The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
Daniel Simons
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0307459659
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Reading this book will make you less sure of yourself—and that’s a good thing. In The Invisible Gorilla, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, creators of one of psychology’s most famous experiments, use remarkable stories and counterintuitive scientific findings to demonstrate an important truth: Our minds don’t work the way we think they do. We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot.
Chabris and Simons combine the work of other researchers with their own findings on attention, perception, memory, and reasoning to reveal how faulty intuitions often get us into trouble. In the process, they explain:
• Why a company would spend billions to launch a product that its own analysts know will fail
• How a police officer could run right past a brutal assault without seeing it
• Why award-winning movies are full of editing mistakes
• What criminals have in common with chess masters
• Why measles and other childhood diseases are making a comeback
• Why money managers could learn a lot from weather forecasters
Again and again, we think we experience and understand the world as it is, but our thoughts are beset by everyday illusions. We write traffic laws and build criminal cases on the assumption that people will notice when something unusual happens right in front of them. We’re sure we know where we were on 9/11, falsely believing that vivid memories are seared into our minds with perfect fidelity. And as a society, we spend billions on devices to train our brains because we’re continually tempted by the lure of quick fixes and effortless self-improvement.
The Invisible Gorilla reveals the myriad ways that our intuitions can deceive us, but it’s much more than a catalog of human failings. Chabris and Simons explain why we succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects. Ultimately, the book provides a kind of x-ray vision into our own minds, making it possible to pierce the veil of illusions that clouds our thoughts and to think clearly for perhaps the first time.
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Critical Comments and Alternative Perspectives,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 10 (1997): 269–278. See also G. Keren and K. H. Teigen, “Why Is p = .90 Better Than p = .70? Preference for Definitive Predictions by Lay Consumers of Probability Judgments,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 8 (2001): 191–202. The popular preference for certainty in weather reports was noted anecdotally over a century ago. When William Ernest Cooke introduced estimates of uncertainty to weather forecasting in
tracks. A more common problem in Britain occurs when truck drivers follow their GPS commands onto streets that are too small for their trucks. In one case, a driver wedged his truck so firmly into a country lane that he couldn’t move backward, move forward, or even open his door. He had to sleep in his cab for three days before being towed out by a tractor. The problem, of course, is that the navigation system doesn’t know or take account of the size of the vehicle—and some of us don’t know that
soon as the movie ends, you are asked to write a detailed description of what you saw. Having just read about the Sabina/Andrea film, you’ve probably guessed that there’s more to this one than just the simple action of answering a phone. When the camera cut from a view of the actor walking toward the doorway to a shot of the actor entering the hall and answering the phone, the original actor was replaced by a different person! Wouldn’t you notice the only actor in a scene being replaced by a
walked into the scene, stopped in the middle of the players, faced the camera, thumped her chest, and then walked off, spending about nine seconds onscreen. After asking subjects about the passes, we asked the more important questions: Q: Did you notice anything unusual while you were doing the counting task? A: No. Q: Did you notice anything other than the players? A: Well, there were some elevators, and S’s painted on the wall. I don’t know what the S’s were there for. Q: Did you notice
schools around the United Kingdom. The children listened to either a Mozart string quintet, a discussion about scientific experiments, or three popular songs (“Country House” by Blur, “Return of the Mack” by Mark Morrison, and “Stepping Stone” by PJ and Duncan), and then performed cognitive tests like those originally used by Rauscher. The children who listened to popular music did the best, and there was no difference in performance between those who listened to Mozart and those who heard the
