The Invisible Gorilla: Q+A with Authors & Giveaway

We think we can multitask without negative consequences, but we are wrong. We trust that those who are confident about their skills have good reason to be. And we assume that we know more than we actually do. These illusions, as well as three others, are the subject of the new book, The Invisible Gorilla, by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The book came about after a very popular experiment during which half the participants failed to see a giant gorilla that was in plain sight. The book is different since it is written by the subject matter experts who conducted the original research from which it is based.

Chris and Dan sent me a copy of the book and offered to do an exclusive Q+A for this site. I would like to pay it forward and give my copy away now that I’ve read it. Here is the Q+A: I asked the questions, they provided the answers, and all the links in this article were added by me simply for convenience to the readers.

What inspired you to write The Invisible Gorilla? How long did it take and what was your writing process like?

We first started discussing ideas the book when we received the Ig Nobel Prize for our “gorillas in our midst” experiment in 2004 — the award recognizes research that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think.”  That’s when we began to realize that the “gorilla effect” was having a bigger impact on people than we had expected.  Our original experiment was intended as a study of selective attention and perception, but we think the gorilla video we created caught on largely because it forced people to confront their own flawed intuitions about how the mind works.  Unlike earlier demonstrations of selective attention, it was hard for people to rationalize why they missed something so glaringly obvious. And, when you miss something like a chest-thumping gorilla, it forces you to see that your intuitions about what captures attention and how much we notice in the world are fundamentally wrong.  As we thought more about the illusory belief that distinctive things automatically capture attention, we soon realized that many of the assumptions we make about the workings of our minds are wrong, and that those mistaken assumptions can affect all of us every day.

We began planning the book shortly after the award ceremony in late 2004, and gradually developed a book proposal over the next few years.

We sold the book in May of 2008 and finished the first draft of it in June 2009.  We spent the next several months revising before it was released in May 2010. So, the thought process, planning, and research for the book took quite a while, but the writing took us about a year.

During that time, we exchanged drafts of chapters and sections, editing and commenting on each other’s work, until we eventually reached consensus on everything. (Though we each have some words and phrases we might still change if it were up to us as individuals …)

The central theme of the book seems to be, Our attention is limited and our assumptions are flawed. What do you hope readers get out of this insight?

That’s just one of many themes in the book.  We would say that the central theme is that we hold mistaken ideas or intuitions about how the mind works and that those assumptions affect almost all aspects of our daily lives.  These intuitions reflect what we call everyday illusions.  Our goal is not to convince people that they are stupid or misguided.  Rather, we try to explain why we hold such flawed intuitions and what we can do about them.  By becoming aware of the many mistaken assumptions we all make about our minds, we can make better decisions at home and at work, and lead happier, safer, and more informed lives

You devote chapters to six everyday illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, causality, and potential. Why these six? Are there other cognitive distortions than these six worth noting?

We chose those six illusions because they seemed to fit together well. They relate to each other; for example, the illusion of confidence operates strongly when we think about the accuracy of our own memories (we think they are more accurate than they are) and when we think about whether people who claim confidence in their memories are reporting accurately about what happened (they aren’t as accurate as we assume they are). Our knowledge is often the most illusory when it concerns our understanding of the causes of things. And so on.

There are, of course, many other sorts of distortions, some of which we deliberately chose not to discuss (because they have been covered extensively by others).  The six illusions we chose also contain other, related illusions within them. For example, the illusion of cause encompasses both our difficulties in figuring out what causes what, and our tendency to assume that a single event (like the invasion of Iraq) must have had a single cause (e.g., the search for weapons of mass destruction), when in reality most events have multiple causes.

What advice do you have for people who want to know whether they should go with their gut or whether they should take a more logical approach to decision-making?

Our advice would be that you should trust your gut whenever a decision can’t benefit from additional analysis.  No amount of cogitation or deliberation will improve your opinion on which ice cream you like best or which potential date you find the most attractive.  In fact, careful analysis might actually lead to worse decisions when the basis for the decision is just an emotional response or aesthetic preference.  Our larger goal, though, is to identify cases in which our assumptions about our own minds might lead us to trust our gut when we shouldn’t. These are the illusions we write about.

In the book you are somewhat critical of other business books, especially Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. What are your thoughts on that?

It is unfortunately true that many business books come to erroneous, or at best unsupported conclusions because of the illusion of cause.

You simply cannot infer a valid general lesson from a single positive anecdote or collection of such anecdotes (e.g., companies that practiced some particular marketing strategy or management technique and were successful). You need a lot more evidence and analysis, as we explain in our book. We pick on Malcolm Gladwell mostly because he has published several high-profile books in this vein. We have written a more extensive essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The Trouble with Intuition” that gives our views on the dangers of relying too heavily on intuitions, something that people seem to have taken away from books like Blink (even when those books themselves are more nuanced). In a nutshell, we argue that the un-nuanced advice of “trust your gut” can be extremely dangerous when those gut instincts concern things like whether we are paying attention to as much as we think, whether our memories are complete and correct, whether we understand the causes of trends, developments, and events, and the like. Moreover, we think that some popular examples of the value of intuition turn out to be mere anecdotes that don’t withstand scrutiny.

This book has a very unique voice because it is based on your own research. What recommendations do you have for other academics or graduate students who want to write a mainstream book about their scientific research?

The biggest challenge in writing a science book for a general audience is recognizing what people find most compelling.  A book that talks down to readers or that tries to persuade with statistics won’t reach the widest audience, or have the maximum impact. We hope that our own book might serve as an example to aspiring writers of how social science research can be communicated accurately and also engagingly to the public.  We would even suggest that by understanding the many ways that people see, remember, and think about their world, authors can capitalize on everyday illusions to make their messages more compelling. We try to use anecdotes and stories to convey our message while backing the conclusions we draw with the experiments that underlie them.  Too many scientists try to use the experiments themselves to convey their message, but as we argue in the book, statistics are inherently less compelling than stories. We also think that it should be the job of academics and intellectuals to communicate their ideas and findings to the public, rather than outsourcing that job to journalists. As good as they can be at their craft, journalists rarely have the training or experience to fully appreciate how research is done and what it can mean. Researchers themselves might even enjoy learning a few new tricks of communication—writing The Invisible Gorilla was definitely an enjoyable learning experience for us!

Related Links:

http://theinvisiblegorilla.com
http://youarenotsosmart.com
VIDEO: TEDxUIUC – Daniel Simons – Counter-Intuition
The Invisible Gorilla: Are You Paying Attention to the Wrong Stuff? – Huffington Post

Please leave a comment that somehow pertains to this topic below if you would like the book. I will pick the winner on or before July 20th.