The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (39 page)

24.
Details about this accident and its consequences were reported in an article on ESPN.com entitled “Big Ben in Serious Condition After Motorcycle Accident” on June 12 and June 13, 2006 (
sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2480830
). Other details and some quotes come from the following stories: M. A. Fuoco, “Multiple Injuries, Few Answers for Roethlisberger,”
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette
, June 13, 2006 (
www.post-gazette.com/pg/06164/697828-66.stm
); J. Silver, “Roethlisberger, Car Driver Are Both Charged,”
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette
, June 20, 2006 (
www.post-gazette.com/pg/06171/699570-66.stm
); D. Hench, “Steelers’ QB Hurt in Crash,”
Portland Press Herald
, June 13, 2006.

25.
Statistics and quotes are drawn from the Hurt report: H. H. Hurt Jr., J. V. Ouellet, and D. R. Thom,
Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures
, Volume 1: Technical report. Traffic Safety Center, University of Southern California, 1981.

26.
Hurt et al.,
Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors
, 46. The larger study discussed in this report conducted on-site accident evaluations for 900 motorcycle accidents in the Los Angeles area, and it also examined 3,600 accident reports. The criteria used to select these 62 cases for additional analysis were not described in the report.

27.
S. B. Most, D. J. Simons, B. J. Scholl, R. Jimenez, E. Clifford, and C. F. Chabris, “How Not to Be Seen: The Contribution of Similarity and Selective Ignoring to Sustained Inattentional Blindness,”
Psychological Science
12 (2000): 9–17.

28.
P. L. Jacobsen, “Safety in Numbers: More Walkers and Bicyclists, Safer Walking and Bicycling,”
Injury Prevention
9 (2003): 205–209. These results have been corroborated in other countries and other time periods; for similar analyses in Australia, see D. L. Robinson, “Safety in Numbers in Australia: More Walkers and Bicyclists, Safer Walking and Bicycling,”
Health Promotion Journal of Australia
16, no. 1 (2005): 47–51. See also Tom Vanderbilt’s excellent book
Traffic
(New York: Knopf, 2008), which discusses this issue and a number of related issues involving expectations and accidents. This book was an informative resource for the material in this chapter on driving.

29.
S. B. Most and R. S. Astur, “Feature-Based Attentional Set as a Cause of Traffic Accidents,”
Visual Cognition
15 (2007): 125–132.

30.
Fuoco, “Multiple Injuries, Few Answers for Roethlisberger.”

31.
E. Fischer, R. F. Haines, and T. A. Price, “Cognitive Issues in Head-Up Displays,” NASA Technical Paper 1711, 1980. See also R. F. Haines, “A Breakdown in Simultaneous Information Processing,” in
Presbyopia Research
, ed. G. Obrecht and L. W. Stark (New York: Plenum Press, 1991).

32.
Statistics and some of the analyses in this section are drawn from “Runway Safety Report: Trends and Initiatives at Towered Airports in the United States, FY 2004 through FY 2007,” Federal Aviation Administration, June 2008. You could encounter a runway incursion much sooner or much later than our estimate of three thousand years of daily round-trip flying, but in any case it is highly unlikely that you will in your lifetime. Details of the Tenerife crash are taken from “… What’s He Doing? He’s Going to Kill Us
All!”
Time
, April 11, 1977 (
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918815,00.html
) and from the Wikipedia entry on the Tenerife disaster,
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_disaster
(accessed January 19, 2009).

33.
Fischer et al., “Cognitive Issues in Head-Up Displays,” 15.

34.
I. Larish and C. D. Wickens,
Divided Attention with Superimposed and Separated Imagery: Implications for Head-up Displays
, Aviation Research Laboratory Technical Report ARL-91-04/NASA-HUD-91-1, 1991.

