The invisible gorilla: why don't we notice it? Christopher Chabris - the invisible gorilla Experiment with a gorilla.
The book by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons is based on a rather interesting psychological experiment by the authors, which proves that many of us see only what we expect to see.
And this often turns out to be an illusion. Moreover, illusions surround us everywhere: from memory, from attention, and even from knowledge.
Alexander Druz, master of the game “What? Where? When?”, winner of the “Crystal Owl” 1990, 1992,1995, 2000, 2006
Entertaining and informative reading... Each of us harbors an unimaginable confidence that the sensations and information about the world around us that our senses provide us with are incredibly accurate.
Through clever experiments and compelling stories, The Invisible Gorilla shows that our confidence is unfounded. This book is an amazing journey through the illusions that we fall into at every turn, and the problems that this can lead to.
The illusion of attention is one of the most important, surprising and most unexplored errors of human consciousness. The book examines these phenomena clearly and in detail.
It’s not often that you come across a book that is so thorough and witty, deeply scientific and answers the questions of our everyday life, but here it is - in front of you! Smart, educational, with shocking and delightful twists, this book, if you take it to heart, will change many of your negative habits and may even save your life.
Margaret Heffernan, managing director of the company and author of The Naked Truth
This book is not only witty and entertaining, but also very educational... When you read it, you, of course, will not be able to free yourself from all the bonds that limit your consciousness, but at least you will learn to be aware of them and somehow restrain them.
Cognitive psychologists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons take us through a fascinating journey and show us how our brains deceive us, day after day. “The Invisible Gorilla” is fascinating, gets to the point, and is full of examples from reality. Some of them made me laugh out loud. Read this book and you'll understand why meteorologists make good financial managers and how Homer Simpson will help you think more clearly.
This book opens our eyes. It arouses in us interest in our mind, which tends to make mistakes. It is a must-read for lawyers, judges, all law enforcement officials, and anyone who is mastering the art of debate.
Introduction
Everyday illusions
There are three things that are extremely difficult to do: break steel, crush diamond and know yourself.
Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanack (1750)
About twenty years ago, we conducted a simple experiment with psychology students at Harvard University. To our surprise, this experiment became one of the most famous in the history of psychology. It is written about in textbooks and taught in introduction to psychology courses in all countries of the world. Entire articles have been devoted to him in magazines such as Newsweek and The New Yorker, and television programs including Dateline NBC. It even became the theme of an exhibition, for example at the Exploratorium Science Museum (San Francisco) and other museums around the world. Such fame is explained by the fact that the experiment, in a comic form, opens our eyes to how we perceive the world around us, as well as to what remains beyond our perception, and these discoveries seem amazing and deep to us.
You will read about our experiment in the first chapter of the book. As we thought about it for many years, we realized that it demonstrates a very deep principle underlying mental activity. We all believe that we can see what is in front of us, accurately recall important events from the past, recognize the limits of our knowledge, and correctly determine cause-and-effect relationships. However, these intuitive beliefs are often erroneous and caused by nothing more than illusions that hide from us the limitations of our cognitive abilities.
Someone should remind us that we should not judge a book by its cover, because many of us tend to believe that the appearance accurately reflects the inner content, unknown to us. Someone should tell us that every ruble saved is a ruble earned, because in our minds we separate future income from the money that is already in our hands. The main purpose of aphorisms is precisely to prevent us from making mistakes under the influence of such intuitive ideas. So Benjamin Franklin's aphorism about three difficult things advises us to question our intuitive belief that we understand ourselves well. In life, we act as if we know perfectly well about the structure of our psyche and the motives for our actions. Surprising as it may seem, in reality we often have no idea about either one or the other.
The book you hold in your hands is about six everyday illusions that have a profound impact on a person's life: illusions attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause-and-effect relationship And potential. Illusions are understood as distorted ideas about one’s own mental activity, which are not only erroneous, but also dangerous. We will find out when and why people are susceptible to these illusions, how they affect our lives, and how to overcome or at least minimize their impact.
We use the term intentionally "illusion", thereby drawing an analogy with optical illusions such as M. C. Escher's famous endless staircase. Even realizing that the structure depicted in the picture cannot exist in reality as a single whole, we involuntarily see a staircase of the correct shape in each individual segment. Everyday illusions are just as firmly rooted in our consciousness. Even if we realize the fallacy of our ideas and intuitive beliefs, it is extremely difficult to change them. We call these illusions everyday, because they influence our behavior day after day. Every time we use a cell phone while driving a car, confident that we are paying enough attention to the road, we are captured by one of these illusions. Every time we accuse a person of lying in whose mind events from the past are confused, we become victims of illusion. Every time we choose someone who looks more confident than the rest as a team leader, we fall under the influence of an illusion. Every time we start a new project with no doubt that we will complete it within a certain time frame, we indulge in an illusion. Almost all spheres of human activity are subject to everyday illusions.
For us professors who design and conduct psychological experiments, the impact of such illusions on our own lives becomes increasingly obvious as we study the psyche. You are able to develop the same penetrating gaze, which, like an X-ray beam, will penetrate into the very depths of your consciousness. After reading this book, you will learn to see who is hiding behind the curtain, and to distinguish even the tiniest cogs and gears of the mechanism that controls our thoughts and ideas. By learning about the existence of everyday illusions, you will look at the world in a new way and understand it more clearly. You become aware of the impact illusions have on your thoughts and actions, as well as the behavior of those around you. You will also be able to identify when journalists, managers, advertisers and politicians - intentionally or unwittingly - use other people's illusions to their advantage, trying to confuse or convince them of something. By learning about everyday illusions, you can adjust your ideas about life, taking into account the limitations and at the same time the real benefits of the psyche. You may even find ways to put the knowledge you have gained into practice - just for your own pleasure or material gain. Ultimately, by looking through the veils that distort the perception of ourselves and the world around us, we can, perhaps for the first time in our lives, be able to connect with reality.
We all believe that we can see what is in front of us, accurately recall important events from the past, recognize the limits of our knowledge, and correctly determine cause-and-effect relationships. However, these intuitive beliefs are often erroneous and caused by nothing more than illusions that hide from us the limitations of our cognitive abilities. This book is about six everyday illusions that have a profound impact on a person's life: illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, causation and potential. Illusions are understood as distorted ideas about one’s own mental activity.
I drew attention to this book thanks to references to it in works I had previously read: , . On one of the sites I came across a review that I didn’t like the book because of its scrupulousness and repetition. Well, such an opinion is possible. In my opinion, this distinguishes scientific work from blah blah blah in the style of “How to achieve ... in 10 proven steps.” I devoured the book in three evenings.
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla, or the Story of How Our Intuition is Deceptive. – M.: Career Press, 2011. – 384 p.
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Introduction. Everyday illusions
We deliberately use the term “illusion”, thereby drawing an analogy with optical illusions like the famous endless staircase of M.K. Escher (Fig. 1). Even realizing that the structure depicted in the picture cannot exist in reality as a single whole, we involuntarily see a staircase of the correct shape in each individual segment.
Rice. 1. M.K. Escher. Ascent and descent
Every time we choose someone who looks more confident than the rest as a team leader, we fall under the influence of an illusion. Every time we start a new project with no doubt that we will complete it within a certain time frame, we indulge in an illusion. By learning about the existence of everyday illusions, you will look at the world in a new way and understand it more clearly.
Chapter 1. “I probably would have noticed him!”
We made a short video of two teams kicking a basketball around. Count the number of passes made by players in white, while ignoring passes by players in black.
The correct answer is 16. Honestly, it doesn't matter. The pass counting task was designed to keep people's attention completely occupied by what was happening on the screen, but we were not at all interested in their ability to count passes. We were trying to figure out something different. About halfway through the video, a student dressed in a gorilla suit walked onto the stage. She would stop among the players, look at the camera, beat her chest, and then disappear after spending enough time in the frame. Having found out how many transmissions the experiment participants counted, we asked them more important questions. Did you notice anything unusual while counting the passes? Did you happen to notice the gorilla?
About half of the participants in our experiment did not notice the gorilla! Why don't people see gorillas? This perceptual error occurs because we are not prepared to perceive objects that we do not expect to see. The phenomenon is designated by the scientific term “inattentional blindness” or “perceptual blindness.” This name indicates the difference between this condition and true blindness caused by damage to the visual apparatus; People don't see a gorilla not because they have vision problems. When a person's full attention is focused on a particular object or aspect of the visible world, he usually does not perceive objects that he does not expect to see, even if such objects are very noticeable, potentially significant and are directly in his field of vision. In other words, a person is so concentrated on such a difficult task as counting passes that he literally goes blind and does not see the gorilla that is right in front of his eyes.
We were even more impressed by people's surprise, which was always and invariably sincere when they learned of their absent-mindedness. When we watched the video again, this time without counting the passes, our subjects immediately saw the gorilla and were amazed. Some involuntarily exclaimed: “And I didn’t notice this?!”
