Читать книгу The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us - Christopher Chabris - Страница 13

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 that women would be more likely to notice the gorilla. Unfortunately, there is little experimental evidence to support the popular belief about multitasking, and we haven’t found any evidence that men are more prone than women to miss the gorilla. In fact, the main conclusion from studies of multitasking is that virtually nobody does it well: As a rule, it is more efficient to do tasks one at a time rather than simultaneously.⁴⁴

It’s still possible—even reasonable—to suspect that people differ in their ability to focus attention on a primary task, but that this ability isn’t related to general intelligence or educational achievement. If individual differences in the ability to focus attention lead to differences in noticing unexpected objects, then people for whom the counting task is easier should be more likely to notice the gorilla—they are devoting fewer resources to the counting task and have more left over.

Dan and his graduate student Melinda Jensen recently conducted an experiment to test exactly this hypothesis. They first measured how well people could do a computer-based tracking task like the one we used in the “red gorilla” experiment and then looked to see whether those who performed the task well were more likely to notice an unexpected object. They weren’t. Apparently, whether you detect unexpected objects and events doesn’t depend on your capacity for attention. Consistent with this conclusion, Dan and sports scientist Daniel Memmert, the researcher who tracked children’s eye movements while they watched the gorilla video, found that who noticed and who missed an unexpected object was unrelated to several basic measures of attention capacity. These findings have an important practical implication: Training people to improve their attention abilities may do nothing to help them detect unexpected objects. If an object is truly unexpected, people are unlikely to notice it no matter how good (or bad) they are at focusing attention.

As far as we can tell, there are no such people as “noticers” and “missers”—at least, no people who consistently notice or consistently miss unexpected events in a variety of contexts and situations. There is one way, however, to predict how likely a person is to see the unexpected. But it is not a simple trait of the individual or a quality of the event; it is the combination of a fact about the individual and a fact about the situation in which the unexpected event occurs. Only seven people out of more than one thousand stopped to listen to Joshua Bell playing in the L’Enfant Plaza subway station. One had been to a concert Bell had given just three weeks earlier. Two of the remaining six were musicians themselves. Their expertise helped them recognize his skill—and the pieces he was playing—through the din. One, George Tindley, worked in a nearby Au Bon Pain restaurant. “You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional,” he told Weingarten. The other, John Picarello, said, “This was a superb violinist. I’ve never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound.”

Experiments support this observation. Experienced basketball players are more likely to notice the gorilla in the original basketball-passing video than are novice basketball players. In contrast, team handball players are no more likely to notice unexpected objects even though they are experts in a team sport that places demands on attention comparable to those of basketball.⁴⁵ Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise. Put experts in a situation where they have no special skill, and they are ordinary novices, taxing their attention just to keep up with the primary task. And no matter what the situation, experts are not immune to the illusory belief that people notice far more than they do. Gene Weingarten described John Picarello’s behavior as he watched Bell play: “On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered. ‘Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn’t registering. That was baffling to me.’”