The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Read online

  More Praise for

  the invisible gorilla

  “Should be required reading by every judge and jury member in our criminal justice system, along with every battlefield commander, corporate CEO, member of Congress, and, well, you and me … because the mental illusions so wonderfully explicated in this book can fool every one of us.”

  —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, monthly columnist for Scientific American, and author of Why People Believe Weird Things

  “A breathtaking and insightful journey through the illusions that influence every moment of our lives.”

  —Richard Wiseman, author of Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things

  “Not just witty and engaging but also insightful.… Reading this book won’t cure you of all these limitations, but it will at least help you recognize and compensate for them.”

  —Thomas W. Malone, author of The Future of Work and founder of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

  “Everyday illusions trick us into thinking that we see—and know—more than we really do, and that we can predict the future when we can’t. The Invisible Gorilla teaches us exactly why, and it does so in an incredibly engaging way. Chabris and Simons provide terrific tips on how to cast off our illusions and get things right. Whether you’re a driver wanting to steer clear of oncoming motorcycles, a radiologist hoping to spot every tumor, or just an average person curious about how your mind really works, this is a must-read.”

  —Elizabeth Loftus, PhD, Distinguished Professor, University of California–Irvine, and author of Memory and Eyewitness Testimony

  “An eye-opening book. After reading The Invisible Gorilla you will look at yourself and the world around you differently. Like its authors, the book is both funny and smart, filled with insights into the everyday illusions that we all walk around with. No matter what your job is or what you do in life, you will learn something from this book.”

  —Joseph T. Hallinan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Why We Make Mistakes

  “Cognitive scientists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons deliver an entertaining tour of the many ways our brains mislead us every day. The Invisible Gorilla is engaging, accurate, and packed with real-world examples—some of which made me laugh out loud. Read it to find out why weathermen might make good money managers, and what Homer Simpson can teach you about thinking clearly.”

  —Sandra Aamodt, PhD, coauthor of Welcome to Your Brain and former editor, Nature Neuroscience

  “Wonderfully refreshing … The Invisible Gorilla makes us smarter by reminding us how little we know. Through a lively tour of the brain’s blind spots, this book will change the way you drive your car, hire your employees, and invest your money.”

  —Amanda Ripley, senior writer, Time magazine, and author of The Unthinkable

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Everyday Illusions

  1. “I Think I Would Have Seen That”

  2. The Coach Who Choked

  3. What Smart Chess Players and Stupid Criminals Have in Common

  4. Should You Be More Like a Weather Forecaster or a Hedge Fund Manager?

  5. Jumping to Conclusions

  6. Get Smart Quick!

  Conclusion: The Myth of Intuition

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  everyday illusions

  “There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self.”

  —Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack (1750)

  ABOUT TWELVE YEARS AGO, we conducted a simple experiment with the students in a psychology course we were teaching at Harvard University. To our surprise, it has become one of the best-known experiments in psychology. It appears in textbooks and is taught in introductory psychology courses throughout the world. It has been featured in magazines such as Newsweek and The New Yorker and on television programs, including Dateline NBC. It has even been exhibited in the Exploratorium in San Francisco and in other museums. The experiment is popular because it reveals, in a humorous way, something unexpected and deep about how we see our world—and about what we don’t see.

  You’ll read about our experiment in the first chapter of this book. As we’ve thought about it over the years, we’ve realized that it illustrates a broader principle about how the mind works. We all believe that we are capable of seeing what’s in front of us, of accurately remembering important events from our past, of understanding the limits of our knowledge, of properly determining cause and effect. But these intuitive beliefs are often mistaken ones that mask critically important limitations on our cognitive abilities.

  We must be reminded not to judge a book by its cover because we take outward appearances to be accurate advertisements of inner, unseen qualities. We need to be told that a penny saved is a penny earned because we think about cash coming in differently from money we already have. Aphorisms like these exist largely to help us avoid the mistakes that intuition can cause. Likewise, Benjamin Franklin’s observation about extremely hard things suggests that we should question the intuitive belief that we understand ourselves well. As we go through life, we act as though we know how our minds work and why we behave the way we do. It is surprising how often we really have no clue.

  The Invisible Gorilla is a book about six everyday illusions that profoundly influence our lives: the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. These are distorted beliefs we hold about our minds that are not just wrong, but wrong in dangerous ways. We will explore when and why these illusions affect us, the consequences they have for human affairs, and how we can overcome or minimize their impact.