The Invisible Gorilla Experiment Demonstrates the Deep and Pervasive Impact It Has on Us illusion of attention. Our perception of the visible world is limited.
Why do drivers cut off motorcyclists when turning? We are inclined to believe that at least some of these cases can be explained by an illusion of attention. People don't notice motorcyclists because they don't expect to see them. After all, when making a difficult left turn across a traffic lane, your path is mostly blocked by cars, not motorcycles (nor bicycles, horses or rickshaws). To some extent, the motorcycle is an unexpected object. Just like the participants in our gorilla experiment, drivers often do not notice events that they do not expect, even if these events are very significant. However, they are confident in their ability to notice everything, believing that unexpected objects and events will attract their attention as soon as they direct their gaze in the right direction. In reality, our visual expectations are largely beyond our conscious control. Our brains are wired to automatically detect certain patterns, and when we're behind the wheel, that pattern for us is the predominance of cars and the occasional encounter with motorcyclists.
Peter Jacobsen, a public health consultant in California, studied the statistics of car collisions with pedestrians or cyclists in several cities in California and in several European countries. The result revealed a clearly visible and surprising pattern: walking and cycling were the least dangerous in those cities where they were most common, and conversely, they posed the greatest danger where their prevalence was lowest. Motorists are less likely to hit pedestrians and cyclists in places where there is more cycling and walking. They are used to pedestrians. What we see, as well as what we miss, is determined more by immediate expectations than by the visual salience of the object.
The longer we look at the world around us, the worse we notice the objects that are directly in front of us. But how is this possible? The answer seems to lie in our mistaken assumption that we understand the principles on which attention is based. Although the intruder aircraft on the runway was directly in front of the approaching pilots, completely within their field of vision, they focused their attention on the landing rather than on the possibility of objects within the runway.
Both experimental and epidemiological studies show that impaired driving performance caused by mobile phone use is comparable in its consequences to driving while intoxicated. The realization that people can't talk on the phone and drive safely at the same time has led to a movement to limit cell phone use while driving. New York was one of the first states to pass legislation. But at the same time, the New York law stipulated that drivers can avoid a fine if they subsequently confirm the purchase of a mobile headset, thanks to which their hands remain free during a conversation. The problem does not lie in our eyes or hands. We can successfully handle the controls with one hand, and during a telephone conversation nothing prevents us from looking at the road. The cause of the problem should not be sought in the limitations associated with driving, but in the limitations of our attention and perception. Regular mobile phones and phones with headsets that do not need to be held in your hands have almost the same negative impact on concentration. Both of them distract the driver in the same way and to the same extent. Driving and talking on a cell phone at the same time puts a lot of strain on our limited attentional resources, even though both activities are well practiced and seemingly effortless. It's about doing multiple things in parallel, and no matter what you've heard or thought about it, the more attention-demanding tasks our brains process, the lower the performance of each individual task.
In the second part of our gorilla experiment, we tested the limits of attention by making the task assigned to participants (counting basketball passes) more difficult. Now, instead of one procedure - counting the number of passes made by a team in a white uniform, we asked to perform as many as two actions in our minds - counting the number of passes through the air and the number of passes with the ball bouncing off the floor (but we were still talking only about players in a white uniform ). As we predicted, the number of those who did not notice the unexpected event increased by 20%. Due to the increased complexity of the counting procedure, participants completed the task with a greater concentration of attention, and, accordingly, they had fewer resources available to perceive the gorilla.
Errors of perception and illusions of attention are not limited to visual sensations alone. People may also suffer from perceptual deafness. One Friday morning, during rush hour, virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell took his $3 million Stradivarius violin and headed to the subway station. He positioned himself between the entrance and the escalator, unfolded his collection box, thoughtfully throwing in a few coins and banknotes, and began to perform complex classical works. The concert lasted 43 minutes. During this time, more than a thousand people walked a few steps away from him, and only seven of them stopped to listen to the music (see, for example,).
Journalists from the Washington Post apparently expected a different result. According to Weingarten (the author of the article), they were worried that the performance of a famous violinist could lead to a disturbance of public order. Perhaps you can guess why no one recognized Bell as a great musician. People simply did not expect to see (or hear) a virtuoso violinist. The passengers were initially absorbed in a task that distracted them from everything else - they were in a hurry to get to work.
Although the idea of using a gorilla movie to determine personality types is intuitively attractive, we have virtually no evidence to support the influence of personality traits on perceptual blindness.
Training aimed at developing attention does not affect the ability to detect unexpected objects. Experience and knowledge help in the perception of unexpected events, but only if the event is related to something that a person is well versed in. As soon as specialists find themselves in a situation where their professional skills are powerless, they behave like amateurs and direct all their attention to solving the main problem. And specialists are not immune to the illusion of attention.
How to overcome the illusion of attention? If the illusion of attention is so pervasive, then how did our species survive? Why weren't our ancestors eaten by undetected predators? In part, perceptual blindness and the accompanying illusion of attention are a product of modern society. Although our ancestors likely suffered from the same limitations in understanding the world, in a less complex world there was less to perceive. Not many objects or events required immediate concentration. Scientific and technological progress has given us many devices that increasingly absorb our attention, leaving us less and less time to think.
We find too little evidence of our inattention. This creates fertile ground for the illusion of attention. We are aware only of those unexpected objects that we manage to notice, and we do not even suspect the existence of what remains unnoticed. Consequently, everything speaks in favor of the fact that we allegedly adequately perceive the world around us. It is only in those cases where we find it difficult to find an excuse for our own inattention (and there is little incentive to find such excuses), as, for example, in the gorilla experiment, that we realize how much of the world around us remains unnoticed.
For the human brain, attention is essentially a zero-sum game. If we pay more attention to a specific place, object or event, then there is inevitably less attention to everything else. Thus, perceptual blindness is an inevitable, although undesirable, by-product of normal processes associated with attention and perception. In most cases, perceptual blindness is not a problem. This is simply a consequence of the work of our attention; the price we pay for the exceptional and extremely useful ability to concentrate our thoughts.
Chapter 2. Trainer Strangler
This chapter is dedicated to illusions of memory: the discrepancy between what we think about our memory and how it actually works. In 2009, we commissioned a nationwide survey. Almost half (47%) of respondents believe that “events that we once experienced and remembered will remain unchanged in our memory forever.” Even more people (63%) believe that “the human memory acts like a video camera, accurately recording everything we see and hear, and later we can return to any event and mentally reproduce it.” The illusion of memory is based on a fundamental discrepancy between our memories and the actual events on which they are based.
Memory depends not only on actual events, but also on the subjective meaning that we assign to these events. Our memory does not retain everything we perceive; instead, it captures individual objects of visual or auditory perception and connects them with existing knowledge. Such associative connections help us separate the important from the unimportant and recall the details of what we saw. They are a kind of guidelines in the search for information, thanks to which our memory acts more quickly. In most cases, such guidelines are very useful. However, associative connections can also mislead us because they cause us to overestimate the accuracy of our memory. It is not so easy to distinguish the real events that we remember from our own constructions based on associative connections and knowledge. For example, memory reconstructs the interior of a room not only on the basis of what was actually seen by a person, but also on the basis of what was there should have be.
The pictures captured in memory are not an exact copy of reality, but only its reconstruction. We cannot “rewind” our memories like a videotape; each time we remember the past, we mix up the actual details with our own expectations of what we should have remembered.
In a famous scene from the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts has breakfast with Richard Gere in his hotel room. She takes a croissant from the plate, but instead brings a pancake to her mouth. In The Godfather, Sonny's car is riddled with bullets near a security checkpoint, but seconds later we see that the windshield is intact. Ordinary viewers rarely pay attention to such trifles. The surprising inability to notice obvious changes occurring right before our eyes is called blindness to change– people are “blind” to instantaneous changes in an object in their field of vision.
This phenomenon is related to perceptual blindness, which we talked about in the previous chapter, but is not identical to it. Perceptual blindness usually refers to the inability to notice an object that we are not expecting to appear. Change blindness is the inability to compare what we see now with what was in our field of vision just a moment ago. Of course, in the real world there is no sudden change from one object to another, so every second checking all visible elements in order to confirm their immutability would be too wasteful for the brain. In many ways, what matters is not so much the failure to notice changes as the misconception that we should notice them.
In most cases, a person receives little to no feedback about the extent to which he is able to notice changes. We are aware only of those changes that we manage to detect, and what remains unnoticed cannot, by definition, change our ideas about our own susceptibility. However, there is a group of people who have extensive experience in tracking changes: script supervisors, specialists responsible for identifying errors in plot coherence during the making of a film.
However, script supervisors are also vulnerable to change blindness. The difference between them and other people is that through direct feedback, script supervisors understand that they may not notice changes and that they sometimes do not notice them. As these specialists gain experience in finding inconsistencies and learn about the mistakes they have made, they are increasingly freed from the illusory idea that a person is able to notice and remember everything that happens around him. Blindness to change manifests itself not only when watching videos, but also when communicating with others in a real life situation.