35.
Evidence for driving impairment while talking on a cell phone comes from D. A. Redelmeier and R. J. Tibshirani, “Association Between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions,”
New England Journal of Medicine
336 (1997): 453–458; and D. L. Strayer, F. A. Drews, and D. J. Crouch, “Comparing the Cell-Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver,”
Human Factors
48 (2006): 381–391. Evidence linking alcohol consumption to increased inattentional blindness comes from S. L. Clifasefi, M. K. T. Takarangi, and J. S. Bergman, “Blind Drunk: The Effects of Alcohol on Inattentional Blindness,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
20 (2005): 697–704. In this study, subjects were less likely to notice the unexpected gorilla after having had an alcoholic beverage. Alcohol could have its effect by directly altering the ability to detect unexpected objects or by making the primary counting task more difficult.

36.
E. Goodman, “We Love, Hate Our Cell Phones,”
The Boston Globe
, July 6, 2001. Consistent with Goodman’s claim, a survey found that cell phone users agreed more strongly with the statement “I can use a cellular phone safely when driving” than with “People, in general, can use a cellular phone safely when driving.” M. S. Wogalter and C. B. Mayhorn, “Perceptions of Driver Distraction by Cellular Phone Users and Nonusers,”
Human Factors
47 (2005): 455–467.

The New York legislation that took effect on December 1, 2001, involved adding Section 1225-c to the New York vehicle and traffic law. Part of the law stated, “The court shall waive any fine for which a person who violates the provisions of section 1225-c of the vehicle and traffic law … supplies the court with proof that, between the date on which he or she is charged with having violated such section and the appearance date for such violation, he or she possesses a hands-free mobile telephone.” This “get out of jail” provision was in effect until March 2002. The effect of this law essentially meant that rather than paying a fine, people caught using a handheld phone could pay a cell-phone vendor for a hands-free headset. Consequently, it’s not surprising that the major telecommunication companies supported the legislation.

Nokia’s recommendation to use hands-free phones was titled “Safety Is the Most Important Call You Will Ever Make: A Guide to Safe and Responsible Wireless Phone Use” and its top safety tip was to “Get to know your wireless phone and its features such as speed dial and redial.” AT&T’s flier was headed “A special offer just for you” and provided a coupon for a free hands-free earpiece. The statistic that 77 percent of people believe that talking on a hands-free phone is safer comes from the SurveyUSA representative national poll we commissioned, conducted June 1–8, 2009.

37.
W. J. Horrey and C. D. Wickens, “Examining the Impact of Cell Phone Conversations on Driving Using Meta-Analytic Techniques,”
Human Factors
48 (2006): 196–205.

38.
In most variants of the “gorilla” experiment, the gorilla did not stop to thump its
chest. Instead, it just walked through the scene, remaining visible for five seconds. We created the “chest thump” version that we described earlier for a separate test to explore how dramatic we could make the event and still provoke inattentional blindness.

39.
B. J. Scholl, N. S. Noles, V. Pasheva, and R. Sussman, “Talking on a Cellular Telephone Dramatically Increases ‘sustained inattentional blindness’” [Abstract],
Journal of Vision
3 (2003): 156 (journalofvision.org/3/9/156/). More recent observational studies show that people are often oblivious to their surroundings when talking on a phone. For example, people walking across a college campus while talking on a phone were less likely than undistracted pedestrians to notice a unicycling clown nearby: I. E. Hyman Jr., S. M. Boss, B. M. Wise, K. E. McKenzie, and J. M. Caggiano, “Did You See the Unicycling Clown? Inattentional Blindness While Walking and Talking on a Cell Phone,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
.

40.
This finding and the explanations in the next paragraph are based on F. A. Drews, M. Pasupathi, and D. L. Strayer, “Passenger and Cell Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
14 (2008): 392–400.

41.
The phenomenon of inattentional deafness can be traced to studies from the 1950s and 1960s on the ability to attend selectively to information presented to one ear while ignoring sounds in the other ear. Under those conditions, people often fail to notice unexpected messages in the ignored ear. The term “inattentional deafness” was first used by Mack and Rock in their 1998 book
Inattentional Blindness
. For examples of early work on selective listening, see E. C. Cherry, “Some Experiments upon the Recognition of Speech, with One and with Two Ears,”
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
25 (1953): 975–979; and A. Treisman, “Monitoring and Storage of Irrelevant Messages in Selective Attention,”
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
3 (1964): 449–459.