  We use the word “illusions” as a deliberate analogy to visual illusions like M. C. Escher’s famous never-ending staircase: Even after you realize that something about the picture as a whole is not right, you still can’t stop yourself from seeing each individual segment as a proper staircase. Everyday illusions are similarly persistent: Even after we know how our beliefs and intuitions are flawed, they remain stubbornly resistant to change. We call them everyday illusions because they affect our behavior literally every day. Every time we talk on a cell phone while driving, believing we’re still paying enough attention to the road, we’ve been affected by one of these illusions. Every time we assume that someone who misremembers their past must be lying, we’ve succumbed to an illusion. Every time we pick a leader for a team because that person expresses the most confidence, we’ve been influenced by an illusion. Every time we start a new project convinced that we know how long it will take to complete, we are under an illusion. Indeed, virtually no realm of human behavior is untouched by everyday illusions.

  As professors who design and run psychology experiments for a living, we’ve found that the more we study the nature of the mind, the more we see the impact of these illusions in our own lives. You can develop the same sort of x-ray vision into the workings of your own mind. When you finish this book, you will be able to glimpse the man behind the curtain and some of the tiny gears and pulleys that govern your thoughts and beliefs. Once you know about everyday illusions, you will view the world differently and think about it more clearly. You will see how illusions affect your own thoughts and actions, as well as the behavior of everyone around you. And you will recognize when journalists, managers, advertisers, and politicians—intentionally or accidentally—take advantage of illusions in an attempt to obfuscate or persuade. Understanding everyday illusions will lead you to recalibrate the way you approach your
life to account for the limitations—and the true strengths—of your mind. You might even come up with ways to exploit these insights for fun and profit. Ultimately, seeing through the veils that distort how we perceive ourselves and the world will connect you—for perhaps the first time—with reality.

  “i think i would have seen that”

  AROUND TWO O’CLOCK on the cold, overcast morning of January 25, 1995, a group of four black men left the scene of a shooting at a hamburger restaurant in the Grove Hall section of Boston1 As they drove away in a gold Lexus, the police radio erroneously announced that the victim was a cop, leading officers from several districts to join in a ten-mile high-speed chase. In the fifteen to twenty minutes of mayhem that ensued, one police car veered off the road and crashed into a parked van. Eventually the Lexus skidded to a stop in a cul-de-sac on Woodruff Way in the Mattapan neighborhood. The suspects fled the car and ran in different directions.

  One suspect, Robert “Smut” Brown III, age twenty-four, wearing a dark leather jacket, exited the back passenger side of the car and sprinted toward a chain-link fence on the side of the cul-de-sac. The first car in pursuit, an unmarked police vehicle, stopped to the left of the Lexus. Michael Cox, a decorated officer from the police antigang unit who’d grown up in the nearby Roxbury area, got out of the passenger seat and took off after Brown. Cox, who also is black, was in plainclothes that night; he wore jeans, a black hoodie, and a parka.2

  Cox got to the fence just after Smut Brown. As Brown scrambled over the top, his jacket got stuck on the metal. Cox reached for Brown and tried to pull him back, but Brown managed to fall to the other side. Cox prepared to scale the fence in pursuit, but just as he was starting to climb, his head was struck from behind by a blunt object, perhaps a baton or a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Another police officer had mistaken him for a suspect, and several officers then beat up Cox, kicking him in the head, back, face, and mouth. After a few moments, someone yelled, “Stop, stop, he’s a cop, he’s a cop.” At that point, the officers fled, leaving Cox lying unconscious on the ground with facial wounds, a concussion, and kidney damage.3

  Meanwhile, the pursuit of the suspects continued as more cops arrived. Early on the scene was Kenny Conley, a large, athletic man from South Boston who had joined the police force four years earlier, not long after graduating from high school. Conley’s cruiser came to a stop about forty feet away from the gold Lexus. Conley saw Smut Brown scale the fence, drop to the other side, and run. Conley followed Brown over the fence, chased him on foot for about a mile, and eventually captured him at gunpoint and handcuffed him in a parking lot on River Street. Conley wasn’t involved in the assault on Officer Cox, but he began his pursuit of Brown right as Cox was being pulled from the fence, and he scaled the fence right next to where the beating was happening.

  Although the other murder suspects were caught and that case was considered solved, the assault on Officer Cox remained wide open. For the next two years, internal police investigators and a grand jury sought answers about what happened at the cul-de-sac. Which cops beat Cox? Why did they beat him? Did they simply mistake their black colleague for one of the black suspects? If so, why did they flee rather than seek medical help? Little headway was made, and in 1997, the local prosecutors handed the matter over to federal authorities so they could investigate possible civil rights violations.

  Cox named three officers whom he said had attacked him that night, but all of them denied knowing anything about the assault. Initial police reports said that Cox sustained his injuries when he slipped on a patch of ice and fell against the back of one of the police cars. Although many of the nearly sixty cops who were on the scene must have known what happened to Cox, none admitted knowing anything about the beating. Here, for example, is what Kenny Conley, who apprehended Smut Brown, said under oath:

  Q: So your testimony is that you went over the fence within seconds of seeing him go over the fence?