Although we consider our memories to be an accurate record of what we saw and heard, in reality such a record can be extremely unreliable. We mistakenly assume that our memories are true and accurate, but in reality we are unable to reliably determine which aspects reflect real events and which were added later. This is why Ken took credit for his friend's story—he had a vivid memory of recounting the event, but mistakenly attributed the event to his own experience. In the scientific literature, distortions of this kind are called incorrect identification of the source of memories. Ken forgot where he got his memories from, but since they were so vivid, he assumed they were based on his own experiences. Incorrect identification of the source of memories is often the cause of unintentional plagiarism. Unintentional plagiarism is when a person is convinced that the author of an idea belongs to him, although in reality he got it from someone else's sources.
Under the illusion of memory, we assume that our memories, beliefs, and actions are consistent with each other and remain stable over time. In the midst of national mourning following the assassination of President Kennedy, one poll found that two-thirds of respondents said they had voted for Kennedy in the 1960 election, even though he actually won by a narrow margin. At least some of these people changed their memories of how they voted three years earlier, likely to align them with positive feelings about the fallen leader. Memories can change at the same time as our ideas.
Some significant events are so deeply imprinted in our memory that even after many years it seems to us that we are able to reproduce them in every detail, like a videotape. This intuition is ubiquitous and has a profound impact on our lives. However, it is also wrong. Social psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik coined the term “photographic memories,” or “flashbulb memories,” to refer to these vivid, detailed memories of unexpected and important events.
Sometimes the distortion of memories can lead to fatal consequences precisely because we are susceptible to the illusion of memory. When people are in the grip of illusion, they misinterpret the intentions and motives of those who unintentionally make inaccurate memories.
The vividness of our memories is related to their emotional impact. For most people, the bare numbers do not inspire fear or despondency, unlike the events of September 11th. And such an emotional connection influences our ideas about how memory works, even if its influence on the actual amount of information we remember is not so great. Beware of memories that are accompanied by strong feelings and vivid details - for all their vividness, such memories can turn out to be distorted, and it is very difficult to realize such a distortion.
Unfortunately, people constantly use vividness and emotionality as an indicator of accuracy; By these signs they judge how much they can trust their own memory. Equally important is the fact that people judge the accuracy of other people's memories depending on the degree of confidence that the rememberer displays.
Chapter 3. What do smart chess players and stupid criminals have in common?
If a doctor diagnosed you and prescribed treatment using a manual, wouldn't you be alarmed? We all tend to believe that a competent doctor must be confident in himself, and when we see a doubting doctor, we involuntarily think about a possible lawsuit for unqualified treatment. We consider confidence to be a reliable sign of professionalism, good memory and deep knowledge. However, as you will learn in this chapter, the confidence one displays in any endeavor—making a diagnosis, making foreign policy decisions, or testifying in court—very often turns out to be just another illusion.
Adams Mark Hotel in Philadelphia. For a long time now, one of the largest open chess tournaments in the world with the self-explanatory name World Open has been held annually here. Any person who has paid the registration fee can take part in it - from beginner to grandmaster. In 2008, more than 1,400 players competed for a prize pool of $300,000. The most amazing thing about this tournament is that the players accurately assess their skill level compared to their opponents. However, this is typical for any chess competition. In most fields of activity and even in most competitions and competitions, you will not find such objectivity. You won't find a rating scale to compare yourself to other drivers, business managers, teachers or parents. Even in professions such as law and medicine, there are no clear methods for identifying the best. Due to the lack of clear criteria for assessing abilities, it is very easy for us to overestimate our skills. Only in chess does there exist a mathematically objective, publicly accessible rating system that provides reliable and accurate data about a player's class.
We conducted an experiment at the World Open in Philadelphia. We asked players to fill out a short questionnaire with two simple questions: “Indicate your latest official rating” and “Where should you rank in the rating based on your actual level at this time?” 21% of participants in our experiment indicated that the current rating corresponds to their real class. Only about 4% considered their rating to be too high, and the remaining 75% were convinced that their level was not rated highly enough. According to these professional chess players, their rating should be almost 100 points higher. Our chess tournament participants suffered from a third everyday illusion: illusions of confidence.
The illusion of confidence has two characteristic aspects. First, as with chess players, it encourages us to overestimate our own qualities, especially when we compare ourselves to other people. Secondly, under the influence of illusion, we believe that the confidence or uncertainty that a person exhibits is a reliable sign of his abilities, knowledge, or the accuracy of his memories. There would be no problem here if confidence were actually related to these characteristics. However, in fact, a person’s confidence and his abilities can be so divergent from each other that, trusting the first, we fall into an insidious trap set by our own consciousness.
As Charles Darwin noted, “ignorance always has greater self-confidence than knowledge.” Indeed, the more modest abilities a person has, the more confident he is in his own competence and the more susceptible he is to the illusion of confidence.
The same pattern can be seen in our experiment with chess players who believed that they should occupy a higher place in the ranking. A disproportionately high proportion of players who felt they were underrated were in the bottom half of the classification. On average, weaker players believed that their rating was underestimated by 150 points, while chess players from the first half of the list were “underestimated” by only 50 points. If stronger players only slightly overestimated their strength, then the self-confidence of weaker chess players exceeds all reasonable limits.
The incompetent worker faces two serious difficulties. Firstly, his abilities are below average. Secondly, he is not aware of this fact and, therefore, is unlikely to make any effort to develop them.
When we receive feedback about our own abilities, we tend to interpret it in the most favorable light possible. We are accustomed to believing that good results in a particular activity are a consequence of our high abilities, while mistakes are an “accident,” an “oversight,” or the result of circumstances beyond our control. We try to ignore evidence that contradicts these conclusions. If incompetence and overconfidence are related, does this mean that as people become more skilled, incompetent people become more objective about their own performance? Yes, it does.
On the contrary, highly qualified specialists sometimes suffer from the exact opposite problem. Almost every teacher or professor we know, especially those who have achieved success early in their careers, is convinced that they are deceiving people because they are not as competent as others think they are.
In Western society, confidence is given great importance; Without believing in yourself, it is impossible to live a decent life. People invariably trust what gives them confidence and reject all indecision, whether in their own perceptions and memories, as well as in the advice of legal counsel, the testimony of a witness, or the speech of a national leader in times of crisis. We pay great attention to confidence, demanding this quality from ourselves, and from leaders, and from all the people around us - especially in cases where we doubt any facts or are unsure about the future.
The principle of bringing participants together in one place to think together about a certain problem before they have come to an independent conclusion makes it almost impossible to develop a collective solution that takes into account the views and contributions of each participant. The decision will be a consequence of group dynamics, personality conflicts and other social factors that have nothing to do with the actual knowledge of the team members and the sources of this knowledge.
In indecisive people, such group processes give rise to a desire to hide behind other people's backs, which distorts the real state of affairs and creates a false sense of confidence, instead of promoting a deeper understanding of their abilities and a more realistic self-esteem. It seems to us that this is another illusion that people have about their psyche: the mistaken intuition that thinking together about the right answer and trying to find consensus uses the abilities of all team members in the most effective way.
In cases where independent analysis and qualified judgment are required, the illusion of certainty can lead to the most disastrous consequences. And just like individuals, teams are sometimes completely unaware that they tend to exaggerate their collective abilities.
Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley conducted an experiment with mathematical problem solving. They formed several groups of four students who had never met each other and asked them to solve several problems from the GMAT, a standardized test used in admissions to graduate business schools. Anderson and Kilduff videotaped all interactions within the team and then reviewed the tape to determine the team leaders. The team leaders turned out to be no more competent than the other members. They became leaders only due to their personal charm, and not due to outstanding abilities. They were the first to express their opinions. In 94% of cases, the first answer proposed by the entire team was chosen as the final answer, but people with a dominant personality type tend to speak first, and do so more assertively and energetically than others. Thus, team leadership in this experiment was determined primarily by the degree of confidence. If you speak your mind earlier and more often than others, people will view this assertive demeanor as an indicator of your ability, even if you are not actually superior to your peers.
Psychologists call a personality trait any personality characteristic that influences a person’s behavior in a variety of situations. However, personality traits do not determine a person's behavior in all situations in life; Many other factors also have a significant influence, in particular the specific conditions in which he finds himself. As for confidence, most sets of personality traits compiled by psychologists do not include a trait under that name. It is not one of the so-called "Big Five" personality dimensions (neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, cooperation and conscientiousness). Confidence is related to the tendency to dominate, but is not entirely identical to it, and the tendency to dominate itself is rarely assessed in personality studies.
One factor that appears to influence the development of confidence is genes.
