“It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us.”
In what is perhaps one of the best known psychology experiments conducted, subjects are asked to carefully count the passes of a basketball made between a team wearing white shirts and one wearing black shirts. About half the subjects fail completely to notice when a woman wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the screen, pounds her chest, and walks off!
The authors of the experiment, Chabris and Simons, argue in The Invisible Gorilla that this captures a cognitive illusion, a situation in which our intuition leads us astray. In this case, almost all of us believe that were such a situation to happen to us, we would notice the gorilla. In reality, they suggest, looking does not imply seeing if our attention is directed elsewhere. The same problem occurs when we talk on cell phones while driving: we all believe we will still see what is going on in front of us, when in reality we emphatically do not.
They list several such illusions, including attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. We do not see everything we look at or remember everything we have seen; we massively overestimate our abilities, particularly those of us who are worst at something; we say we could explain how a zipper works or why the sky is blue, but when asked cannot; we believe spurious causation claims with no grounding in evidence, as in the case of autism and vaccinations; and we believe there must be an easy way to unlock vast abilities in our brains.
We tend to intuitively believe in our abilities, whether multitasking or memory, yet experiments like the invisible gorilla or one in which 50% of subjects failed to notice when experimenters replaced their conversational partner with a different person while they were distracted cast significant doubt on these claims. Intuition, Chabris & Simons argue, may well be useful in the Gladwellian sense, but the only way to know whether it is accurate or illusory is to conduct randomized experiments. In this sense, they are firmly on the side of Banerjee and Duflo, though in a different context.
At heart, though, their book is one of stories; for every claim they make they tell multiple stories of experiments run and demonstrations seen, and so the book is both entertaining and educational. Our intuitions can guide us well, often for reasons unknown to our conscious selves, but a little humility would do us all good, instead of assuming our intuitions will always steer us correctly.
Looking to understand more of the psychology of illusions? Keep reading (or in the UK or Canada). Or, join the Subtle Illumination email list to your right!