Cognitively Yours 1.28
"When we see the world only through the lens of our own needs, we are trapped and blind to the perspectives of other people"
Blind spots are part and parcel of a car’s mirrors. The viewing angle of the side mirrors just overlaps that of the cabin’s rearview mirror. This can be disorienting for drivers used to seeing the flanks of their own car in the side mirrors. Just like car mirror, we all have blind spots that are built into ways that we naturally think. Our blind spots can be labelled as stupidity. Many a time, we feel dim-witted, we do feel that we should have known or realised or should have thought about it, seems so obvious in retrospect. Ignorance or not knowing makes us feel stupid, but the blind spot is not knowing that we do not know.
A dumbfounding study more than a decade ago, that many now find hard to believe revealed that, if people are asked to focus on a video of other people passing basketballs, about half of watchers missed a person in a gorilla suit walking in and out of the scene thumping its chest.
Now researchers delving further into this effect shows that people who know that such a surprising event is likely to occur are no better at noticing other unforeseen events and may even be worse at noticing them than others who aren't expecting the unexpected.
These confounding findings from cognitive psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris detailed in a 1999 study, revealed how people can focus so hard on something that they become blind to the unexpected, even when staring right at it. When one develops “in-attentional blindness”, as this effect is called, it becomes easy to miss details when one is not looking out for them.
Although people do still try to rationalise why they missed the person in a gorilla suit, 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.
The same experiment was repeated to see if those who knew about the invisible gorilla beforehand would be more or less likely to notice other unexpected events in the same video.
Of the 41 volunteers, Simon tested who had never seen or heard about the old video, a little less than half missed the gorilla in the new video, much like what happened in the old experiments. The 23 volunteers he tested who knew about the original gorilla video all spotted the fake ape in the new experiment. However, knowing about the gorilla beforehand did not improve their chances of detecting other unexpected events. Only 17 percent of those who were familiar with the old video noticed one or both of the other unexpected events in the new video. In comparison, 29 percent of those who knew nothing of the old video spotted one of the other unexpected events in the new video.
“This demonstration is much like a good magic trick in which a magician repeatedly makes a ball disappear”
Simons said – “A magician can lead the audience to think he's going to make the ball disappear with one method, and while people watch for that technique, he uses a different one. In both cases, the effect capitalises on what people expect to see, and both demonstrate that we often miss what we don't expect to see”.
“A lot of people seem to take the message of our original gorilla study, to be that people don't pay enough attention to what is happening around them, and that by paying more attention and expecting the unexpected, we will be able to notice anything important. The new experiment shows that even when people know that they are doing a task in which an unexpected thing might happen, that doesn't suddenly help them notice other unexpected things”.
Once people find the first thing they're looking for, they often don't notice other things. Our intuitions about what we will and won't notice are often mistaken.
What are our blind spots?
1) Not stopping to think
Many a time, we do things which do not make sense. A computer expert who was advising a novice to install a program, advised him to open the door, indicating him to open the door of the disk drive to insert the disk. The novice took it literally and opened the door of the floor. You need not be a rocket scientist to realise that this does not make sense. You just have to have a brain. Many a time, the novice if asked again what he was doing would have realised his mistake and would have understood that what he was doing did not make sense. “Not thinking” leads people to appear foolish.
2) Missing opportunities to think
Harvard psychologist David Perkins studied the behaviour of law students in writing essays about cases involving controversial issues. The students needed to carefully consider both sides of an issue in order to write an effective analysis. Most of the students failed to do so. They failed to carefully consider both sides of the argument. The relationship between the law students’ IQ scores and the likelihood that they would consider both sides of the issue, the correlation was zero. Most intelligent students were no more likely than the least intelligent students to address both sides of the controversy. The sensitivity to thinking opportunities not only is crucial for intelligent behaviour as well their inability to reason intelligently was directly borne out in the study.
Why do we fail to stop and think?
Information overload. Our minds can process limited information at a particular time. Cognitive psychologists term the processing capacity of the brain as “7 plus or minus 2” meaning that on average we can hold between 5 and 9 bits of information in our consciousness at one time. In any particular circumstance, we can focus only on a limited number of aspects of the situation. Unless we make a conscious effort to consider various dimensions and elements, we may miss some of them. We fail to think, because we are snowed under by the sheer amount of new information that we are trying to take in.
Lulled by everyday life
We are caught up in the mundane activities of every day’s lives. We stop to think when things become routine. “The fish is the last to know that it is in water”. We should make it a point to step back from the job we are doing and sit in a chair a few feet away and reflect on our work. When we see the world only through the lens of our own needs, we are trapped and blind to the perspectives of other people. Only when we are able to take these lenses themselves as the object of our thoughts can we escape being subject to them.
In a nutshell, failure to stop and think can lead people to blunder. It turns out that it’s much harder than it appears to realise that “now would be a good time to stop and reflect”. The natural ways in which we react to crises and to familiar circumstances make it easy for us to miss noticing that “this is the time to stop and think”. We need to practice recognising the cases that could alert us to take a time-out to think in pressurised situations. We need a scheduled reflection time among our mundane activities.
Reference: The invisible gorilla by Christopher Chabris and Blind Spots by Madeleine L Van Hecke.
Photo credit: @rawpixel.com - www.freepik.com
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