In August 2008, the tiny country of Georgia provoked a military conflict with Russia, its northern neighbor, over two provinces whose separatist movements were actively supported by the Russian government. It's hard to imagine, but Georgian leaders truly believed that their troops would quickly capture key points in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and, having fortified themselves there, would successfully repel Russian counterattacks. Mikheil Saakashvili and a group of like-minded members of the government developed a series of opinions that none of them would be confident in if they acted alone; but then, through collective discussion and mutual approval of the statements voiced by each of them, they came to a single conclusion, the correctness of which they did not doubt. The individuals making these decisions may have had very low confidence if acting alone, perhaps so low that they would not have given such an order under any circumstances. However, in a team, their self-confidence could increase to such limits that even the most risky and dubious undertakings seemed quite feasible to them.
In the popular series, Dr. House and his colleagues constantly deal with rare cases. They find the correct solution only at the end of the series after a number of unsuccessful attempts. House, like many other doctors from television series, is extremely arrogant and self-confident. Being completely confident in your decision, despite all evidence to the contrary, is probably the first sign that you should change doctors!
Doctors who show doubts are likely to more accurately assess their capabilities compared to more confident colleagues, but people rarely notice this sign of true professionalism when communicating with a specialist. Instead, we pay attention to appearance and personality traits.
Why do we tend to trust the opinions of confident doctors more than the opinions of more indecisive doctors? One reason is our knowledge of ourselves. The better we understand a certain issue, the more confident we are in our judgments about it. (As noted earlier, as a skill is mastered, confidence increases, while overconfidence decreases.) If we know a person well enough, we can judge how high or low the level of confidence they exhibit is for them. Knowing how a person's confidence manifests itself in certain situations, you can rely on this quality as a reliable indicator of his competence. After all, other people, just like you, behave more confidently when they understand some issue, and experience doubts if they lack knowledge.
However, this quality is also a personality trait, meaning that the base level of confidence expressed by different people can be quite different. Without knowing the degree of confidence that a person typically demonstrates in certain situations, you cannot judge whether this quality reflects his cognition or personal characteristics.
Most psychologists who speak in court as experts on issues related to eyewitness memory note that “a witness’s confidence cannot be a reliable predictor of the accuracy of identification results.” In fact, 75% of wrongful convictions subsequently overturned based on DNA evidence were due largely to a witness' mistaken identification and subsequent confident presentation to the jury.
In our opinion, justice reform should be aimed primarily at educating the judicial authorities about the structure of the human psyche. Police, witnesses, lawyers, juries and judges are all too susceptible to the illusions we have just discussed. They, like all people, overestimate their ability to concentrate, exaggerate the detail and reliability of memories, and consider confidence a reliable sign of accuracy. The general law of criminal procedure took centuries to develop in England and the United States, and its postulates are firmly based on these erroneous intuitions.
Chapter 4. Who are you closer to in spirit - weather forecasters or hedge fund managers?
In 1957, two of the pioneers of computing and artificial intelligence, Herbert Simon and Allen Newell, publicly stated that within ten years a computer would be able to beat the world chess champion. But by 1968, no one had even come close to creating a machine capable of such a feat. It wasn't until 1997 that Deep Blue, equipped with multiple processors and custom-built chips, beat world champion Garry Kasparov 3-2, fulfilling Simon and Newell's prophecy thirty years late. This is just one of many examples of scientists overestimating their knowledge.
If even the judgments of experts can be so far from the truth, then surely other people are inclined to exaggerate their knowledge. Every time we mistakenly assess the limits of our own knowledge, we fall under the influence of another everyday illusion: illusions of knowledge.
The Sydney Opera House was designed in 1959. Its cost was supposed to be 7 million Australian dollars. However, by the time construction was completed, the bill had risen to 102 million. In 1883, Antoni Gaudi led the construction of the Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona, and in 1886 he promised to complete the work in ten years. The church is scheduled to be completed by 2026, in time for the centenary of his death. Hofstadter's Law states: "Any business always takes longer than expected, even if Hofstadter's Law is taken into account." Only such aphorisms remind us how difficult planning is for a person, and this fact alone proves the persistence of the illusion of knowledge. The problem is not that plans sometimes go wrong - after all, life is much more complex than our simplified speculative models. As Yogi Berra noted, “It is very difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” We are too optimistic about the timing or cost of our projects. What seems simple in our minds usually turns out to be much more complex when our plans collide with reality. The problem is that every time we forget about this limitation, without learning from previous experiences. The illusion of knowledge invariably convinces us that we have a deep understanding of a subject, although in reality we are talking about only superficial acquaintance.
The persistent and profound impact of illusions on our habitual thinking patterns is explained by the fact that under their influence we think of ourselves better than we deserve. To avoid the illusion of knowledge, you first need to accept that your personal ideas about the cost and timing of a project that seems unique to you are most likely wrong. This is not an easy task, because you know much more about your own project than any other person. However, this feeling of familiarity gives rise to the false sense that only you understand the project deeply enough to plan everything correctly. If, instead, you find information about similar projects that have been successfully completed by other people or organizations (of course, the more similar they are to your own, the better), you can compare their actual time frame and cost with your calculations. Such an “outside” view of problems that we usually do not bring to public discussion will significantly change our attitude towards our own plans.
Throughout the existence of financial markets, investors have created various theories explaining the reasons for the rise or fall in the value of certain assets. Like a model airplane that leaves out only a few key characteristics of a real airplane and leaves out all other details, each of these theories is a simplified model of the behavior of financial markets: they reduce a complex system to a simple form so that investors can use it to make decisions. The heavy dependence of such models on historical data almost guarantees that the forecast will be wrong when conditions change.
The global financial system is probably the most complex system imaginable. After all, it depends on the daily decisions of billions of people, and these decisions, in turn, are based on ideas about what knowledge different investors possess (or do not possess). Every time you buy shares of a certain company, you assume that they are undervalued in the market. With this purchase, you are essentially saying that you have a more accurate estimate of the future value of the stock than most other investors (at least those who sold the stock to you).
To make informed financial decisions, it is important to understand three factors: first get an accurate understanding of the long-term returns and short-term volatility you should expect from each investment option, and only then evaluate what level of risk is acceptable to you. Most short-term fluctuations in stock prices have nothing to do with long-term rates of return and therefore should not influence investment decisions.
We are able to focus on only a small part of the world around us, and none of us is able to remember everything that happens around us. It is exactly the same with our knowledge: the illusion of knowledge is a by-product of an effective and useful mental process. We rarely need to know exactly how this or that object works. We just need to understand how to use it.
Companies often use the illusion of knowledge to force their products on people. When they talk about their products, they place emphasis in such a way that a person has a false feeling that he understands the principle of operation or structure of the product. For example, audiophiles and audio manufacturers constantly sing the praises of their cables for connecting different system components.
The “curse of knowledge” occurs when people find it difficult to distance themselves from their own point of view and evaluate what another person thinks about a particular situation; it is the tendency to mistakenly project one’s own knowledge onto others.”
For most decisions in our lives, we never receive accurate feedback, unlike weather forecasters, who find out the next morning whether they were right or wrong - and so on, day after day, year after year. Any student knows that without immediate feedback on mistakes made, it is much more difficult to progress in their field - be it photography, psychology or business.
Do we really tend to trust people who predict putative events with greater certainty, even if the predictions are less likely to be more accurate? Try solving a simple problem created by Dutch psychologist Gideon Keren.
Below are two four-day rain forecasts compiled by Anna and Betty:
As it turned out later, three out of four days were rainy. Who do you think is the better forecaster: Anna or Betty? This question raises a conflict between the demands we place on precision and certainty. Betty estimated the probability of rain to be 75% and was correct, therefore the illusion of knowledge had no effect on her forecast. Anna, trying to determine the probability of rain, clearly overestimated her knowledge: for her forecast to be more accurate than Betty's, it would have to rain all four days. However, when we conducted an experiment with exactly this wording of the question, almost half of the participants preferred Anna’s forecast.
In people's minds, a successful investor is not one who carefully hedges his risks and ensures that his asset allocation and leverage adequately reflect the level of uncertainty. A successful investor is a person who is not afraid to take bold steps, one who risks everything and wins. The illusion of knowledge is so deep that we are too sympathetic to those people who do well for a while, winning one victory after another, but then go too far and lose everything.
Chapter 5. How to jump to conclusions
Pattern perception plays a huge role in our lives, and skill in many professions depends almost entirely on the ability to quickly recognize a wide range of meaningful patterns. We all, regardless of our will, recognize various patterns in the world around us and make our predictions based on them.
Such exceptional pattern-detecting abilities often benefit us, allowing us to reach conclusions in a few seconds (or even milliseconds) when complex logical calculations would take us minutes or hours. But, unfortunately, they can mislead us, giving rise to the illusion of a cause-and-effect relationship. Sometimes we invent patterns that don't exist, and sometimes we don't notice what actually exists. Whether a repeating pattern exists or not, when we notice it, we easily conclude that it arose as a result of a certain cause-and-effect relationship. We have already learned that memory can store information about the world around us in a distorted form, bringing it into line with our subjective ideas about the events being remembered, and that we do not notice a gorilla that is right in front of us because its appearance goes against our original expectations . Our picture of the world is also subject to systematic distortions, since we are focused on the perception of logically related events, rather than arbitrary and isolated facts, and we tend to explain events by cause-and-effect relationships, rather than by a random combination of circumstances. And, as a rule, we are completely unaware of such distortions.
