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Cognitive Bias Bootcamp: Inattentional Blindness [1]
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Date: 2023-05-03
Gorillas In The Mist
Did you see the gorilla?
For those unable to view the video, here is the scenario (spoilers ahead, so pause here if you want to test yourself with the video later): A group of six people, half in white shirts, half in black shirts. Each group (white & black shirted people) are milling among each other, with each group passing a basketball between their members.
Viewers are to count how many times the group in white pass the ball during the video.
Sounds pretty simple, but there’s a curveball here.
Shortly into the video, a person in a gorilla suit wanders into the milling group of basketball-passers, stops in the middle of the screen, beats their chest, and then walks offscreen.
So, as you focused on counting how many times the group in white passed the ball, did you notice the gorilla wander through?
Roughly half of people that aren’t tipped off ahead of time don’t notice the gorilla.
That’s because our attention is a limited resource. We only focus our attention on limited slices of the world around us at any given time, like the task we are currently doing. Things that fall outside the scope of that focus fade into the background and we are far less likely to notice details. Like a gorilla walking through the middle of the room.
Think how many times you’ve been completely absorbed into a book or movie and completely blocked out what’s otherwise going on around you. I’m not sure about others, but if I’m really absorbed into a good book, there are times I’m not sure I’d notice a bomb going off in the next room. At least, not enough to be bothered to stop reading.
Inattention Blindness is a common tool of stage magic — direct the audience’s attention to something, get them focused, and Presto! Magic happens while your attention is redirected, and then the magician brings your attention to the New Thing That’s Happening On Stage.
This limitation to our attention can have important consequences, though. For example, think about driving a vehicle. There’s a reason texting and driving is illegal, because our attention suddenly is focused more on a cell phone screen and less on piloting the roughly 3,000 pounds of vehicle around us as we move at dangerously high speeds through the world. Pedestrian? What pedestrian?
What about law enforcement? What ramifications does this have for eyewitness testimony, for example?
The Beating Will Continue...
Let’s look at an experiment done by Dr. Daniel Simons (who also created the gorilla experiment) to test the plausibility of a real-world incident that led to the conviction of a police officer for perjury.
That real-world scenario took place in 1995. While in pursuit of suspects of a shooting, plainclothes police officer Michael Cox split off from other officers to pursue one of the suspects on foot.
Still other officers joining in on the chase saw officer Cox running and mistook him for a suspect, and proceeded to beat him rather severely.
Officer Kenny Conley, another officer who had joined the pursuit of Cox’s suspect, ran past the officers beating Cox. He later claimed he did not notice the attack on Cox and that was why he did not intervene. A jury did not believe this, and convicted Conley of perjury and obstruction of justice.
But is Conley’s story plausible? Could someone literally run past the scene of a man being beaten by a group of police officers without noticing?
In 2011, Dr. Simon and colleague Dr. Christopher Chabris set up an experiment to test this. Of course, they could not simulate an intense police foot pursuit.
Instead, they had test subjects jog behind an assistant and as they jogged behind the assistant, they were assigned to count how many times the assistant touched the hat they were wearing.
Along the jogging route was a staged fight in which two men appeared to be beating a third.
Even with such a mundane low-risk, low-stakes task to occupy their attention, in broad daylight, 40% of the test subjects still failed to notice the fight. At night, the number jumped to 65%.
So Conley’s story suddenly seems much more plausible. Especially when one considers that in a police pursuit with suspects of a shooting, the officer’s attention was probably very much focused on the suspect he was after. Also, it’s a well-known phenomenon that adrenaline and stress can lead to a “tunnel-vision” effect as subjects become hyper-focused on the source of the stress.
I’ll take a quick run down a side path here just to let everyone know how all of this eventually panned out:
Officer Conley was eventually granted a new trial in 2004 and charges were dismissed by the courts in 2005, ten years after the incident, but in the meantime, in the first trial he had been convicted and sentenced to $6,000 in fines and 34 months in prison. He was, fortunately for him, allowed his freedom during his various appeals and so did not have to serve any actual prison time. After his exoneration, he was awarded $645,000 in back pay and allowed to rejoin the Boston PD.
As for Cox, who received the beating at the hands of fellow officers, well, he is currently serving as no less than the Commissioner of the Boston Police Department as of August 2022.
None of the officers that beat Cox were ever charged. As far as the shooting incident that spurred the entire incident, four men were eventually prosecuted, two of whom were acquitted and two were convicted of murder and received life sentences.
Change Blindness
And now back to Inattentional Blindness…
A closely related phenomenon to Inattentional Blindness is Change Blindness, and the difference is a bit subtle to explain. Inattentional Blindness might be described as failing to notice something unexpected (like a gorilla wandering through a scene of people passing basketballs). Change Blindness is failing to notice a change in something already present. For example, you may be looking at a picture of a scene and then shown a new picture of the same scene with changes to things that were already present. The upholstery of a couch in the picture might change color, for example, or the tree in the window change from bare branches to fully leafed out. Or in the case of the gorilla video, if the black shirts had changed to green or t-shirts changed to sweaters.
We can be especially susceptible to this if there is an interruption in our attention when the change occurs. For example, if we glance away for a moment, or even just blink. Studies have shown that flickering the image between the changes (like making a screen go black for a moment before showing the changed image) is enough to make us less likely to notice changes in what we see.
Conclusion
The human brain is wild, huh? But the bottom line here is that we have a finite amount of cognitive resources to devote attention to things around us. We pick and choose every moment where our attentions are directed, and events outside that attention funnel might be missed, even significant things that one would expect to have noticed — like an unexpected gorilla.
Until next time, folks!
Prior Bootcamp Installments
Logical Fallacies Bootcamp:
The Strawman
The Slippery Slope
Begging the Question
Poisoning the Well
No True Scotsman!
Ad Hominem
False Dilemma
Non Sequitur
Red Herring
Gamblers Fallacy
Bandwagon Fallacy
Appeal to Fear
The Fallacy Fallacy
Appeal to Personal Incredulity
Appeal to Authority
Special Pleading
Texas Sharpshooter
Post Hoc
Appeal to Nature
Furtive Fallacy
Alphabet Soup
Middle Ground
Relative Privation
Cognitive Bias Bootcamp:
Bystander Effect
Curse of Knowledge
Barnum Effect
Declinism
In-Group Bias
Hindsight Bias
Survivor Bias
Rhyme-as-Reason Effect
Apophenia (& Paradoleia)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Confirmation Bias
Anchoring Bias
Critical Thinking Bootcamp:
Sea Lioning
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/3/2167273/-Cognitive-Bias-Bootcamp-Inattentional-Blindness
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