Inattentional blindness: why we don't notice what's happening under our noses
Miscellaneous / / November 06, 2023
Our perception is imperfect, and sometimes this leads to disaster.
In 1995, in Boston, a group of black criminals was saved from the police. The violators' golden Lexus drove into a dead end, after which they left the vehicle and ran in all directions. One of the criminals, nicknamed Smoot, climbed onto the wire fence and got caught in the mesh.
A police officer named Michael Cox, also black and dressed in civilian clothes, gave chase. While he was trying to pull the criminal off the grid, he was hit on the head by his own people: one of the policemen who arrived in time mistook Cox for a bandit and, together with others, began to beat him. A little later they realized their mistake and left the officer lying unconscious.
This whole story happened in front of another police officer, Kenny Conley, who also rushed in pursuit of Smoot and eventually caught him and detained him. When questioned at the trial, Conley stated that he did not see either Cox or his beating.
The jury found that it was simply impossible: he was in the same place, climbing over the fence at the same moment when other police attacked Cox. Even Smoot said he turned around and saw a white police officer standing at the scene of the beating. The court found that Conley was simply covering up for his comrades and lying under oath, so he had to leave the service.
People simply could not believe that they could not see such an event. And the reason for this phenomenon of perception, known as inattentional blindness.
What is inattention blindness
Inattentional blindness, or perceptual blindness, is the inability to notice an object or event when attention is focused elsewhere.
If a man concentrated on any aspect of the visible world, the appearance of an unexpected object can easily go unnoticed.
Even if it is quite large, potentially significant and right in sight.
A well-known experiment clearly demonstrating the existence of this phenomenon is held Harvard University scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. To begin with, they filmed a short video in which two teams - one in black T-shirts and the other in white - throw a basketball to each other. The video was then given to other students to watch and they were asked to count how many passes the players wearing white shirts made and ignore those wearing black shirts.
Try it too. Just don't read any further until you've counted.
Did you notice the student in a gorilla suit walking onto the stage in the middle of the video? If not, you have just fallen victim to the phenomenon of inattentional blindness.
Like about half of the students who were enthusiastically counting passes in the original experiment.
You might think that stealth gorillas This is at least partially explained by the fact that the suit was black and participants only paid attention to white objects. But in another experiment they proved that color does not matter.
There are people in it observed behind the black and white letters, when a red plus suddenly appeared in the middle of the screen. Despite the fact that it was the only figure of this color on the field, 30% of the participants did not notice it.
People don't even necessarily need visual stimuli to miss something unusual. For example, in one experiment, participants got carried away telephone conversation that they did not notice a clown crossing the street on a unicycle.
Why does inattention blindness occur?
Inattention blindness is a byproduct of our ability to focus only on important information and ignore irrelevant or distracting information.
Brain Resources limited, and we physically cannot perceive absolutely everything that happens around us. To speed up the processing of incoming data, we have a kind of filter that lets through what we want to see and hear, and filters out irrelevant stimuli.
This mechanism seriously saves time and brain resources, but sometimes mistakenly filters out what may be important.
What's even more interesting is that the existence of such a filter is counterintuitive. People are sincere considerthat their perception is complete and comprehensive, and they are very surprised when they see evidence to the contrary. Thus, in the book by Chabris and Simons lead results of a survey in which 75% of participants claim that they would notice an unexpected event even if they were absorbed in something else.
In the same gorilla experiment, scientists were repeatedly accused of replacing the films. The participants simply could not believe that they had not seen such a noticeable and unusual character.
And sometimes such confidence in human perception can play a cruel joke.
Can inattention blindness be dangerous?
Because perceptual blindness characteristic For all people, no matter how good their memory and attention are, it cannot be said that the phenomenon is so harmful and dangerous.
This feature of perception has been tested evolution. Apparently, the ability to concentrate on a task while ignoring unimportant stimuli has proven to be a more useful for survival than the ability to notice in time an unexpected object that, in principle, should not be there must.
But in modern conditions, inattentional blindness can really lead to disaster.
For example, it can explain many accidents involving motorcyclists. Motorists, accustomed to seeing cars on the road, notice a motorcycle only at the last moment, when it seems to “emerge out of nowhere.”
Should we fight inattentional blindness?
In most cases, inattentional blindness does not lead to bad consequences, because unusual and unexpected things are rarely encountered at all. It is impossible to fight it, and it is not necessary. Another thing is to reduce risks in situations where mistakes can be fatal.
First of all, this concerns driving a car. Many people feel that talking on the phone does not affect their concentration and ability to react in time to an unexpected situation. And the fact that they have never found themselves in such a situation only increases the false confidence in their perception.
In addition, in dangerous and unusual cases, you should not rely on the perceptions of other people. In one experiment with the same gorilla on a screen, scientists tracked the eye movements of subjects and found that those who did not noticed a sudden character, held their gaze on him for about one second - exactly as long as those who discovered his.
In other words, a person can look at you but not see you. So before crossing the road, make sure the driver slows down. If he looks into your eyes, but does not slow down, it is quite possible that he simply does not see you.
How else does our brain deceive us?🧠
- Fear of Failure: The Thinking Trap That Keeps Us from Growing
- What is “projection bias” and how does it affect our decisions?
- How Believing in Happy Endings Causes Us to Make Bad Decisions