The illusion of cause and effect occurs every time we discover some kind of pattern and pattern in the random, and this most often happens when we are confident that we understand the reason for what is happening. If we have an intuition that a causal relationship exists, then when we notice a pattern, we link it to those beliefs.
Examples indicate that the brain is overactive when it is busy searching for patterns. Even skilled professionals make mistakes, seeing what they expect to see and omitting what is not consistent with their expectations. When pattern recognition works effectively, we are able to spot our lost child among the huge crowd at the mall. When this function works too hard, we find faces in confectionery products, identify trends in stock prices, and establish other relationships that do not exist in reality or that have a completely different meaning than what we put into them.
Specialists are specifically trained to notice patterns that are consistent with traditional expectations. However, perceiving the world through the prism of expectations, no matter how reasonable they may be, can sometimes lead to negative consequences. Just like subjects who don't notice an unexpected gorilla while counting basketball passes, experts may not notice their gorilla—the unusual, unexpected, or rare cause of a pattern.
Many introductory psychology textbooks ask students to find a connection between ice cream consumption and the number of people drowning. On days with increased ice cream consumption, more people die on water bodies, and on days when little ice cream is eaten, such accidents occur less frequently. It's easy to assume that ice cream itself cannot lead to waterborne deaths, and news of drownings is unlikely to encourage people to buy ice cream. There is probably a third factor that links these two facts: summer heat. In winter, people consume less ice cream and are less likely to drown because few people go to the beach during this time.
This example demonstrates the second main fallacy underlying the illusion of causation: when two events are related in time, we tend to conclude that one follows from the other. The correlation between ice cream consumption and the number of drownings is given in textbooks precisely because it is difficult to discern a causal relationship between these two facts, but it is easy to determine a third, unmentioned factor that is a common cause for them. However, in the real world, dispelling the illusion of cause and effect is not so easy.
Most conspiracy theories are based on identifying patterns in events, the causes of which, when looked at from the point of view of the theory itself, seem clear and understandable to us. In fact, conspiracy theories derive causes from random coincidence. The more you believe them, the more likely it is that you are a victim of an illusion.
Statistics and social sciences seek intelligent ways to collect and analyze relationships between factors so that true cause-and-effect relationships can be identified. But the only way With the help of which you can accurately verify the presence of a cause-and-effect relationship is an experiment. Without experiment, we cannot be sure that the connection is not a coincidence.
According to the classic principle taught in all introductory psychology courses, correlation does not mean causation. This principle is important to remember because it serves as an antidote to the illusion of cause and effect. However, it is extremely difficult to truly master it, and abstract knowledge alone does little to protect us from mistakes. Fortunately, we can advise you on a simple technique that will help you identify the illusion in action. When you hear or read about a connection between two factors, consider whether you could randomly assign people to several groups to test the effect of one of these factors under different conditions. If such a random assignment is not possible (for physical or ethical reasons), then the experiment is impossible in principle and, therefore, the conclusion about a causal relationship is not supported by anything.
For example. “Bullying harms children’s psyche.” Could the researcher have divided the children into two groups: those who were bullied and those who were not? No. This would be impossible for ethical reasons. Therefore, the study was likely to examine the relationship between bullying and mental health problems. However, cause and effect can easily be reversed - children with underlying mental health problems are likely to be more likely to be bullied by their peers. Or bullying and mental health problems may be caused by other factors, such as the child's family environment.
The illusion of perceived causality in simple correlations depends largely on the appeal of the story. However, our entire understanding is based on one logical fallacy. Another mechanism that gives rise to the illusion of cause and effect depends on the approach to interpreting the facts. When evaluating chronologies, or simple sequences of events, we assume that earlier events cause later events.
Often the interpretation of facts seems obvious to us; We make all conclusions automatically, without the participation of consciousness, without even noticing that we are adding information that is not in the source. This is exactly how the illusion of cause and effect works. When we are presented with several sequential facts, we fill in the gaps in the story, building a chain of cause and effect. Not only do we automatically form cause-and-effect relationships that are indirectly expressed in a sequence of facts, but we also tend to remember the story better when we make such conclusions.
People spend billions of dollars to create movies, television shows, novels, short stories, biographies, historical fiction, and other forms of storytelling. One of the reasons for the appeal of spectator sports is their chronological nature: every match, every kick, every victory is a new event in a story that is unlikely to ever end. Teachers and non-fiction writers know from experience that a compelling story is the best way to capture and hold an audience's attention.
5. However, there is one paradox here: history, that is, the sequence of events, is in itself fascinating, but not always instructive. It is difficult to say why our brain, during evolution, was formed in such a way that it is more comfortable for us to perceive facts in chronological order, with the exception of those
The pleasure that narrative forms bring us may be explained by the fact that from any chronological connection we involuntarily try to infer a cause-and-effect relationship, and our brain is initially oriented towards finding and assimilating a causal relationship, rather than a simple sequence of events.
This may partly explain why the old advice of “show, don’t tell” is so valuable for aspiring writers learning to write more powerfully and persuasively. By arranging facts and omitting or adding essential information, they can influence the conclusions their listeners or readers will draw, without having to state or justify such conclusions directly.
When a causal relationship seems plausible, people immediately accept it on faith, without even thinking about alternatives.
The tendency to keep silent about alternative ways to achieve results for the sake of a coherent narrative is characteristic of many popular books for business people. In almost every book that discusses the key drivers of company success, from In Search of Excellence to , the authors make the same mistake: they select only those companies that have achieved high results and then analyze their performance. But they don't try to figure out whether the companies that failed did the same thing. Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling book tells how fortunes took a surprising turn for the maker of old-fashioned shoes, Hush Puppies. His shoes suddenly became all the rage. According to Gladwell, the success of Hush Puppies is due to the fact that its products were noticed by representatives of the fashion subculture, which attracted widespread attention to the brand and created a real stir for it. The author rightly notes that there was a rush for Hush Puppies shoes. However, the conclusion that it was he who caused the success was made in hindsight, and not deduced through experiment. In reality, there is no data that clearly indicates a connection between hype and company success. To establish even the simple fact of correlation, let alone causation, we needed to find out how many other companies of a similar type achieved meteoric rise without any hype, and how many companies created similar hype but failed to succeed. Only then can we speculate on whether the hype is the cause of success, or whether it is a feedback loop (the success itself led to the hype), or whether both dependencies operate simultaneously, forming a “virtuous” cycle.
Let's consider the last misconception, which is associated with the tendency to turn chronology into a cause-and-effect relationship. We perceive the sequence of events as a process extended in time, when one event gives rise to another. Therefore, it is difficult for us to understand that in almost all cases the same result can be explained by several interrelated causes or factors. The consistent passage of time encourages people to act as if every complex decision or event had only one single cause. In reality, any complex decision is based on several reasons as complex as it itself.
False judgments about cause and effect are common not only in politics, but also in business. Sherry Lansing, long touted as the most powerful woman in Hollywood, headed Paramount Pictures from 1992 to 2004. Under her careful leadership, such mega-hits as “Forrest Gump” and “Titanic” were created, and films created at her studio were awarded the Oscar for best film of the year three times. According to one Los Angeles Times article, after a string of unsuccessful projects and a declining share of box office receipts in Paramount's overall revenue, Lansing's contract was not renewed. A year before, she left her post, and then everyone was talking about how she was fired for poor results. However, just as Lansing's successes cannot be attributed solely to her extraordinary abilities, her failures could not be solely a consequence of her blunders - after all, hundreds of people worked with her on each film, and hundreds of different factors determine whether a film can capture the imagination of audiences ( and at the same time lighten their wallets).
Lansing's successor, Brad Gray, received the highest praise for the changes the studio had made under him; Already the first two films released under his leadership - “War of Miron” and “All or Nothing” - became one of the leaders in film distribution in 2005. However, both films were conceived and shot under Lansing. If she had stayed in her post for a few more months, she might have been able to regain her former trust and remain at the helm of the company. There is no doubt that the CEO is formally responsible for the results of his company, but the tendency to attribute all of the company's successes and failures to one of its leaders is a classic example of how the illusion of cause and effect operates.
Now that we've looked at the three fallacies that underlie the illusion of causation—an overzealous pattern detection mechanism, unwarranted leaps from correlation to causation, and our inherent interest in chronological accounts of events—we can try to explain why which encourages people to voluntarily refuse to vaccinate their children. The answer is that these parents, along with the media, some celebrities, and even some doctors, have fallen prey to the illusion of cause and effect. More precisely, they see a pattern where there is none, and mistake a simple coincidence in time for a causal relationship.