  A: Yeah.

  Q: And in that time, you did not see any black plainclothes police officer chasing him?

  A: No, I did not.

  Q: In fact, no black plainclothes officer was chasing him, according to your testimony?

  A: I did not see any black plainclothes officer chasing him.

  Q: And if he was chasing him, you would have seen it?

  A: I should have.

  Q: And if he was holding the suspect as the suspect was at the top of the fence, he was lunging at him, you would have seen that, too?

  A: I should have.

  When asked directly if he would have seen Cox trying to pull Smut Brown from the fence, he responded, “I think I would have seen that.” Conley’s terse replies suggested a reluctant witness who had been advised by lawyers to stick to yes or no answers and not volunteer information. Since he was the cop who had taken up the chase, he was in an ideal position to know what happened. His persistent refusal to admit to having seen Cox effectively blocked the federal prosecutors’ attempt to indict the officers involved in the attack, and no one was ever charged with the assault.

  The only person ever charged with a crime in the case was Kenny Conley himself. He was indicted in 1997 for perjury and obstruction of justice. The prosecutors were convinced that Conley was “testilying”—outlandishly claiming, under oath, not to have seen what was going on right before his eyes. According to this theory, just like the officers who filed reports denying any knowledge of the beating, Conley wouldn’t rat out his fellow cops. Indeed, shortly after Conley’s indictment, prominent Boston-area investigative journalist Dick Lehr wrote that “the Cox scandal shows a Boston police code of silence … a tight inner circle of officers protecting themselves with false stories.”4

  Kenny Conley stuck with his story, and his case went to trial. Smut Brown testified that Conley was the cop who arrested him. He also said that after he dropped over the fence, he looked back and saw a tall white cop standing near the beating. Another police officer also testified that Conley was there. The jurors were incredulous at the notion that Conley could have run to the fence in pursuit of Brown without noticing the beating, or even seeing Officer Cox. After the trial, one juror explained, “It was hard for me to believe that, even with all the chaos, he didn’t see something.” Juror Burgess Nichols said that another juror had told him that his father and uncle had been police officers, and officers are taught “to observe everything” because they are “trained professionals.”5

  Unable to reconcile their own expectations—and Conley’s—with Conley’s testimony that he didn’t see Cox, the jury convicted him. Kenny Conley was found guilty of one count each of perjury and obstruction of justice, and he was sentenced to thirty-four months in jail.6 In 2000, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case, he was fired from the Boston police force. While his lawyers kept him out of jail with new appeals, Conley took up a new career as a carpenter.7

  Dick Lehr, the journalist who reported on the Cox case and the “blue wall of silence,” never actually met with Kenny Conley until the summer of 2001. After this interview, Lehr began to wonder whether Conley might actually be telling the truth about what he saw and experienced during his pursuit of Smut Brown. That’s when Lehr brought the former cop to visit Dan’s laboratory at Harvard.

  Gorillas in Our Midst

  The two of us met over a decade ago when Chris was a graduate student in the Harvard University psychology department and Dan had just arrived as a new assistant professor. Chris’s office was down the hall from Dan’s lab, and we soon discovered our mutual interest in how we perceive, remember, and think about our visual world. The Kenny Conley case was in full swing when Dan taught an undergraduate course in research methods with Chris as his teaching assistant. As part of their classwork, the students assisted us in conducting some experiments, one of which has become famous. It was based on an ingenious series of studies of visual attention and awareness conducted by the pioneering cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser in the 1970s. Neisser had moved
to Cornell University when Dan was in his final year of graduate school there, and their many conversations inspired Dan to build on Neisser’s earlier, groundbreaking research.

  With our students as actors and a temporarily vacant floor of the psychology building as a set, we made a short film of two teams of people moving around and passing basketballs. One team wore white shirts and the other wore black. Dan manned the camera and directed. Chris coordinated the action and kept track of which scenes we needed to shoot. We then digitally edited the film and copied it to videotapes, and our students fanned out across the Harvard campus to run the experiment.8

  They asked volunteers to silently count the number of passes made by the players wearing white while ignoring any passes by the players wearing black. The video lasted less than a minute. If you want to try the task yourself, stop reading now and go to the website for our book, www.theinvisiblegorilla.com, where we provide links to many of the experiments we discuss, including a short version of the basketball-passing video. Watch the video carefully, and be sure to include both aerial passes and bounce passes in your count.

  Immediately after the video ended, our students asked the subjects to report how many passes they’d counted. In the full-length version, the correct answer was thirty-four—or maybe thirty-five. To be honest, it doesn’t matter. The pass-counting task was intended to keep people engaged in doing something that demanded attention to the action on the screen, but we weren’t really interested in pass-counting ability. We were actually testing something else: Halfway through the video, a female student wearing a full-body gorilla suit 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: