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

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      Fellow staffers at the Washington Post magazine apparently expected a different result. According to Weingarten’s story, they had been worried that the performance might cause a riot:

      In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous “what-if” scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

      After the stunt was over, Weingarten asked famous conductor Leonard Slatkin, who directs the National Symphony Orchestra, to predict how a professional performer would do as a subway artist. Slatkin was convinced a crowd would gather: “Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.” During the actual performance, less than one-tenth that number stopped, and the National Guard did not mobilize.

      Weingarten, his editors, Slatkin, and perhaps the Pulitzer committee members fell prey to the illusion of attention. Even Bell, when he saw the video of his performance, was “surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”⁴³ Now that you’ve read about invisible gorillas, neglected fishing vessels, and unseen motorcycles, you can likely guess one reason why Bell went unrecognized for the great musician he is. People weren’t looking (or listening) for a virtuoso violinist. They were trying to get to work. The one person interviewed for the story who correctly understood the minimal response to Bell was Edna Souza, who shines shoes in the area and finds buskers distracting. She wasn’t surprised that people would rush by without listening: “People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward.”

      Under the conditions Weingarten established, commuters were already engaged in the distracting task of rushing to get to work, making them unlikely to notice Bell at all, let alone focus enough attention on his playing to distinguish him from a run-of-the-mill street musician. And that is the key. Weingarten’s choice of time and location for the stunt nearly guaranteed that nobody would devote much attention to the quality of Bell’s music. Weingarten is concerned that “if we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that—then what else are we missing?” Probably a lot, but this stunt provides no evidence for a lack of aesthetic appreciation. A more plausible explanation is that when people are focusing attention (visual and auditory) on one task—getting to work—they are unlikely to notice something unexpected—a brilliant violinist along the way.

      If we were designing an experiment to test whether or not Washingtonians are willing to stop and appreciate beauty, we would first pick a time and location where an average street performer would attract an average number of listeners. We would then randomly place either a typical street performer or Joshua Bell there on several different days to see who earned more money. In other words, to show that people don’t appreciate beautiful music, you first have to show that at least some people are listening to it and then show that they reward it no more than they do average music. Weingarten wouldn’t have won a Pulitzer had he stationed Bell next to a jackhammer. Under those conditions, nobody would be surprised by the lack of attention to the musician—the deafening sound would have drowned out the violin. Placing Bell next to a subway station escalator during rush hour had the same effect, but for a different reason. People physically could have heard Bell playing, but because their attention was diverted by their morning commute, they suffered from inattentional deafness.

      Other factors worked against Bell as well—he was performing relatively unfamiliar classical pieces rather than music that most commuters would know. If Bell had played The Four Seasons or other better-known classical pieces, he might have done better. By doing so, a far less talented musician could have taken in more money than Bell did. When Dan lived in Boston, he occasionally walked from downtown to the North End to get Italian food. At least half a dozen times, he walked past an accordion player who stationed himself at one end of an enclosed walkway that ran past a highway—a perfect place to attract listeners with time on their hands, walking to restaurants that they’d probably have to wait to get into anyhow. For street artists, like for real estate, location is everything. The accordionist played with gusto, showing an emotional attachment to his instrument and his art. Yet, Dan only ever heard him play one song: the theme from The Godfather. He played it when Dan walked to dinner and when Dan walked back from dinner, every time Dan made that trip. Either he spotted Dan before he was within earshot and instantly started playing the Godfather theme as some odd sort of joke or warning (Dan has yet to wake up with a bloody horse’s head at his feet), or he simply recognized the appeal to his audience of playing what may be the most familiar accordion piece. Our bet is that he did quite well. Had Bell performed on a Saturday afternoon, he likely would have attracted more listeners. Had he played shorter pieces on a subway platform rather than extended pieces next to the exit escalator, he might have attracted more listeners who had to wait for trains. And had he played the theme from The Godfather on his three-hundred-year-old violin, who knows.

      Who Notices the Unexpected?

      Chris once demonstrated the gorilla experiment to students in a seminar he was teaching. One of them told him the next week that she’d shown the video to her family, and that her parents had both missed the gorilla but her older sister had seen it. The sister then proceeded to crow about her triumph in this gorilla-noticing competition, claiming that it showed how smart she was. Dan regularly receives e-mails from people he’s never met asking why they missed the gorilla but their children saw it, or whether girls always notice but boys never do. A hedge fund manager found out about our study and had the people in her office do it. She tracked Chris down through a chain of acquaintances and interrogated him about the differences between people who notice the gorilla and people who don’t.

      Many people who have experienced the gorilla experiment see it as a sort of intelligence or ability test. The effect is so striking—and the balance so even between the number who notice and the number who don’t—that people often assume that some important aspect of your personality determines whether or not you notice the gorilla. When Dan was working with Dateline NBC to create demonstrations, the show’s producers speculated that employees in detail-oriented occupations would be more likely to notice the gorilla, and they asked most of their “subjects” what their jobs were. They assumed that how you perform on the task depends on what kind of person you are: a “noticer” or a “misser.” This is the question of individual differences. If we could figure out whether some people consistently notice the gorilla and other unexpected events in laboratory tasks, then we could figure out whether they are immune to inattentional blindness more generally, and potentially train the missers to become noticers.

      Despite the intuitive appeal of the gorilla video as a Rosetta stone for personality types, there is almost no evidence that individual differences in attention or other abilities affect inattentional blindness. In theory, people could differ in the total attentional resources they have available, and those with more resources (perhaps those with higher IQs) might have enough “left over” after allocating some to the primary task to be better at detecting unexpected objects. One argument against this possibility, though, is the consistency in the pattern of results we obtain with the gorilla demonstration. We conducted the original experiment on Harvard undergraduates—a fairly elite group—but the experiment works just as well at less prestigious institutions and with subjects who aren’t students. In all cases, about half of the subjects see the gorilla and half don’t. According to an online survey by Nokia, 60 percent of women and men think that women are better at multitasking. If you agree, you might also think СКАЧАТЬ