Andrew Wakefield, a famous London doctor, announced in 1998 that a link had been found between autism and the measles vaccine. Wakefield's claim about the link between autism and vaccination immediately caused a media frenzy, which may have led some parents to refuse to vaccinate their children, which in turn led to a decline in herd immunity to measles among the UK population. Even if Wakefield were to conduct a large-scale epidemiological study and it showed that vaccinated children were more likely to have autism, he would still have no basis to claim a causal relationship. Recall that to establish causality, the experimenter needs to assign participants to different conditions based on random assignment. To reach this conclusion, Wakefield would have to conduct a clinical trial in which some children were randomly assigned to receive the vaccine and others to receive a placebo, and then prove that the incidence of autism was significantly different between the two groups.
The link between vaccines and autism is a sham. There is not even a correlation between them, let alone a cause-and-effect relationship. People perceive patterns that are consistent with their beliefs and expectations and infer causal relationships from simple sequences of events. Therefore, evidence from a few patients was enough to spread the world into an epidemic of fear of highly effective vaccines.
Despite evidence that any conclusion about causation is born of illusion, vaccination of the population has not returned to the required rate of 90%. Real stories are inherently more compelling than statistics. This is probably due to the narrative effect that underlies such stories; they hypnotically influence us, subjugating us to their power. You can learn from Consumer Reports that Hondas and Toyotas are very reliable car brands. Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, surveys thousands of car owners and uses their responses to create an overall reliability rating. However, a friend’s complaints that his Toyota is always sitting in the workshop and that he will never buy a car of the same brand in his life impresses us much more than the combined reviews of thousands of strangers. The experience of a particular car owner, especially his negative feelings, evokes a certain emotional response, while statistics about thousands of people leave us indifferent.
We remember individual examples, not statistics and averages. And this explains why stories seem so attractive to us. Our brain was formed in conditions in which we received all information through direct perception or from the lips of people in whom we trusted. Our ancestors did not have access to huge amounts of data, statistical calculations and experimental methods. We were forced to learn from specific examples, rather than from aggregate information about how people act in certain situations.
Each of us trusts experts and their recommendations. However, scientists are also influenced by real stories and tend to empathize. As a rule, we trust the opinions of family and friends more and are less likely to listen to people we don’t know well. Meanwhile, science has a reliable way to reject unfounded conclusions - to determine whether the results of the study on the basis of which the conclusion was made can be reproduced. Real stories do not accumulate in the same way that material from major scientific studies does. And scientific education helps determine which sources can be trusted and which cannot.
We have looked at three mechanisms through which the illusion of cause and effect operates. First, we look for the regular in the random and predict future events based on repeating patterns. Secondly, we establish cause-and-effect relationships between events occurring at the same time. Finally, thirdly, we are inclined to believe that if one event follows or should follow another, then the earlier event is the cause of the subsequent one. The illusion of cause and effect is very deeply rooted in us. Humans differ from other primates in their ability to infer cause and effect relationships. Even small children understand that when one object hits another, it will begin to move. They are also able to judge the possible causes of events: if an object moved, then someone set it in motion. Primates, our closest relatives, do not know how to make such conclusions, and therefore it is difficult for them to understand the reasons for what is happening unless they observe them with their own eyes. Therefore, by evolutionary standards, the ability to identify hidden causes is relatively recent, and new mechanisms often need to be refined. We build cause-and-effect relationships without any problems; the problem is that we tend to find connections where it is most beneficial for us.
Chapter 6. How to become smarter in a few minutes?
The opinion that Mozart's music has a beneficial effect on our intellect is shared by many people. In one Slovak hospital, all newborns in the children's ward are fitted with headphones within a few hours of birth to provide a powerful boost to their mental development through music. “Mozart’s music has a positive effect on future IQ,” said the doctor who initiated the practice.
Influenced illusions of potential We believe that our brain hides huge reserves of intellectual resources that are just waiting to be harnessed - the only question is how to do it. The illusion is based on two ideas: first, in a wide range of situations and conditions, the human mind and brain are potentially capable of operating at a much higher level than normal; secondly, this potential can be unlocked using simple methods that can be quickly and easily implemented. The story of the Mozart effect is a perfect illustration of this illusion: it turns a claim with little or no scientific basis into a widespread myth from which some make millions of dollars.
In 1997, Kenneth Steele, a psychology professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and two of his students decided to repeat the Mozart experiment. But when all attempts to detect improvements in cognitive function after Mozart's music failed, Steele came to the conclusion that the Mozart effect did not exist at all.
72% of respondents agreed that “most people only use their brains to 10% of their capacity.” This is a strange idea that is often mentioned in self-help books and comedy shows. In some ways, this is the purest embodiment of the illusion of potential. We have no reason to suspect that evolution or an intelligent designer has given us an organ that is 90% ineffective. If we used only a small part of our brain, then as a result of natural selection it would have been reduced in volume long ago. The “Myth of the 10%” predates brain imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography. In a person who does not have neurological disorders, the entire brain, including the dark areas, is always “on” and is at least at the initial level of activity.
According to surveys, 65% of people believe that “a person is able to physically feel the gaze of someone behind him. The famous psychologist Edward Titchener wrote in Science magazine in 1898. “I tested this... in a series of laboratory experiments involving people who claimed to be extremely sensitive to the gaze of people standing behind them or to have a special ability to make people turn around... the experiments were consistently negative.”
76% of respondents believe that “advertising operating at a subliminal level (subliminal – not reaching the threshold of consciousness, subconscious) can encourage people to buy a product. Suggestion made at the subliminal level, as well as the belief in the ability to physically feel someone else's gaze on oneself, is based on the idea that people are very sensitive to weak signals that cannot be detected using ordinary senses. The belief in subliminal suggestion underlies many other beliefs, for example, that we can quit smoking or learn a new language while we sleep with the help of recordings with subliminal messages that release the hidden capabilities of our body and do not require any effort on our part.
Although there is no evidence to support the reality of subliminal suggestion, people stubbornly believe that with the help of this technique it is possible to control the minds of others. Belief in the influence of some invisible forces plays a key role in the illusion of potential. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Peter Jennings, an ABC news anchor, smiled more often when talking about Republican Ronald Reagan than when talking about Democrat Walter Mondale. According to a small poll conducted among ABC viewers, the number of voters who voted for Reagan was 13% higher than those of NBC and CBS. Did Jennings actually persuade many viewers to vote for Reagan with his simple smile trick? The scientists who conducted this study came to this exact conclusion, as did Malcolm Gladwell, who described the results in his best-selling book The Tipping Point. “The point is not that these smiles and nods carry some subliminal messages. They are fairly straight and lie on the surface. The point is that they have a completely invisible effect... ABC viewers who voted for Reagan will never, in a thousand years, tell you that the only reason they voted that way was because Peter Jennings smiled every time he mentioned the president's name .
Which of the two explanations seems more convincing to you: Peter Jennings's facial muscles led to a sharp increase in votes for Ronald Reagan - from 13 to 24%, or that ABC News viewers initially had certain qualities that influenced both the choice of this program and the decision to vote for Reagan. In our opinion, it is more logical to assume the second.
The rapidly growing market for cognitive training products is cleverly taking advantage of most people's fear that their intellectual abilities will decline as they age. The website for Mindscape's Brain Trainer states that "Training your brain for 10 to 15 minutes every day with these simple exercises and puzzles will help you improve the skills that are so important to success in school and everyday life." .
Now that you've read about the Mozart effect, the 10% myth, and subliminal suggestion, you probably understand why this type of advertising is so effective, and you should become immune to its charms. Advertisers skillfully take advantage of our love for quick solutions, the desire to find a wonderful panacea that would save us from all our problems. A few minutes of play a day, and you will be able to quickly remember the right word or name, overcome the limitations of your own memory and miraculously rejuvenate your brain. We should be suspicious of any simple solutions to complex problems and be hesitant to spend money when we are promised skill development without any effort.
Several studies have even been conducted to find out whether simple perception and memory exercises help in solving everyday problems that require mental effort. It has been established that the influence of cognitive training is limited only by the task being practiced. By playing Brain Age, you will become better at specific tasks included in the program, but the new skills will not automatically transfer to other types of tasks. If you want to improve your Sudoku skills, try solving these puzzles as often as possible, especially if you enjoy them. But if you think that Sudoku will help you keep your thinking sharp, and thanks to this game you will not have to search around the house for keys or medicine, then most likely you have succumbed to the illusion of potential.
Don't get us wrong. We are not trying to prove that a person has no ability to improve his mental abilities at all. Intellectual reserves are not something constant or static, no matter what age a person is. We all have great potential to develop our abilities and acquire new skills. Neuroscientific research shows that the plasticity of the adult brain—that is, its ability to change its structure under the influence of learning, trauma and other influences—is much greater than previously thought. The illusion is that this potential is easily revealed and can be achieved instantly and with a minimum of effort. Most people have approximately the same potential and, with appropriate training, are able to achieve approximately the same results.
