From cell phones to iPods to BlackBerrys, there are more distractions than ever in our daily lives. So how much is happening right in front of our eyes that we totally miss? Much more than you would imagine, according to Dan Simons and Chris Chabris, authors of "The Invisible Gorilla." An excerpt.
Chapter 1: “I think I would have seen that”
Around two o’clock on the cold, overcast morning of January 25, 1995, a group of four black men left the scene of a shooting at a hamburger restaurant in the Grove Hall section of Boston. As they drove away in a gold Lexus, the police radio erroneously announced that the victim was a cop, leading officers from several districts to join in a ten-mile high-speed chase. In the fifteen to twenty minutes of mayhem that ensued, one police car veered off the road and crashed into a parked van. Eventually the Lexus skidded to a stop in a cul-de-sac on Woodruff Way in the Mattapan neighborhood. The suspects fled the car and ran in different directions.
One suspect, Robert “Smut” Brown III, age twenty-four, wearing a dark leather jacket, exited the back passenger side of the car and sprinted toward a chain-link fence on the side of the cul-de-sac. The first car in pursuit, an unmarked police vehicle, stopped to the left of the Lexus. Michael Cox, a decorated officer from the police antigang unit who’d grown up in the nearby Roxbury area, got out of the passenger seat and took off after Brown. Cox, who also is black, was in plainclothes that night; he wore jeans, a black hoodie, and a parka.
Cox got to the fence just after Smut Brown. As Brown scrambled over the top, his jacket got stuck on the metal. Cox reached for Brown and tried to pull him back, but Brown managed to fall to the other side. Cox prepared to scale the fence in pursuit, but just as he was starting to climb, his head was struck from behind by a blunt object, perhaps a baton or a flashlight. He fell to the ground. Another police officer had mistaken him for a suspect, and several officers then beat up Cox, kicking him in the head, back, face, and mouth. After a few moments, someone yelled, “Stop, stop, he’s a cop, he’s a cop.” At that point, the officers fled, leaving Cox lying unconscious on the ground with facial wounds, a concussion, and kidney damage.
Meanwhile, the pursuit of the suspects continued as more cops arrived. Early on the scene was Kenny Conley, a large, athletic man from South Boston who had joined the police force four years earlier, not long after graduating from high school. Conley’s cruiser came to a stop about forty feet away from the gold Lexus. Conley saw Smut Brown scale the fence, drop to the other side, and run. Conley followed Brown over the fence, chased him on foot for about a mile, and eventually captured him at gunpoint and handcuffed him in a parking lot on River Street. Conley wasn’t involved in the assault on Officer Cox, but he began his pursuit of Brown right as Cox was being pulled from the fence, and he scaled the fence right next to where the beating was happening.
Although the other murder suspects were caught and that case was considered solved, the assault on Officer Cox remained wide open. For the next two years, internal police investigators and a grand jury sought answers about what happened at the cul-de-sac. Which cops beat Cox? Why did they beat him? Did they simply mistake their black colleague for one of the black suspects? If so, why did they flee rather than seek medical help? Little headway was made, and in 1997, the local prosecutors handed the matter over to federal authorities so they could investigate possible civil rights violations.
Cox named three officers whom he said had attacked him that night, but all of them denied knowing anything about the assault. Initial police reports said that Cox sustained his injuries when he slipped on a patch of ice and fell against the back of one of the police cars. Although many of the nearly sixty cops who were on the scene must have known what happened to Cox, none admitted knowing anything about the beating. Here, for example, is what Kenny Conley, who apprehended Smut Brown, said under oath:
Q: So your testimony is that you went over the fence within seconds of seeing him go over the fence?
A: Yeah.
Q: And in that time, you did not see any black plainclothes police officer chasing him?
A: No, I did not.
Q: In fact, no black plainclothes officer was chasing him, according to your testimony?
A: I did not see any black plainclothes officer chasing him.
Q: And if he was chasing him, you would have seen it?
A: I should have.
Q: And if he was holding the suspect as the suspect was at the top of the fence, he was lunging at him, you would have seen that, too?
A: I should have.
