goal of advertising is to grab your attention via bottom-up means. And often the best way to do that is via bottom-up salience signals. Why do you think sex sells? It brings attention to the product and makes subconscious associations, even if they are not actually relevant.
This brings us to Walgreens primary slogan, which is what is found at the corner of happiness and health. One of the constructs that UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, defines is well-being. It posits that the core dimension of well-being that stretches from the very best life to the very worst can be framed by two key elements: functioning and subjective evaluation. Functioning refers to the processes that allow for effective self-organization across the biological, psychological, and social dimensions of existence. Put simply, your biological, psychological, and social health can range from optimal to good to adequate to poor to completely dysfunctional. Subjective evaluation can range from a deep-seated contentment with a meaningful life to feeling pretty good to feeling OK to feeling poor to feeling completely miserable.
This means that we can essentially define well-being in terms of being functionally healthy and meaningfully happy. And, given our reflective values, well-being is highly relevant. That is, when we consider how we want to live and what is good, well-being is one of the key concepts we should be focused on, both in our individual lives and when we consider how our actions are impacting the world.
Now consider the idea of endlessly consuming products we don’t need. That is not a valued state of being, at least from our perspective. But that is the message of instant points and endless rewards. Thus, the two ads give us an interesting angle to see the difference between what is salient and what should be relevant.
To conclude, salience and relevance are key aspects of perspectival knowing. Salience draws our attention, and relevance is what is actually important. We hope you can see why aligning these two are crucial, especially in this modern attention-capture economy where salience cues that are irrelevant to healthy living are everywhere.
We encourage you to reflect on your values to be clear about what you think should be relevant and cultivate life practices that minimize salient but irrelevant or even harmful distractions and work to bring what is authentically relevant onto your salience landscape. This skill is one of the keys to wise living in our modern world.
John Vervaeke, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series, "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis."
