A False Confidence

If you learn by participation, then please view this video first before continuing to read.

http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html

Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above) in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.

—————————————————————————————————————-

At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?
Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed? But when we did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, we found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.

This is called “inattentional blindness” and has important implications. Good quality attention comes with a trade-off: while one’s attention is focused on element a, everything that is not-a moves to the shadows of one’s attention.

“Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it’s hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think,” is the conclusion of authors and cognitive psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris, in their book “The Invisible Gorilla.”

Under normal circumstances there are merits in this ability. It does make us aware however that attention span is “limited space” and it has definite boundaries to how much we become aware of when our attention is “on bright.” The good news of this is in the “flow” research done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This optimal state of experience allows one to tap resources and be very close to a version of an optimal self.

Here is where it is not good. The key is the context. As an example: in the context of business you have to think differently about how to think: the change required to apply new problem solving models, new ways of thinking about managing people, etc. You have the mental frame/map because you have been trained (i.e. have the ability), but in the situation where you need to do it, unless you remember in time, and deliberately switch on the new frame/map, you will do what you always did. What is happening?

In motorbike accidents involving motor cars, the driver of the car frequently says they did not even see the motorbike! That is the “invisible gorilla.”

We very frequently live from mental maps which gives us the direction and boundaries in a situation. It is like when you are traveling on the road: you have an internal map of the “big picture” so that you can identify your location through matching the internal “data” with the external data. If there is a mismatch, one normally makes a correction by verifying external information and updates internal information so that internal-external match. When people “get lost” they impose the internal map on the external environment. The internal maps become compelling and could lead to a hitchhiker’s death as they get more lost, and more frantic because they are operating from internal which is misaligned with the external. Laurence Gonzales in his book “Deep Survival” calls this “bending the map.” “Bending the map” does not just apply to physical environments.

Socially, we also do this “invisible gorilla” way of thinking. It is called “mind reading.” The observer insists that they know the thoughts and feeling of another person, refusing to update that impression no matter what the other person says or do. Psychologists are renowned for this when their theory of people becomes more important than the person. The malevolent subtleness of “bending the map” happens when people paraphrase what they heard has been said, and then put in a little spin about what the person “really” said. The “bending the map” now also justifies the follow-on behaviour of the observer: “I do because you …” This kind of justification flows from what the person is aware of, and what they are not paying intention to: the map is more important than the territory, and the person refuses to align the two.

We are frequently “dumbed down” by our emotions, especially if it reaches a certain level of intensity. We tend to see our “emotions”: if you are angry your world becomes one of violating your standards; if you love, then everything about the person is loved, even their halitosis. The rest of the information is for everybody else to see and hear, but not within your attention span: the invisible gorilla.

For 2017: my wish is to check when we have to.