What's Missing?

In his television special The System, illusionist Darren Brown tosses a fair coin 10 times in a row, getting heads each time. During this whole sequence, he is confident and in control. After 6 tosses, he even says: Four more to go, and I’ll stop. And then, he does exactly that!

Impressive. How does he do that?

(Spoiler in this paragraph!) Well… As we watch Brown toss 10 heads in a row, we are inevitably focused on what we can see. However, the trick involves what we don’t. It’s not about what’s there… it’s about what’s missing. He later reveals that what he did was possible because he tossed the coin hundreds of times, over many hours, but we, the audience, got to observe only the last trial, where he ultimately achieved his goal.

It wasn’t supernatural. It was a result of probability.

Brown comments: “We can only know what comes from our own limited experience. And our experience can often be very far from the truth.”

Let’s go one step further. What if, instead of one person, many people simultaneously tossed coins. With enough people, some would definitely toss 10 heads in a row on their first try. But if we mainly observe those people, then their achievements would seem much more remarkable than they actually are. And our experience would urge us to learn from them.

Unfortunately, the question of what’s missing goes well beyond tossing coins. Much of our experience in life is based on selected information.

For example, we don’t get to see and learn from many failed attempts. This can lead to a pretty biased perception of what causes success.

And while we clearly see the outcomes, most processes behind them remain hidden. So, we don’t know how certain results really come about.

We also typically don’t get to observe counterfactuals, that is, what would have happened had we made another choice. This makes it difficult to learn what causes what.

We end up discounting a relevant part of the picture, because we trust and rely on our experience too much. In Educating Intuition, one of us (Robin Hogarth) writes, “The fact that we learn so easily from what we see has its downside. We don’t always think to learn from what we do not see, and, even if such information is available, we may still ignore it.”

When it comes to experience, out of sight easily and convincingly becomes out of mind. By identifying and considering what’s missing in our experience, we stand to make fewer errors of judgment and gain essential insights for our important decisions.

We reveal and discuss the wrong lessons we learn from experience in our new book The Myth of Experience.