[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Not now, you couldn’t, but the experiment involved a group of people who were given a specific task that would require intense concentration and focus (such as counting the number of times the ball is passed). Being thus primed, they simply didn’t observe anything else (in fact some of them were adamant that they were being shown a different clip the second time around).
:smack: Fair enough. I knew something about the initial description didn’t seem right, and went with my faulty memory of the experiment (there were no replies after mittu when I started to post. Memo to self: that’s what preview is for).
Oh, and mhendo, it’s WotNot. WhyNot’s someone else altogether.
This effect is one reason for motorcycle accidents – people just don’t see motorcycles on the road. Ever bought a car, then began noticing how many of that model car there were? You didn’t pay attention to that model until it became relevant to you. Motorcycles are kind of the same. Unless you’re interested, you might not even see them, even when looking right at them.
I’ve shown that film to many of my friends and neighbors, directing them to count the number of passes the white shirted team makes (therefore distracting them from “black” stuff). Few have noticed the gorilla.
When I reshow them the clip, they frequently think that I am tricking them with a second film in which the gorilla was added, until the fool around with the site themselves.
In my Intro to Criminal Justice class they showed us a short video produced with the apparent intent of showing just how crappy eye witnesses can be.
The camera filmed a (staged) store robbery, car chase and subsequent arrest. The actor portraying the arresting officer then narrated what had just happenned.
The video ended. Our professor asked us some questions related to the video. He noted our answers.
An entire class of more than 20 students managed to answer incorrectly about a number of details, including all of us agreeing that the getaway vehicle was a car when it had in fact been a pickup truck.
So, to answer the thread title, yes, people really are this stupid. And I know in excess of a half dozen criminal justice majors (some of whom are presumably cops by now) who are that stupid.
It’s not necessarily stupidity, it’s efficiency. It’s the brain making the most out of its limited resources. (Er, in otherwords, I guess it’s the brain dealing its stupidity. Hmmm.)
A guy in a gorilla suit, while absurd, isn’t particularly interesting, especially when you’ve been told to to watch the basketball.
If he was carrying an assualt rifle, I wonder if the brain would gloss over that as easily, or the experimental subjects would all be saying, “Holy crap! That gorilla has a gun!”
The website with that film clip has other clips that use various ways to lead someone not to notice something. There are two clips in which an experimenter goes up to an unsuspecting person and asks for directions. Then two people carrying a door “rudely” walk between them, and the person asking for directions switches places with one of the two people carrying the door. According to the report, many did not notice that the switchoccurred, but perhaps even more interesting they aren’t offended by two people carrying a door interrupting the conversation, when they clearly go around.
I watched the video, not knowing what to watch and the gorilla was obvious.
Then I watched again, counting the passes by the white team and I didn’t see the gorilla. Did this a couple times and got the same result.
Then I watched again, counting the passes by the black team and the gorilla was pretty obvious.
So, this is not about paying attention to passes and missing a gorilla. It’s about conciously blocking out the color black and missing seeing something that is completely black.
Which is a completely different concept than is proposed by the researcher.
Did you read the link i provided above, which contains the journal article based on the experiment, and provides a discussion of the background literature, the theory, the methodology, and the conclusions of the experiment?
The conclusions reached by the researcher may be different from what you think they were looking for, but if you’ll read their own report you’ll see that the conclusions they drew were perfectly consistent with the things they were studying, and were completely within the context of the extant literature and thinking on the subject at hand.
I think you just nailed it right on the head. Remove the gorilla and substitute a strikingly attractive member of the opposite sex, scantily clad or wearing nothing. Now let’s see how many people fail to notice.
They’ve done that too, actually. This experiment works with many many many different “distractions” walking by during the basketball game. It’s the psychological principle of selective attention: You can’t pay full attention to two things at once. If you’re told to count the passes between basketball players and focus on it, that’s what you’re likely to pay attention to. This is standard enough to make it into Intro to Psychology textbooks, the most famous experiment involved a woman with an umbrella walking by. So it’s legitimate, and old, actually.