42.
G. Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,”
The Washington Post
, April 8, 2007, p. W10 (
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
). Biographical information about Bell comes from Weingarten’s article and the Wikipedia entry on Joshua Bell (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bell). The biographical quote about Bell is from his official biography,
www.joshuabell.com/biography
(accessed January 16, 2009).

43.
Later, Joshua Bell had a different memory of his feelings. In the revised edition of
Predictably Irrational
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009), Dan Ariely writes of meeting Bell and asking about his day as a busker: “I wanted to know how he felt about being overlooked and ignored by so many people. He responded that he was really not all that surprised, and admitted that expectation is an important part of the way we experience music” (p. 272).

44.
Nokia Corporation, “Survey Results Confirm It: Women Are Better Multitaskers Than Men,” press release, November 22, 2007,
www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1170280
(accessed January 28, 2009). Despite the title of this press release, it reports no actual test of multitasking abilities, just a nonrepresentative survey of popular beliefs about multitasking abilities. A typical study of the inefficiency of multitasking is J. S. Rubinstein, D. E. Meyer, and J. E. Evans, “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
27 (2001): 763–797. There is frequent discussion of differences in brain
anatomy between men and women that could explain a difference in multitasking ability, but we have been unable to find experiments that offer unequivocal evidence for a general superiority of women in dividing attention between multiple tasks or goals.

45.
These findings are reported in D. Memmert, “The Effects of Eye Movements, Age, and Expertise on Inattentional Blindness,”
Consciousness and Cognition
15 (2006): 620–627; and D. Memmert, D. J. Simons, and T. Grimme, “The Relationship Between Visual Attention and Expertise in Sports,”
Psychology of Sport and Exercise
10 (2009): 146–151.

46.
T. E. Lum, R. J. Fairbanks, E. C. Pennington, and F. L. Zwemer, “Profiles in Patient Safety: Misplaced Femoral Line Guidewire and Multiple Failures to Detect the Foreign Body on Chest Radiography,”
Academic Emergency Medicine
12 (2005): 658–662.

47.
Omitting a final step in a process (e.g., removing a guidewire) once the main objective of the process has been achieved (e.g., placing the central line correctly) is a common sort of mistake known as a
post-completion error
. This is the type of error you are making when you walk away with your stack of copies while the original document is still sitting on the glass, or when you type out an e-mail saying “as shown in the document I have attached” but hit “send” before you attach the document.

48.
D. B. Spring and D. J. Tennenhouse, “Radiology Malpractice Lawsuits: California Jury Verdicts,”
Radiology
159 (1986): 811–814.

49.
W. James,
The Principles of Psychology
(New York: Henry Holt, 1890). For a discussion of how people search for rare items, see J. M. Wolfe, T. S. Horowitz, and N. M. Kenner, “Rare Items Often Missed in Visual Searches,”
Nature
435 (2005): 439–440.

50.
The examples of uses of the gorilla video are from several sources. The first is from an e-mail sent to Dan’s company, Viscog Productions, Inc., on August 5, 2004, about the usefulness of its DVD that includes the gorilla video. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard psychology professor, used inattentional blindness in an analysis of discrimination; see the story entitled “Tenure and Gender” in
Harvard Magazine
, January 2005 (
harvardmagazine.com/2005/01/tenure-and-gender.html
). The parallels between inattentional blindness and the failure to detect terrorists was discussed in “Background Briefing,” ABC Radio National (Australia) with Gerald Tooth, December 8, 2002. Links to diet were discussed in “Awareness, Fat Loss, & Moonwalking Bears,” December 31, 2008,
www.bellyfatreport.com/?s=bear
(accessed June 9, 2009). Dean Radin’s views are presented in D. Radin,
Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality
(New York: Paraview Pocket Books, 2006). (Later in this book we discuss one of the main reasons why people come to believe in psychic phenomena despite the absence of scientific evidence to support their existence.) Discussion of bullying was from an e-mail received by Viscog Productions on September 1, 2008. The link to religion is from a March 2008 sermon by Reverend Daniel Conklin of the Epiphany Parish in Seattle,
www.epiphanyseattle.org/sermons/Lent4-2008.html
(accessed June 28, 2009).