In an interview on Consciousness

So now on to ‘Failure to Detect Mismatches between Intention and Outcome’. Why have you chosen this?

Another aspect of consciousness is the consciousness of self. And this is what this particular article sheds an interesting light on. We each walk around the world, constantly telling ourselves a story. The narrative of our lives is the narrative we use to construct our sense of self, who we are, why we do what we do, why we choose what we choose – everything we do, we justify to ourselves. And we have this illusion of stability. We think we know why we did what we did, why we chose what we chose. And what this article does really well is to show that, actually, that sense of self, that narrative, is a lot more fragile than we might normally think. We’re probably updating it on-line all the time. We probably know why we did something because we see what we did – rather than the other way around.

Tell me how the experiment works.

OK. Imagine a researcher is holding up two pictures of women, and you are asked to choose which one is more attractive. You pick one, and the researcher puts the pictures face down. Then he picks up the one you chose, shows it to you again, and asks you to explain why you chose it. Easy enough. But as it happens, the researcher is a magician and, using sleight of hand, he’s switched the pictures and is actually showing you the one you liked less. Surely, you’d say, ‘No, I picked the other one’, right? Well, turns out about one-third of people don’t – they happily go on to explain why they chose the picture they are being shown.

So isn’t this experiment also saying that the narrative is more important than the outcome?

In this particular case the narrative is shaped by the outcome. Now if you look at the paper, you’ll see that not everyone fell for this. But still a huge number of people did, if you think about the scenario for this, which is really, really simple. So I would say that at least of those people who fell for it – instead of saying, ‘I have a narrative, I remember I chose that picture, not this one, what’s going on here?’, they’re thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a picture, I’m being told I chose it, I must remember wrong…’ or ‘Something’s wrong here, but I just saw that he picked up the picture that I remember pointing at, it might be different to the one I remember, but it must be one I chose…’ Something like that. I don’t know what’s going on these people’s minds. But what this suggests is that the outcome is a very strong retrospective force in shaping the narrative. So if inattentional blindness had to do with relationship between awareness and perception, this one has to do with the relationship between awareness and memory.

Not as much work has been done on choice blindness as on inattentional blindness. There’s a lot of scope for finding out what influences it, what makes more or less of it happen. It’s a fairly untapped phenomenon.

Also, one last thing I’d like to add: it’s a great example of how stage magic can help us shed light on human psychology. In this case, the key to the experiment working was the experimenter acting as a magician – he had the ability or skill to use sleight of hand where he put the picture face down and he picked up a different one. The whole experiment hinged on that. They didn’t check it, but I think if they’d done the same thing simply using a computer screen showing two pictures, asked for one to be chosen, and then just showed the other one on the computer screen, a lot of people would have been more likely to say, ‘No, there’s a glitch in the program, I chose the other one’. But in this case they actually saw the person put down the picture and pick it up again and show it to them again, so they remained unaware of the fact it was a different one.

That gorilla one also reminds me of stage magic – isn’t that how they do it? They get you to look at something to the left, while they do something to the right…

Yes, misdirection. Have you heard of Richard Wiseman? He’s at the University of Hertfordshire, where he is a Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology. And he’s a great speaker. Now, there’s a great video of him on YouTube where he does a great demonstration using a card trick – it’s magic essentially, and there’s a gorilla suit in the background to show people where he’s coming from…

In an interview on Behavioural Economics

Let’s go through the books, and you can tell me what’s important about them and why you like them. The first one on your list is The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

These are the guys who did one of the most important pieces of research in social science, which is to show how little we actually see in the world around us. The basic demonstration of this is a movie in which there are two groups playing basketball. One group is wearing white t-shirts and the other group is wearing black t-shirts. They are passing the ball, and the viewer is asked to count how many times the people in white t-shirts pass the ball to each other. What then happens in the background is a gorilla passes through. He stops right in the middle and thumps his chest. When the clip is over, the viewer is asked, “How many times did you see the people in white t-shirts pass the ball?” Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. But when you ask, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” it turns out very few people saw the gorilla.

I didn’t see the gorilla.

There’s also another demonstration in the book that I really like. This involves going up to someone on a campus with a map and saying, “Excuse me, can you help me figure out how to get to the student centre?” They take the map from your hand and start explaining it to you. While they’re explaining, two people in workmen’s clothes come between you with a door. For a moment, they obscure your view. What the person you’ve asked for directions doesn’t know is that you’re going away. You’re walking off with the door and a new person is standing in front of them. The question is, do people notice this change? And the answer is, again, no.

These are findings that are incredibly powerful and important. We think we see with our eyes, but the reality is that we largely see with our brains. Our brain is a master at giving us what we expect to see. It’s all about expectation, and when things violate expectation we are just unaware of them. We go around the world with a sense that we pay attention to lots of things. The reality is that we notice much less than we think. And if we notice so much less than we think, what does that mean about our ability to figure out things around us, to learn and improve? It means we have a serious problem. I think this book has done a tremendous job in showing how even in vision, which is such a good system in general, we are poorly tooled to make good decisions.

Can you give an example where you think this failing has been particularly important?

If you think about the financial crisis, it was to some degree caused by conflicts of interest. You pay a group of people a lot of money to see reality in a distorted way, and lo and behold they are able to do it. Now you would think that in the case of people working for Lehman Brothers, for example, that the firm wanted them to see reality correctly. But they paid them to see reality incorrectly. What ended up happening is that people saw reality as they wanted to see it, not as it really was. This is an example of this issue coming into play in a big, important and quite devastating way.

I also liked the chapter about how someone being very confident is often not a sign of skill.

Yes, and this again is partly because we have such a hard time learning. Because we have a hard time figuring things out and learning from experience, the connection is not that good. We’re going through reality, but nothing we do ever registers, and so we never know that we are wrong. I’m exaggerating, but that’s the basic idea.