When asked directly if he would have seen Cox trying to pull Smut Brown from the fence, he responded, “I think I would have seen that.” Conley’s terse replies suggested a reluctant witness who had been advised by lawyers to stick to yes or no answers and not volunteer information. Since he was the cop who had taken up the chase, he was in an ideal position to know what happened. His persistent refusal to admit to having seen Cox effectively blocked the federal prosecutors’ attempt to indict the officers involved in the attack, and no one was ever charged with the assault.
The only person ever charged with a crime in the case was Kenny Conley himself. He was indicted in 1997 for perjury and obstruction of justice. The prosecutors were convinced that Conley was “testilying”— outlandishly claiming, under oath, not to have seen what was going on right before his eyes. According to this theory, just like the officers who filed reports denying any knowledge of the beating, Conley wouldn’t rat out his fellow cops. Indeed, shortly after Conley’s indictment, prominent Boston-area investigative journalist Dick Lehr wrote that “the Cox scandal shows a Boston police code of silence . . . a tight inner circle of officers protecting themselves with false stories.”
Kenny Conley stuck with his story, and his case went to trial. Smut Brown testified that Conley was the cop who arrested him. He also said that after he dropped over the fence, he looked back and saw a tall white cop standing near the beating. Another police officer also testified that Conley was there. The jurors were incredulous at the notion that Conley could have run to the fence in pursuit of Brown without noticing the beating, or even seeing Officer Cox. After the trial, one juror explained, “It was hard for me to believe that, even with all the chaos, he didn’t see something.” Juror Burgess Nichols said that another juror had told him that his father and uncle had been police officers, and officers are taught “to observe everything” because they are “trained professionals.”
Unable to reconcile their own expectations—and Conley’s—with Conley’s testimony that he didn’t see Cox, the jury convicted him. Kenny Conley was found guilty of one count each of perjury and obstruction of justice, and he was sentenced to thirty-four months in jail. In 2000, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case, he was fired from the Boston police force. While his lawyers kept him out of jail with new appeals, Conley took up a new career as a carpenter.
Dick Lehr, the journalist who reported on the Cox case and the “blue wall of silence,” never actually met with Kenny Conley until the summer of 2001. After this interview, Lehr began to wonder whether Conley might actually be telling the truth about what he saw and experienced during his pursuit of Smut Brown. That’s when Lehr brought the former cop to visit Dan’s laboratory at Harvard.
Gorillas in Our Midst The two of us met over a decade ago when Chris was a graduate student in the Harvard University psychology department and Dan had just arrived as a new assistant professor. Chris’s office was down the hall from Dan’s lab, and we soon discovered our mutual interest in how we perceive, remember, and think about our visual world. The Kenny Conley case was in full swing when Dan taught an undergraduate course in research methods with Chris as his teaching assistant. As part of their classwork, the students assisted us in conducting some experiments, one of which has become famous. It was based on an ingenious series of studies of visual attention and awareness conducted by the pioneering cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser in the 1970s. Neisser had moved to Cornell University when Dan was in his final year of graduate school there, and their many conversations inspired Dan to build on Neisser’s earlier, groundbreaking research.
With our students as actors and a temporarily vacant floor of the psychology building as a set, we made a short film of two teams of people moving around and passing basketballs. One team wore white shirts and the other wore black. Dan manned the camera and directed. Chris coordinated the action and kept track of which scenes we needed to shoot. We then digitally edited the film and copied it to videotapes, and our students fanned out across the Harvard campus to run the experiment.
They asked volunteers to silently count the number of passes made by the players wearing white while ignoring any passes by the players wearing black. The video lasted less than a minute. If you want to try the task yourself, stop reading now and go to the website for our book, www.theinvisiblegorilla.com, where we provide links to many of the experiments we discuss, including a short version of the basketball-passing video. Watch the video carefully, and be sure to include both aerial passes and bounce passes in your count.
Immediately after the video ended, our students asked the subjects to report how many passes they’d counted. In the full-length version, the correct answer was thirty-four—or maybe thirty-five. To be honest, it doesn’t matter. The pass-counting task was intended to keep people engaged in doing something that demanded attention to the action on the screen, but we weren’t really interested in pass-counting ability. We were actually testing something else: Halfway through the video, a female student wearing a full-body gorilla suit walked into the scene, stopped in the middle of the players, faced the camera, thumped her chest, and then walked off, spending about nine seconds onscreen. After asking subjects about the passes, we asked the more important questions:
Q: Did you notice anything unusual while you were doing the counting task?