Eyewitnesses ARE unreliable, but that has more to do with how we “fill in the blanks” of our memories with things we’ve heard from other people. People who write down all of the details of a crime they can remember immediately after it occurs, put the paper away and then look at it two weeks later are often shocked at how differently they remember it. This is why people end up going to jail for rape and then end up exonerated by DNA. What we don’t remember, we fill in. It’s not conscious and it’s not intentional, but we integrate as much false information as real information, because we DON’T have photographic memories and because outside influences have a major effect on us.
My Criminal Justice teacher runs a demonstration every year where, in the middle of class, a guy runs in and pretends to shoot a planted person, then runs out. He then asks the class to describe the “gunman.” The result? Remarkably poor, even 5 minutes after the event. We like to think our memories are better than they really are.
Elizabeth Loftus is probably the foremost leading researcher on eyewitness unreliability. She’s studied thousands and thousands of people and shown how wording is everything. Shown a video of a car crash, people were 80% more likely to respond that they remembered broken glass if asked “How fast were the two cars going when they smashed each other?” than if the word was simply “hit”. Shown pictures, including one of a white man holding up a black businessman on a subway, subjects often reversed the races and accused the researchers of “switching” the pictures on them.
I very clearly remember a scene that was staged on the Dick Cavett Show about 30 years ago by a famous lawyer (whose name escapes me at the moment) who was a guest that night.
During Cavett’s usual opening monolog, a guy walks out onto the stage. Cavett says something like, “What are you doing here? Get this guy out of here!” The guy walks up to Cavett, pulls out a banana, holds it in his hand like a gun, and points it at Cavett. Cavett grabs his stomach, and says, “Ow, ow.” And then the guy says, “Bang! Bang!” and walks off the stage.
They brought a bunch of people out of the studio audience and asked them to tell what they had seen. As I recall it, all of the witnesses said that the guy had a gun and shot Cavett (well, pretended to shoot him, obviously). No one noticed it was a banana, and no one realized that Cavett said “ow” before the shots.
The lawyer’s point being, of course, that eyewitness testimony can be quite unreliable, because people see what they expect to see.
(Of course, I’m probably remembering this all wrong.)
Alan_Smithee showed it to me without intro, just telling me to count passes – and, yeah, I totally missed the gorilla. There was a period in the middle when it was hard to see what was going on – something dark passed in front of the person I was watching – but I had zero idea there was a gorilla there.
There was a Doonesbury strip against the death penalty being allowable by one eyewitness. The whole strip, we see the guy sit there talking against the topic, and then at the end he asks the reader, w/o looking, to describe the man who walked behind him in square 2. He makes a good point!
We already touched on this, and this is a little off-topic, but I’ll add that I read that the human tendency to daydream when presented w/ boring material- like when your wife or mother or teacher talk in a monotone voice- may be an evolutionary survival instinct, as in, you focus on something interesting instead of something boring b/c ‘interesting’ things are the dangerous things. You can’t keep focused on that boring old bush, but that’s good, cause here comes the tiger out of it! So the fact that humans can stay focused on a counting game when an alarming gorilla walks in the way- well, that’s not sensical in light of this human tendency.
That sucks that the human desire to focus on one task outdoes the desire to keep on one’s toes in a normal atmosphere- it really does.
I saw this preview for what looked to be a standard buddy-cop movie where this one guy was getting trained, and he got to the point where he could walk into the convenience store and tell you exactly what was happening in like 3 seconds- the guy has a gun to the woman’s head, there’s another guy in the back, and paper towels are on sale $1.99! I have respect for trained people like that; I hope to one day take a class that teaches me how to become an observant machine.
As of right now, all I have going for me is that I carry a notepad and pen w/ me; I’m some kinda Hardy boy, aren’t I?
Your reference is ironic in that a real cop would have “inattentional blindness” in this situation. His/her observing training would probably allow seeing and processing the guy with the gun before most other people, but, his/her “action” training would also cause other responses to kick in – to the point where the cop probably couldn’t tell you later if there were any items on display in the store at all.