Geniuses are not born, but become, developing over many years and following a fairly predictable route. Mozart's early compositions were far from perfect, and Bobby Fischer made a lot of mistakes when learning to play chess. Nature endowed them with an exceptional gift, but without training and training they would not have become great people. And their greatness is limited only by the areas in which they trained. No matter how much you train your memory for numbers, it will not make you remember names any better.
No matter how counterintuitive it may be, the most effective way to preserve and strengthen your mental abilities has practically nothing to do with cognitive activity itself. Directly training the brain may have less of an impact than training the body, especially when it comes to staying in shape through aerobic exercise. At the same time, it is not necessary to subject yourself to grueling loads and compete in triathlon. To improve your executive functioning and improve your brain health, take a moderate walk for at least thirty minutes several times a week. Physical activity keeps the brain in good shape and thereby improves a range of cognitive functions. And solving puzzles has no effect on longevity, health or appearance.
Conclusion. The Myth of Intuition
Why do the “success stories” of CEOs leading large corporations pique our interest? First of all, we hope to understand how they achieved such heights: how they got to their post, what prompted them to make certain decisions, why their management style contributed to their success. And most importantly, we want to get to know a person who, thanks to a special approach to business and, perhaps, to life in general, is a worthy example to follow.
In recent years, psychologists have suggested that most thought processes can be divided into two types: fast and automatic, on the one hand, and slow and reflective, on the other (for more details, see). Both processes contribute to the formation of everyday illusions. The fast, automatic processes that accompany perception, memory, and reasoning about cause and effect have serious limitations. Moreover, these limitations lead to more significant consequences in cases where our higher-level abilities, more associated with reflection and abstract thinking, do not notice distortions and do not make the necessary corrections. In other words, people who talk on the phone while driving are more likely to get into accidents not only because of limited attention, but also because of the inability to notice this limitation at the moment when it occurs.
Everyday illusions are closely intertwined with our habitual way of thinking, and we are not even aware that they are based on the “common sense”, under the influence of which we treat such stories so favorably. This common sense is often referred to by another word: intuition. Everything we intuitively agree with and believe comes from our collective assumptions and knowledge, and our intuition automatically influences our decisions without requiring any reflection on our part. It is intuition that makes us overestimate the ability to concentrate, as well as the accuracy and reliability of memories; It is under its influence that we take confidence as a sign of competence and exaggerate the level of our own knowledge; because of it, we find cause-and-effect relationships in random coincidences and simple correlations, and we also believe that our brain hides huge reserves that can be easily mastered. But in all these cases our intuitions are wrong.
This thesis clearly does not apply to recent popular ideas. It has become fashionable among the general public and some psychologists to argue that intuitive methods of thinking and decision making are more effective than analytical approaches. Indeed, intuitive thinking is a faster and easier process. And the idea that such thinking produces more accurate results is very tempting, since it challenges society's long-standing reverence for rationality and logic as the purest and most objective forms of thought.
Business magazines regularly praise this “decisive” management style. For example, in its article on Percy Barnevik, the celebrated chief executive of the Swedish-Swiss company ABB, Long Itange Planning magazine was full of praise: “When you meet him... you immediately notice his impulsive and original approach to management, where the main role is played by the ability to make quick decisions. and confident decisions.”
Pointing out the nature of everyday illusions and their potentially destructive consequences is much easier than finding solutions to the problems they create. However, we have looked at three general approaches that can reduce the impact of these illusions on everyday life. First, by understanding the principles behind everyday illusions, you will be able to spot them in the future and learn to avoid the traps they set. Secondly, you can try to improve your cognitive abilities through specific training. Illusions are a consequence of erroneous judgments about our limitations, so it is these judgments that need to be corrected.
As Woody Allen said at the end of his legendary comedy program: “I wish I could leave you with some positive advice, but I don’t have any. Would you take two negative ones instead?” One piece of advice you can take away from our book is really negative: beware of your intuition, especially if it tells you how the mind works. Our mental systems, responsible for rapid cognition, are excellent at solving the problems for which they were formed during evolution. However, today we live in much more complex cultural, social and technological realities than our ancestors. In many cases, intuition is poorly adapted to solving the problems that modern life poses to us. Think twice before trusting your intuition and neglecting rational analysis, especially when it comes to important issues. Be critical of people who claim that intuition is a panacea for all problems that arise when making decisions.
And yet we will not leave you without positive advice. Important events can happen before our eyes, but due to the illusion of attention, we do not always notice them. Now that you know about this illusion, you will no longer be so confident that you are able to see everything around you. Under the influence of the illusion of memory, we can overestimate the accuracy and reliability of our memories. Now, understanding the essence of this illusion, you will begin to trust the memory a little less - both your own and other people, and in important situations you will check your memories with the help of other evidence. You will know that confidence is simply a personality trait of people, and not a sign of their knowledge, good memory or ability. You will stop overestimating your knowledge about a particular subject and learn to check the level of your understanding before confusing superficial knowledge with true knowledge. You will not establish cause-and-effect relationships simply because one event follows or occurs simultaneously with another. You will learn to be skeptical of claims that the brain's potential can be unlocked through simple means, but at the same time you will know that with education and training you can achieve excellence in any task.
One day I had the opportunity to check one of my vivid memories. In the late 80s, my friends and I went to a bridge tournament abroad for the first time - in Sofia. Three team members boarded the carriage in advance, but the fourth was still missing. We were already starting to get nervous, and when the train started moving, we were completely sad. But our friend managed to jump into one of the last cars, and a few minutes later he joined us. Since then, we have always joked: whoever lives closest comes later than everyone else. We departed from the Belorussky railway station, and the latecomer lived on Lesnaya Street (15 minutes on foot). When I described this story for a book of memoirs, the editor noted that trains to Bulgaria depart from Kievsky Station, which contradicts our joke. I tried to defend my version, but the editor was scrupulous, and found out that the same procedure was in place in Soviet times. After that I gave up and this passage was removed from the book.
Neuroticism (Neuroticism) is a personality trait characterized by emotional instability, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
PHOTO Getty Images
It seems to us that we see and hear everything that is happening around us. This belief, which has been called the “Great Illusion of Consciousness,” has attracted the attention of psychologists, philosophers, and physiologists in recent decades. It's no secret that we don't notice a lot. For example, magicians and pickpockets actively take advantage of our inattention. In 2008, even a special direction emerged - “neuromagic”, which answers the question of why we are convinced that we see everything. The question is what we don't notice and why it happens.
Psychology began to study attention gaps in the 1970s. These studies arose as a by-product of the study of visual perception. Ulric Neisser, the founder of cognitive psychology, wanted to prove that in our visual perception there are no special filters that retain important information and discard everything unnecessary. All we need to do is know what we are monitoring and we will do it effectively. To do this, an experiment was conducted: viewers were shown a game of two basketball teams and were asked to follow the passes of the ball. The majority of viewers generally coped with this task successfully. Neisser introduced an additional condition: during the game, a girl under an umbrella walked from corner to corner on the screen. It was a stimulus that had nothing to do with what was happening, but was still quite noticeable. It turned out that if a person is not loaded with a task, this stimulus is read by him. If there is a task (for example, to monitor the passes that team members give to each other), the person most likely will not notice this event.
This phenomenon has been labeled "inattentional blindness." If we are not tuned in to perceive a certain object, most likely we will not notice it. About 30 years later, Chicago psychologist Daniel Simons replicated the experiment, but now instead of the girl, a man in a gorilla suit walked between the players. And even this potentially dangerous creature was not noticed by the audience. Simons made many modifications to this experiment to see how the viewer would react to changing conditions. For example, the viewer may know about the gorilla in advance, but if during the process of observation we change the color of the curtain against which the action takes place, he will again not notice anything. And this is another well-known error of attention - the so-called change blindness: we do not notice even very large changes in the visual scene if they occur very gradually or are accompanied by a film break. For example, the game “find 10 differences” uses exactly this effect: basically the same scene appears before us, but with some changes, and we cannot immediately notice them. If changes occur suddenly and in a static picture, they are caught by motion detectors, which automatically draw our attention to the place where something happened.
Moreover, our brain does not detect changes, even if there is not a global interruption of the image, but its local noise. For example, several splashes of dirt fall on the car window. And we don't notice them. Why? Are we not looking at what is changing, or are we not looking at where the change is happening? Psychologists have tried to find an answer to this question - not very successfully. The answer was found by physiologists who used the functional MRI method.
Our brain has special areas that process information about objects. For example, a human face, an image of a home. Physiologists assumed that when a person does not notice changes in the face, there should be no activity in this area. It turns out that activity actually differs when we notice and when we don't notice changes. But this also happens in other zones - in those that are associated with unconscious processing of information about the location of an object. In other words, we are looking in the wrong direction and because of this we do not notice what is changing in the image on the periphery of our vision.