A: No.
Q: Did you notice anything other than the players?
A: Well, there were some elevators, and S’s painted on the wall. I don’t know what the S’s were there for.
Q: Did you notice anyone other than the players?
A: No.
Q: Did you notice a gorilla?
A: A what?!?
Amazingly, roughly half of the subjects in our study did not notice the gorilla! Since then the experiment has been repeated many times, under different conditions, with diverse audiences, and in multiple countries, but the results are always the same: About half the people fail to see the gorilla. How could people not see a gorilla walk directly in front of them, turn to face them, beat its chest, and walk away? What made the gorilla invisible? This error of perception results from a lack of attention to an unexpected object, so it goes by the scientific name “inattentional blindness.” This name distinguishes it from forms of blindness resulting from a damaged visual system; here, people don’t see the gorilla, but not because of a problem with their eyes. When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking. In other words, the subjects were concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they were “blind” to the gorilla right in front of their eyes.
What prompted us to write this book, however, was not inattentional blindness in general or the gorilla study in particular. The fact that people miss things is important, but what impressed us even more was the surprise people showed when they realized what they had missed. When they watched the video again, this time without counting passes, they all saw the gorilla easily, and they were shocked. Some spontaneously said, “I missed that?!” or “No way!” A man who was tested later by the producers of Dateline NBC for their report on this research said, “I know that gorilla didn’t come through there the first time.” Other subjects accused us of switching the tape while they weren’t looking.
The gorilla study illustrates, perhaps more dramatically than any other, the powerful and pervasive influence of the illusion of attention: We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do. If we were fully aware of the limits to attention, the illusion would vanish. While writing this book we hired the polling firm SurveyUSA to contact a representative sample of American adults and ask them a series of questions about how they think the mind works. We found that more than 75 percent of people agreed that they would notice such unexpected events, even when they were focused on something else. (We’ll talk about other findings of this survey throughout the book.)
It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the erroneous belief that we process all of the detailed information around us. In essence, we know how vividly we see some aspects of our world, but we are completely unaware of those aspects of our world that fall outside of that current focus of attention. Our vivid visual experience masks a striking mental blindness—we assume that visually distinctive or unusual objects will draw our attention, but in reality they often go completely unnoticed.
Since our experiment was published in the journal Perception in 1999, under the title “Gorillas in Our Midst,” it has become one of the most widely demonstrated and discussed studies in all of psychology. It earned us an Ig Nobel Prize in 2004 (awarded for “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”) and was even discussed by characters in an episode of the television drama CSI. And we’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked us whether we have seen the video with the basketball players and the gorilla.
Kenny Conley’s Invisible Gorilla Dick Lehr brought Kenny Conley to Dan’s laboratory because he had heard about our gorilla experiment, and he wanted to see how Conley would do in it. Conley was physically imposing, but stoic and taciturn; Lehr did most of the talking that day. Dan led them to a small, windowless room in his laboratory and showed Conley the gorilla video, asking him to count the passes by the players wearing white. In advance, there was no way to know whether or not Conley would notice the unexpected gorilla—about half of the people who watch the video see the gorilla. Moreover, Conley’s success or failure in noticing the gorilla would not tell us whether or not he saw Michael Cox being beaten on Woodruff Way six years earlier. (These are both important points, and we will return to them shortly.) But Dan was still curious about how Conley would react when he heard about the science.
Conley counted the passes accurately and saw the gorilla. As is usual for people who do see the gorilla, he seemed genuinely surprised that anyone else could possibly miss it. Even when Dan explained that people often miss unexpected events when their attention is otherwise engaged, Conley still had trouble accepting that anyone else could miss what seemed so obvious to him.
