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By Root 523 0

through the middle of a room in which there was a studio audience of people who thought that they were trying out for an NBC reality show. We arranged for a real New York basketball team to participate, but when I saw how small the room was and how close the audience members would be to the area where Chris would walk across the stage, I became concerned that the effect would not work. So I instructed our basketball players to really ham up their dribbling and passing and to emulate the Harlem Globetrotters with some very animated and vocal play. As well, I divided the studio audience into two groups, one of whom would count the number of passes by the white-shirted players and the other half the number of passes by the black-shirted players. Finally, I had them count the passes out loud. The effect was nearly complete. Only a couple of people noticed something unusual, and not one person in the audience saw that it was Chris Hansen who walked across the stage, stopped, twirled around, and exited the stage. The audience was shocked when I explained what had just happened and brought Chris out to greet them.

Figure 12. Would You See the Gorilla?

Inattentional blindness is the tendency to miss something obvious and general while attending to something special and specific. The now-classic experiment in this bias has subjects watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each, one team donning white shirts and the other black shirts, as they move about one another in a small room tossing two basketballs back and forth. The assigned task is to count the number of passes made by the white team. Unexpectedly, after thirty-five seconds a gorilla enters the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps its chest, and exits nine seconds later. In this remarkable experiment by psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, 50 percent of the subjects did not see the gorilla, even when asked if they noticed anything unusual. PHOTO COURTESY OF DANIEL SIMONS AND CHRISTOPHER CHABRIS, “GORILLAS IN OUR MIDST: SUSTAINED INATTENTIONAL BLINDNESS FOR DYNAMIC EVENTS,” PERCEPTION 28 (1999): 1059–74, AND THE LAB WEB PAGE OF DANIEL SIMONS: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com.

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Experiments such as these reveal a hubris in our powers of perception, as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how the brain works. We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with percepts. Memory, in this flawed model, is simply rewinding the tape and playing it back in the theater of the mind. This is not at all what happens. The perceptual system, and the brain that analyzes its data, are deeply influenced by the beliefs it already holds. As a consequence, much of what passes before our eyes may be invisible to a brain focused on something else. In fact, eye trackers have been used to monitor subjects watching the film, and those who missed the gorilla were looking right at it.

Biases and Beliefs

Our beliefs are buffeted by a host of these and additional cognitive biases that I will briefly mention here (in alphabetical order):

Authority bias: the tendency to value the opinions of an authority, especially in the evaluation of something we know little about.

Bandwagon effect: the tendency to hold beliefs that other people in your social group hold because of the social reinforcement provided.

Barnum effect: the tendency to treat vague and general descriptions of personality as highly accurate and specific.

Believability bias: the tendency to evaluate the strength of an argument based on the believability of its conclusion.

Clustering illusion: the tendency to see clusters of patterns that, in fact, can be the result of randomness; a form of patternicity.

Confabulation bias: the tendency to conflate memories with imagination and other people’s accounts as one’s own.

Consistency bias: the tendency to recall one’s past beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as resembling present beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors more than they actually do.

Expectation bias / experimenter bias: the tendency