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Fellow PT bloggers Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have come out with a new book, The Invisible Gorilla, that's getting a good bit of early attention. The title comes from a highly influential experiment performed by Chabris and Simons about a decade ago. The long and short of the test was described by psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in the New York Review of Books:
Subjects are shown a video, about a minute long, of two teams, one in white shirts, the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. They are asked to count the number of aerial and bounce passes made by the team wearing white, a seemingly simple task. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a full-body gorilla suit walks slowly to the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and then walks out of the frame. If you are just watching the video, it's the most obvious thing in the world. But when asked to count the passes, about half the people miss it.
The bold text is my own, for those lacking the attention span to read Bloom's entire snippet. For those lacking the attention span to read at all, bold directive or otherwise, here's a video of the study (via invisiblegorilla.com):
As a person, it's hard to come to terms with the idea that other persons completely fail to notice one of the strangest sights that will ever cross their visual paths simply because they're focused on another task. Seems I'm not alone. In fact, when other psychologists asked people to read descriptions of this test, roughly 90 percent thought they'd notice the gorilla.
The result is a potentially dangerous disparity between what we think we'll notice and what we actually do, the authors write in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
If you believe you will notice unexpected events regardless of how much of your attention is devoted to other tasks, you won't be vigilant enough for possible risks. Consider talking or texting on a cellphone while driving. Most people who do this believe, or act as though they believe, that as long as they keep their eyes on the road, they will notice anything important that happens, like a car suddenly braking or a child chasing a ball into the street. Cellphones, however, impair our driving not because holding one takes a hand off the wheel, but because holding a conversation with someone we can't see—and often can't even hear well—uses up a considerable amount of our finite capacity for paying attention.
A major lesson here is that sometimes our instincts provide acceptable guidance, and sometimes—like when we assume we can drive while on our mobile phones—we'd be wise to consider the matter more carefully. In the Chronicle piece, the authors present this position as a hard contrast to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which, as Chabris and Simons put it, argues that "rapid intuitions often outperform rational analyses." They continue:
Without comparing how frequently intuitions outperform analysis for both genuine and fake items, there is no way to draw general lessons about the power of intuition. ... It is ironic that Gladwell (knowingly or not) exploits one of the greatest weaknesses of intuition—our tendency to blithely infer cause from anecdotes—in making his case for intuition's extraordinary power.
Gladwell has responded to criticism of his work in the past. Interested to see if he'll reply this time. Call it an instinct, but I suspect he will.
(Read my March 2006 profile of Gladwell here.)
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