The illusion of attention is so ingrained and pervasive that everyone involved in the case of Kenny Conley was operating under a false notion of how the mind works: the mistaken belief that we pay attention to—and therefore should notice and remember—much more of the world around us than we actually do. Conley himself testified that he should have seen the brutal beating of Michael Cox had he actually run right past it. In their appeal of his conviction, Conley’s lawyers tried to show that he hadn’t run past the beating, that the testimony about his presence near the beating was wrong, and that descriptions of the incident from other police officers were inaccurate. All of these arguments were founded on the assumption that Conley could only be telling the truth if he didn’t have the opportunity to see the beating. But what if, instead, in the cul-de-sac on Woodruff Way, Conley found himself in a real-life version of our gorilla experiment? He could have been right next to the beating of Cox, and even focused his eyes on it, without ever actually seeing it.
Conley was worried about Smut Brown scaling the fence and escaping, and he pursued his suspect with a single-minded focus that he described as “tunnel vision.” Conley’s prosecutor ridiculed this idea, saying that what prevented Conley from seeing the beating was not tunnel vision but video editing—“a deliberate cropping of Cox out of the picture.”
But if Conley was sufficiently focused on Brown, in the way our subjects were focused on counting the basketball passes, it is entirely possible that he ran right past the assault and still failed to see it. If so, the only inaccurate part of Conley’s testimony was his stated belief that he should have seen Cox. What is most striking about this case is that Conley’s own testimony was the primary evidence that put him near the beating, and that evidence, combined with a misunderstanding of how the mind works, and the blue wall of silence erected by the other cops, led prosecutors to charge him with perjury and obstruction of justice. They, and the jury that convicted him, assumed that he too was protecting his comrades.
Kenny Conley’s conviction was eventually overturned on appeal and set aside in July 2005. But Conley prevailed not because the prosecutors or a judge were convinced that he actually was telling the truth. Instead, the appeals court in Boston ruled that he had been denied a fair trial because the prosecution didn’t tell his defense attorneys about an FBI memo that cast doubt on the credibility of one of the government’s witnesses. When the government decided not to retry him in September 2005, Conley’s legal troubles were finally over. On May 19, 2006, more than eleven years after the original incident on Woodruff Way that changed his life, Conley was reinstated as a Boston police officer—but only after being forced to redo, at age thirty-seven, the same police academy training a new recruit has to endure. He was granted $647,000 in back pay for the years he was off the force, and in 2007 he was promoted to detective.
Throughout this book, we will present many examples and anecdotes, like the story of Kenny Conley, that show how everyday illusions can have tremendous influence on our lives. However, two important caveats are in order. First, as Robert Pirsig writes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something that you actually don’t.” But science can only go so far, and although it can tell us in general how galaxies form, how DNA is transcribed into proteins, and how our minds perceive and remember our world, it is nearly impotent to explain a single event or individual case. The nature of everyday illusions almost never allows for proof that any particular incident was caused entirely by a specific mental mistake. There is no certainty that Conley missed the beating because of inattentional blindness, nor is there even certainty that he missed it at all (he could have seen it and then consistently lied). Without doing a study of attention under the same conditions Conley faced (at night, running after someone climbing a fence, the danger in chasing a murder suspect, the unfamiliar surroundings, and a gang of men attacking someone), we cannot estimate the probability that Conley missed what he said he missed.
We can, however, say that the intuitions of the people who condemned and convicted him were way off the mark. What is certain is that the police investigators, the prosecutors, and the jurors, and to some extent Kenny Conley himself, were all operating under the illusion of attention and failed to consider the possibility—which we argue is a strong possibility—that Conley could have been telling the truth about both where he was and what he didn’t see on that January night in Boston.
The second important point to keep in mind is this: We use stories and anecdotes to convey our arguments because narratives are compelling, memorable, and easily understood. But people tend to believe convincing, retrospective stories about why something happened even when there is no conclusive evidence of the event’s true causes. For that reason, we try to back up all of our examples with scientific research of the highest quality, using endnotes to document our sources and provide additional information along the way.
Our goals are to show you how everyday illusions influence our thoughts, decisions, and actions, and to convince you that they have large effects on our lives. We believe that once you have considered our arguments and evidence, you will agree, and that you will think about your own mind and your own behavior much differently. We hope that you will then act accordingly. So as you read on, read critically, keeping your mind open to the possibility that it doesn’t work the way you think it does.
Excerpted from "The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us," by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. Published by Crown © Christopher F. Chabris and Daniel J. Simons.