There is a special type of error that concerns what has already appeared in the field of our perception - this is repetition blindness. We do not notice the repetition of a visual object if it occurs within a certain interval of time or if this object is located next to the one we just saw. Therefore, in modern text editors, repeated words are underlined in red - to make the object different for us. If we see the same object, then our brain does not encode it separately, but relates it to the image that we just saw. For example, if we see a white dog on the lawn and, turning away for a moment, see the white dog again, we will think that it is the same white dog.
In fact, there are incomparably more errors. In recent years at the beginning of the 21st century, psychologists and physiologists are finding them more and more. Philosophers debate whether it is necessary to discuss these errors at all, or whether in fact it is unimportant and we perceive everything that we need. I just want to note that when we think that we see and notice absolutely everything, it makes sense to stop, look closely and think if this is so.
Maria Falikman is a cognitive psychologist, leading researcher at the Laboratory of Cognitive Research at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, scientific director of the Moscow Seminar on Cognitive Science.
Experiment: "The Invisible Gorilla"
Christopher Chabris
Daniel Simons
The invisible gorilla
or the story of how deceptive our intuition is
The book by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons is based on a rather interesting psychological experiment by the authors, which proves that many of us see only what we expect to see.
And this often turns out to be an illusion. Moreover, illusions surround us everywhere: from memory, from attention, and even from knowledge.
Alexander Druz, master of the game “What? Where? When?”, winner of the “Crystal Owl” 1990, 1992,1995, 2000, 2006
Entertaining and informative reading... Each of us harbors an unimaginable confidence that the sensations and information about the world around us that our senses provide us with are incredibly accurate.
Through clever experiments and compelling stories, The Invisible Gorilla shows that our confidence is unfounded. This book is an amazing journey through the illusions that we fall into at every turn, and the problems that this can lead to.
The illusion of attention is one of the most important, surprising and most unexplored errors of human consciousness. The book examines these phenomena clearly and in detail.
It’s not often that you come across a book that is so thorough and witty, deeply scientific and answers the questions of our everyday life, but here it is - in front of you! Smart, educational, with shocking and delightful twists, this book, if you take it to heart, will change many of your negative habits and may even save your life.
Margaret Heffernan, managing director of the company and author of The Naked Truth
This book is not only witty and entertaining, but also very educational... When you read it, you, of course, will not be able to free yourself from all the bonds that limit your consciousness, but at least you will learn to be aware of them and somehow restrain them.
Cognitive psychologists Chris Chabris and Dan Simons take us through a fascinating journey and show us how our brains deceive us, day after day. “The Invisible Gorilla” is fascinating, gets to the point, and is full of examples from reality. Some of them made me laugh out loud. Read this book and you'll understand why meteorologists make good financial managers and how Homer Simpson will help you think more clearly.
This book opens our eyes. It arouses in us interest in our mind, which tends to make mistakes. It is a must-read for lawyers, judges, all law enforcement officials, and anyone who is mastering the art of debate.
Introduction
Everyday illusions
There are three things that are extremely difficult to do: break steel, crush diamond and know yourself.
Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanack (1750)
About twenty years ago, we conducted a simple experiment with psychology students at Harvard University. To our surprise, this experiment became one of the most famous in the history of psychology. It is written about in textbooks and taught in introduction to psychology courses in all countries of the world. Entire articles have been devoted to him in magazines such as Newsweek and The New Yorker, and television programs including Dateline NBC. It even became the theme of an exhibition, for example at the Exploratorium Science Museum (San Francisco) and other museums around the world. Such fame is explained by the fact that the experiment, in a comic form, opens our eyes to how we perceive the world around us, as well as to what remains beyond our perception, and these discoveries seem amazing and deep to us.
You will read about our experiment in the first chapter of the book. As we thought about it for many years, we realized that it demonstrates a very deep principle underlying mental activity. We all believe that we can see what is in front of us, accurately recall important events from the past, recognize the limits of our knowledge, and correctly determine cause-and-effect relationships. However, these intuitive beliefs are often erroneous and caused by nothing more than illusions that hide from us the limitations of our cognitive abilities.
Someone should remind us that we should not judge a book by its cover, because many of us tend to believe that the appearance accurately reflects the inner content, unknown to us. Someone should tell us that every ruble saved is a ruble earned, because in our minds we separate future income from the money that is already in our hands. The main purpose of aphorisms is precisely to prevent us from making mistakes under the influence of such intuitive ideas. So Benjamin Franklin's aphorism about three difficult things advises us to question our intuitive belief that we understand ourselves well. In life, we act as if we know perfectly well about the structure of our psyche and the motives for our actions. Surprising as it may seem, in reality we often have no idea about either one or the other.
The book you hold in your hands is about six everyday illusions that have a profound impact on a person's life: illusions attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause-and-effect relationship And potential. Illusions are understood as distorted ideas about one’s own mental activity, which are not only erroneous, but also dangerous. We will find out when and why people are susceptible to these illusions, how they affect our lives, and how to overcome or at least minimize their impact.
We use the term intentionally "illusion", thereby drawing an analogy with optical illusions such as M. C. Escher's famous endless staircase. Even realizing that the structure depicted in the picture cannot exist in reality as a single whole, we involuntarily see a staircase of the correct shape in each individual segment. Everyday illusions are just as firmly rooted in our consciousness. Even if we realize the fallacy of our ideas and intuitive beliefs, it is extremely difficult to change them. We call these illusions everyday, because they influence our behavior day after day. Every time we use a cell phone while driving a car, confident that we are paying enough attention to the road, we are captured by one of these illusions. Every time we accuse a person of lying in whose mind events from the past are confused, we become victims of illusion. Every time we choose someone who looks more confident than the rest as a team leader, we fall under the influence of an illusion. Every time we start a new project with no doubt that we will complete it within a certain time frame, we indulge in an illusion. Almost all spheres of human activity are subject to everyday illusions.
For us professors who design and conduct psychological experiments, the impact of such illusions on our own lives becomes increasingly obvious as we study the psyche. You are able to develop the same penetrating gaze, which, like an X-ray beam, will penetrate into the very depths of your consciousness. After reading this book, you will learn to see who is hiding behind the curtain, and to distinguish even the tiniest cogs and gears of the mechanism that controls our thoughts and ideas. By learning about the existence of everyday illusions, you will look at the world in a new way and understand it more clearly. You become aware of the impact illusions have on your thoughts and actions, as well as the behavior of those around you. You will also be able to identify when journalists, managers, advertisers and politicians - intentionally or unwittingly - use other people's illusions to their advantage, trying to confuse or convince them of something. By learning about everyday illusions, you can adjust your ideas about life, taking into account the limitations and at the same time the real benefits of the psyche. You may even find ways to put the knowledge you have gained into practice - just for your own pleasure or material gain. Ultimately, by looking through the veils that distort the perception of ourselves and the world around us, we can, perhaps for the first time in our lives, be able to connect with reality.
An impressive book, full of thorough explorations of the human psyche in the context of human fallacies.
If you haven't seen this video yet, check it out. It asks you to count the number of passes made by players wearing white jerseys.
Did you notice the gorilla? Me not:). Isn't that cool?
For the research that formed the basis of the book, the authors received an Ig Nobel Prize - which is quite strange, because the topic of illusions of perception is quite serious (the book gives examples of illusions that cost people their freedom). And at the same time, such a simple minute experiment shows how limited our consciousness is.
Starting with the illusion of attention (we are sure that if something happened, we would notice it), the authors consistently debunk other stereotypes. Some of them are quite easy to accept (my confidence that I notice everything that happens was shaken quite a bit by the gorilla test:), while some of them cause a strong internal protest. One such illusion is the illusion of intuition.
Intuition is nothing more than a collection of past experiences, the authors believe. Consequently, what our intuition tells us is a template into which our consciousness pushes everything it sees. Several scientific experiments prove that this is indeed the case.
Or, for example, the illusion of cause and effect. If two events happen one after the other, our brain connects them logically as cause and effect, even if in reality there is no such connection. Those. events may be correlated (occurring together and being associated with some third event that we may not see), but this does not automatically make them cause and effect. For example, trees sway and this causes the wind to blow. Or meeting a black cat crossing your path is bad luck.
Another point of view (and recent scientific research also proves this) is that there is not much difference between cause and effect - they are inextricably linked (see, for example, Alan Aspect's experiment in physics and Zivorad Slavinsky's experiments in psychology). That is, it turns out that there is something in these illusions.
In terms of the style of presentation, the book reminded me of "" and "" - the authors also subtly and easily open up the brain :).
I recommend “The Invisible Gorilla” to everyone - as a pill against everyday illusions, as an impetus for reflection. I personally do not agree with all things, but, nevertheless, the book was useful to me as a look from a different perspective on the same situation.
Christopher Sharby and Daniel Simons "The Invisible Gorilla, or the Story of How Our Intuition is Deceptive", 2011, Career Press, ISBN 978-5-904946-07-4.
P.S. Many thanks to the publishing house Career Press and personally to Yuri Shipkov for providing the book!
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