The Fence - Dick Lehr [125]
For Davis, whether he believed Kenny Conley or not, defending the client was a professional responsibility. But this was an instance where the lawyer fully believed the client. And, by coincidence, while Davis was taking up Kenny’s defense in 1997, what Davis knew firsthand as “tunnel vision” was being called something else in the research laboratories in the psychology departments at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Daniel J. Simons, a Harvard psychology professor, was conducting experiments into “inattentional blindness” or “selective attention” on the eighth floor of the university’s William James Hall. In the argot of the academy, the phenomenon of inattentional blindness was defined as this: “When people attend to objects or events in a visual display they often fail to notice an additional, unexpected, but fully visible object or event in the same display.” In lay terms, Professor Simons explained during an interview, “People count on something unexpected to grab their attention. But often this doesn’t happen. The consequences can be dramatic. Like people assuming a car pulling out in front of them will catch their attention, but it doesn’t, and there might be an accident.” It was in the context of car safety and cell phone use that Simons’s work eventually moved from obscure journals into the public domain. The writer Malcolm Gladwell wrote extensively about inattentional blindness in an article, “Wrong Turn: How the Fight to Make America’s Highways Safer Went off Course,” published in the New Yorker magazine in June 2001.
In 1998, Simons and his colleague Christopher Chabris conducted perhaps the most astonishing experiment—what they playfully called “gorillas in our midst.” The researchers began by making a videotape showing two teams of three players moving in a small open area. One team wore white T-shirts and the other team wore black T-shirts. Each team had a basketball and passed it only to teammates. The video lasted about a minute.
Observers were brought in to watch the videotape played on a television monitor. Their task was to focus on the white team and to count the number of its passes. Then came an unexpected event none of the observers were told about beforehand: About halfway through the action, a researcher wearing a full-length gorilla costume walked into the scene and stopped in the middle of all the ball passers. The gorilla turned to face the camera and beat its chest a few times. Then it turned and walked off camera. Nearly half of the observers missed the gorilla. The dramatically high rate of “blindness,” Simons noted, showed that “when people are engaged in an attention-demanding task—doing something that requires their attention to be focused on some parts of the world and not others—often they do not see something that is very visible, very salient, but unexpected.
“This doesn’t match at all with people’s intuition.”
It was that “people’s intuition” that formed the core of Merritt’s conviction that Kenny Conley was lying. Even Kenny acknowledged that—saying he should have seen Mike at the fence. The new experiments and data at Harvard quite possibly offered an explanation for why he hadn’t. But Kenny and Willie Davis were unaware of the scientific studies under way several miles away across the Charles River. Kenny would continue to talk in a vague, general way about tunnel vision. The conflict was that he didn’t know why he hadn’t seen Mike Cox, and Ted Merritt thought he had. Merritt kept contacting Willie Davis periodically to say if Kenny would come around his troubles would end. It drove Kenny to existential despair. “What’s going on!