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

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СКАЧАТЬ one day several years later when we were conducting a followup experiment at Harvard, many of the undergraduate psychology students were attending a lecture in the basement of the building. During the lecture, Professor Stephen Kosslyn (Chris’s graduate school mentor and longtime collaborator) happened to describe the “door” study in detail as an example of research being conducted by other faculty members in the department. When they left the lecture, several students were overheard making comments like, “There’s no way I would have missed that change.” Our recruiter asked them if they would like to be in an experiment and sent them to the eighth floor. As they stood at a counter after filling out a form, the experimenter who had been talking to them ducked down behind the counter—ostensibly to file away some papers—and a different person stood up. All of the students missed the change!²⁵

      Change blindness is a surprisingly pervasive phenomenon considering that it has only been studied intensely since the 1990s. It occurs for simple shapes on a computer display, for photographs of scenes, and for people in the middle of a real-world interaction.²⁶ And the illusion of memory leads people to believe that they’re great at change detection even though they’re lousy. This illusion is so powerful that even change blindness researchers regularly experience it. We only came to recognize the limits of our intuitions about memories when our own data repeatedly showed us how wrong we could be. Similarly, filmmakers learn about the illusion of memory the hard way, by seeing evidence of their own mistakes on the big screen. Trudy Ramirez, the Hollywood script supervisor, has experienced this many times: “The way you remember something, how your memory shapes what you think you saw, as sure as you think you are…often it’s different if you can actually look back at it. There were times when I would have staked my life on something and later on realized I was wrong.”

      There are limits to change blindness, of course. When we spoke publicly about the early person-change studies, we were often asked whether people would notice if a man changed into a woman. “Of course they would,” we thought, but of course our certainty was another reflection of the illusion of memory. The only way to find out was to try it. Later experiments in Dan’s lab showed that people do in fact notice when you change a man into a woman or when you change the race of an actor in a movie. And people are more likely to notice a change to the identity of a person who is a member of their own social group.²⁷ But most other changes often go undetected.

      Even when subjects notice the person swap in these real-world experiments, they’re far from perfect in picking the original experimenter from a photographic lineup. And people who miss the change do no better with the lineup than they would have done by just guessing randomly.²⁸ In a brief encounter, we appear to store so little information about another person that we not only fail to see changes, but we also can’t even identify the person we saw just minutes earlier. When you interact briefly with a stranger, there are only a few pieces of general information you can be certain of retaining: sex, race, and social group (student, bluecollar worker, businessperson, and so on). Most of the rest of what you perceive about the person probably won’t make it into memory at all.

      Recall Leslie Meltzer and Tyce Palmaffy, who witnessed a knife attack from their car but recalled it differently just moments later. In light of the evidence that people sometimes fail to notice that a person has almost instantaneously been replaced by someone completely different, Leslie and Tyce’s discrepant eyewitness memories are unsurprising. After all, they were just observing the person from a distance, not standing face-to-face with him and giving him directions.

      “I Sat Next to Captain Picard”

      About ten years ago at a party Dan hosted, a colleague of ours named Ken Norman told us a funny story about sitting next to the actor Patrick Stewart (best known for his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek and Charles Xavier in the X-Men films) at a Legal Sea Food restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The story was prompted when Chris noticed that Dan had a small figurine of Captain Picard perched next to his television screen. “Can I buy your Captain Picard?” asked Chris. Dan said that it was not for sale. Chris offered five, then ten dollars. Dan refused. Chris eventually raised his bid to fifty dollars—for reasons that escape him now—but Dan still refused. (Neither of us remembers why Dan refused, but to this day, Picard has not left his place amid Dan’s electronics.)

      At this point Ken told us that at Legal Sea Food, Patrick Stewart had been dining with an attractive younger woman who, based on snippets of overheard conversation, appeared to be a publicist or agent. For dessert Stewart ordered Baked Alaska—a choice that stood out in memory because it appears rarely on restaurant menus. Toward the end of his meal, another distinctive event happened: Two members of the kitchen staff came out to Stewart’s table and asked for his autograph, which he readily granted. Moments later, a manager appeared and apologized, explaining that the “Trekkie” cooks’ action was against restaurant policy. Stewart shrugged off the supposed offense, and he and his companion were soon on their way.

      The only problem with the story was that it had actually happened not to Ken, but to Chris. Ken had heard Chris tell the story some time before and had incorporated it into his own memory. In fact, Ken felt so strongly that the memory was his, and had so completely forgotten that Chris was the original raconteur, that even Chris’s presence when Ken retold the story did not jog his memory of the way in which he had actually “encountered” Captain Picard. But when Chris pointed out the error, Ken quickly realized that this memory was not his own. This anecdote illustrates another aspect of the illusion of memory: When we retrieve a memory, we can falsely believe that we are fetching a record of something that happened to us rather than someone else.

      Although we believe that our memories contain precise accounts of what we see and hear, in reality these records can be remarkably scanty. What we retrieve often is filled in based on gist, inference, and other influences; it is more like an improvised riff on a familiar melody than a digital recording of an original performance. We mistakenly believe that our memories are accurate and precise, and we cannot readily separate those aspects of our memory that accurately reflect what happened from those that were introduced later. That’s how Ken appropriated Chris’s story—he had a vivid memory for the event, but mistakenly attributed it to his own experience. In the scientific literature, this type of distortion is known as a failure of source memory. He forgot the source of his memory, but because it was so vivid, he assumed that it came from his own experience.

      Source memory failures contribute to many cases of unintentional plagiarism. In the classes we teach, we occasionally encounter intentional plagiarism (or a gross misunderstanding of the right way to do research) when a student copies sections of a paper from Wikipedia or other sources. Unintentional plagiarism refers to cases in which people are convinced that an idea was their own when they actually learned about it from someone else. Recently, bestselling spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch was caught plagiarizing a story originally written by Candy Chand that had circulated on spirituality websites and blogs for more than a decade.²⁹ The story describes a group of students who were using placards to spell out “Christmas Love” in a winter pageant rehearsal. One student accidentally held her letter “m” upside down, resulting in the phrase “Christ was Love.” Walsch posted the story to Beliefnet.com in December 2008 as if it had happened to his son Nicholas. But it actually happened to Chand’s son, who also is named Nicholas, twenty years earlier—before Walsch’s son was even born. In this case, it is clear that Walsch appropriated someone else’s story. The question, though, is whether he was plagiarizing intentionally or whether he merely misappropriated the memory. In acknowledging a “serious error,” Walsch stated:

      I am truly mystified and taken aback by this…Someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so СКАЧАТЬ