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
.
What is the gorilla effect?
Date: April 18, 2011 Source: University of Utah. Summary: Psychologists have learned why many people experience “
inattention blindness
” — the phenomenon that leaves drivers on cell phones prone to traffic accidents and makes a gorilla invisible to viewers of a famous video.
What is the gorilla experiment?
The phrase, “the invisible gorilla,” comes from an experiment created 10 years ago to test selective attention. In it,
study participants are asked to watch a video in which two teams, one in black shirts and one in white shirts, are passing a ball.
What was the gorilla condition in Simon and Chabris?
In the Gorilla condition,
a shorter woman wearing a full body gorilla costume walked through the action in the same way and the players continued as normally during and after
. There were two styles of video, in which the unexpected person/gorilla was clearly seen (opaque) or was transparent.
What famous experiment did the American psychologists Simons and Chabris conduct which Kahneman argues that humans are blind to the obvious?
Research Findings
Probably the most famous study on inattentional blindness, also known as
the “Invisible Gorilla Test
,” was carried out by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris (Simons & Chabris, 1999). In this study, participants watched a video of people dressed in black and white passing basketballs.
What was the invisible gorilla experiment?
The so-called “invisible gorilla” test had volunteers
watching a video where two groups of people — some dressed in white, some in black — are passing basketballs around
. The volunteers were asked to count the passes among players dressed in white while ignoring the passes of those in black.
Who did the invisible gorilla experiment?
As shown by
Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
in their now infamous Invisible Gorilla experiment, our minds don’t really work the way we think they do. The two researchers have been studying inattentional blindness for over a decade.
What is the purpose of the invisible gorilla?
The Invisible Gorilla
reveals the numerous ways that our intuitions can deceive us
, but it’s more than a catalog of human failings. In the book, we also explain why people succumb to these everyday illusions and what we can do to inoculate ourselves against their effects.
What’s an example of selective attention?
Multiple conversations, the clinking of plates and forks, and many other sounds compete for your attention
. … This is an example of selective attention. Because our ability to attend to the things around us is limited in terms of both capacity and duration, we have to be picky about the things we pay attention to.
What conclusion can be drawn from the study of the invisible gorilla?
What conclusions can be drawn from the study of the Invisible Gorilla?
Psychology is marked by diversity and divisiveness
.
What is selective attention in psychology?
Selective attention refers to
the processes that allow an individual to select and focus on particular input for further processing
while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant or distracting information.
What is the selective attention test?
Selective attention is typically
measured by instructing participants to join some sources of information
, but to ignore others at the same time and then determine their effectiveness in doing so.
What is inattentional blindness example?
We all experience inattentional blindness from time to time, such as in these potential situations: Even though you think you are paying attention to the road,
you fail to notice a car swerve into your lane of traffic
, resulting in a traffic accident. … You decide to make a phone call while driving through busy traffic.
What is the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking?
System 1 operates automatically and quickly
, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations.
What is Type 2 thinking?
Kahneman divides our thinking into two subsystems: type 1 and type 2. Type 1 thinking is fast, intuitive, unconscious thought. … The type 2 system
is slow, calculating, conscious thought
. When you’re doing a difficult math problem or thinking carefully about a philosophical problem, you’re engaging the type 2 system.
What is an example of change blindness?
Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. For example,
observers often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers off and on again
.
