The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us. Christopher Chabris

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      In a famous scene in the movie Pretty Woman, Julia Roberts is having breakfast with Richard Gere in his hotel room. She picks up a croissant but then takes a bite out of a pancake. In Jagged Edge, Glenn Close’s outfit changes three times during a single courtroom scene. In The Godfather, Sonny’s car is riddled with bullets at a tollbooth, but seconds later its windshield is miraculously repaired. Did you know about these mistakes or others like them? These inadvertent changes, known as continuity errors, are common in movies, in part because of how movies are created. Rarely are movies shot in sequence and in real time from start to finish. They are completed piecemeal, with scenes filmed in an order determined by the actors’ schedules, the availability of physical locations for filming, the cost of hiring the crew at different times, the weather conditions, and many other factors. Each scene is filmed from many different angles, and the final movie is spliced together and put in order in the editing room.

      Just one person on the set is responsible for making sure that everything in each scene matches from one shot to the next.¹¹ That person, known as the script supervisor, is charged with remembering all of the details: what people were wearing, where they were standing, which foot was forward, whether a hand was on a waist or in a pocket, whether an actress was eating a croissant or a pancake, and whether the windshield should be intact or bullet-ridden. If the script supervisor makes a mistake during filming, it’s often impossible to go back and reshoot the scene. And the editor may decide to ignore the error because other aspects of the shot are more important. As a result, some mistakes almost inevitably make it into the final product. That’s why some of the slaves in Spartacus, set during the Roman Empire, can occasionally be seen wearing wristwatches.

      Dozens of books and websites are devoted to cataloging such errors for the curious and obsessed.¹² For The Godfather, one site lists forty-two separate continuity errors (plus dozens of other mistakes and anomalies). In part, such lists appeal because of the irony involved: Hollywood, despite spending tens of millions of dollars on a movie, makes clear mistakes that anyone can see. Finding such errors gives the amateur continuity sleuth a feeling of superiority—the filmmakers must have been sloppy not to notice what I can see clearly. And indeed, when you see an error in a movie, it suddenly seems obvious.

      Several years ago, Dateline NBC ran a story on film flubs in movies like Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan, which had both won Academy Awards and been acclaimed for their editing. Correspondent Josh Mankiewicz revealed an error in Saving Private Ryan in which eight soldiers walked across a field in the distance, even though one had been killed a few minutes earlier in the film, so by then there should have been only seven soldiers. In a disbelieving voice, he said, “This is Steven Spielberg, one of the most talented and most careful moviemakers out there. You’ve got to figure he watched the film several times before it actually got to the theaters. And he didn’t see it?” Later, Mankiewicz asked, “What is it about filmmakers that they can shoot so carefully, many takes, and still miss something so obvious, something the audience can see clearly?” The questions are nearly perfect illustrations of how the illusion of memory operates. Mankiewicz (and his producers) assumed that people have an accurate memory of everything that has happened and that they will automatically notice any discrepancies.¹³

      When they were in graduate school together at Cornell, Dan and his friend Daniel Levin (now a professor at Vanderbilt University) decided to explore experimentally how well people actually notice such errors in movies.¹⁴ With this project “the two Dans” began a long, productive, and ongoing collaboration. For their first study, they made a brief movie of a conversation between two friends, Sabina and Andrea, about a surprise party for their mutual friend Jerome. Sabina sat at a table when Andrea entered the scene. As they talked about the party, the camera cut back and forth between them, sometimes showing a close-up of one of them, and other times showing both of them. After about a minute, the conversation ended and the screen faded to black.

      Imagine being a subject in their experiment. You come to a laboratory room and are told that before you do another task, the experimenters would like you to watch a brief movie and then to answer some detailed questions about it. They advise you to pay close attention and they start the movie. As soon as the movie ends, they hand you a piece of paper that asks, “Did you notice any unusual differences from one shot to the next where objects, body positions, or clothing suddenly changed?” If you are like almost all of the subjects in this experiment, you would answer no—you would not have noticed any of the nine editing mistakes the two Dans intentionally made!¹⁵

      These “errors,” which were of the same type that end up in books and websites on film flubs, included plates on the table changing color and a scarf disappearing and reappearing. They were much more obvious than the ones Josh Mankiewicz disparaged in his Dateline report. Yet even when subjects watched the film a second time, now looking for changes, they still noticed, on average, just two of the deliberate errors. This phenomenon, the surprising failure to notice seemingly obvious changes from one moment to the next, is now known as change blindness—people are “blind” to the changes between what was in view moments before and what is in view now.¹⁶ This phenomenon is related to the inattentional blindness we discussed in the last chapter, but it is not the same. Inattentional blindness usually happens when we fail to notice the appearance of something we weren’t expecting to see. The thing we miss, such as a gorilla, is fully visible, right in front of us the entire time. For change blindness, unless we remember that Julia Roberts was eating a croissant, the fact that she is now eating a pancake is unremarkable. Change blindness occurs when we fail to compare what’s there now with what was there before. Of course, in the real world, objects don’t abruptly change into other objects, so checking all the visual details from moment to moment to make sure they haven’t changed would be a spectacular waste of brainpower.

      What is in some ways even more important than a failure to notice changes is the mistaken belief that we should notice them. Daniel Levin cheekily named this misbelief change blindness blindness, because people are blind to the extent of their own change blindness. In one experiment, Levin showed photographs from the Sabina/Andrea conversation to a group of undergraduates, described the film, and pointed out that the plates were red in one shot and white in another. That is, rather than run the change blindness experiment, he explained everything about it, including the intentional “flub.” He then asked these subjects to decide whether or not they would have noticed the change if they had just watched the film without being alerted to its presence. More than 70 percent confidently said that they would have spotted the change, even though in the original study no one actually did! For the disappearing scarf, more than 90 percent said they would have noticed, when again, in the original experiment, no one actually did.¹⁷ This is the illusion of memory at work: Most people firmly believe that they will notice unexpected changes, when in fact almost nobody does.

      Now imagine you are in another experiment conducted by the two Dans. You come to the lab and again you are asked to watch a brief silent movie. You are warned that it is really short and that you should pay close attention. The movie shows a person sitting at a desk who gets up and walks toward the camera. The shot then cuts to the hallway and shows a person exiting the door and answering a phone on the wall. He stands still, holding the phone to his ear and facing the camera for about five seconds before the scene fades to black. As soon as the movie ends, you are asked to write a detailed description of what you saw.

      Having just read about the Sabina/Andrea film, you’ve probably guessed that there’s more to this one than just the simple action of answering a phone. When the camera cut from a view of the actor walking СКАЧАТЬ