Book review of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Imagine you are asked to watch a short video (above or here) in which six people – three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.

Can you do that? Probably…

But what if at some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera, thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla?

Almost everyone has the intuition that the answer is “yes, of course I would.” How could something so obvious go completely unnoticed?

The fact is that when this experiment was done at Harvard University several years ago, half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible.

I actually did the gorilla experiment myself a few years ago. A friend showed me the video and told me to count the passes. Of course, he did not tell me about the gorilla. I actually ended up seeing the Gorilla. I was surprised to see people after me try it and miss it. I remembered the experiment and if somebody asked – “Hey, did you see the one with the gorilla”, I would say yes. I did not think to heavily on the ramifications of this experiment.

That is until I read The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons (Where I also found out that the reason I saw it is probably due to the fact that I been playing and watching basketball for years. People with that kind of experience are much more likely to see the gorilla).

In the book, the authors, take not only the gorilla experiment which is academically termed “inattentional blindness” or “illusion of attention” but 5 other “everyday illusions” (The illusion of memory, The illusion of confidence, Illusion of knowledge, illusion of cause and The illusion of potential) and skillfully explain them in both scientific and everyday examples. It is another very scary but equally fascinating journey into the fallibility of the human mind and human nature’s inability to admit that fallibility.

While the entire book was insightful, the first chapter, describing the first Gorilla Experiment (and its replications) as well as some of its real world implications was the chapter if found o be most compelling and novel. The recurring lesson for me was that our most basic beliefs and instincts can widely deceive us. As the authors put it:

We think we should see anything in front of us, but in fact we are aware of only a small portion of our visual world at any moment. The idea that we can look but not see is flatly incompatible with how we understand our own minds, and this mistaken understanding can lead to incautious or overconfident decisions.

As someone interested in human relationship and how professional conversations (like a feedback session) I find this to be especially important. Observing people give feedback for years I always wondered – How can they miss the clear signs the person in front of them is giving? Why do they continue to say what they planed when it is obvious the person is not responding?

While this has to do with listening skills and assumptions, one thing I realized while reading the book is that it has do with expectations. Or more academically phrased:

Your moment-to-moment expectations, more than the visual distinctiveness of the object, determine what you see—and what you miss

If people can miss a gorilla, standing right in front of their eyes because there are not expecting it, why shouldn’t they miss more subtle auditory and behavioral cues? The issue is coming to such a conversation with expectations that define what you will see and hear.

When you connect that to the Illusion of knowledge – the fact that people mistake knowledge of what happens for an understanding of why it happens, and then mistake feelings of familiarity for genuine knowledge – you understand that the assumptions and pre-held conceptions people enter a conversation with can actually make then blind (or deaf) to the person sitting in front of them.

This does not change what I thought about situations of feedback and how to handle them it just reinforces the prescriptions and the habits for good communication. It does, however, help me understand a little bit more about the process that goes inside people’s brains and the reasons to some of their behaviors.

I recommend you read the book as I do believe that many of the illusions described in it (although not all of them) can be at least dealt with to a certain extent by being more aware of the shaky foundations of some of our beliefs. While reading the book is not enough (there should be a process of turning the information into knowledge and then into wisdom, I think it is a great starting point.

Elad

Inside and outside view

Photo by dlco4

Following the last two posts about Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert (here and here) I wanted to highlight a few more interesting quotes from the book. One of the basic challenges that people encounter in any relationship, and especially when approaching a difficult conversation or feedback, is that they assume things about what the other person is thinking or feeling. As the authors of Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss what Matters Most explain, people confuse intentions with actions. We can see the action a person did (or hear what he said). We can only assume his or her intentions. In the book, Gilbert gives us a glimpse to why that happens:

We are the only people in the world whom we can know from the inside. We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that other people are experiencing theirs. We all trust that behind those eyes and inside those skulls, our friends and neighbors are having subjective experiences very much like our own, but that trust is an article of faith and not the palpable, self-evident truth that our own subjective experiences constitute.

In other words, we have an inside view of our own emotions and thoughts, but an outside view of other people’s emotions and thoughts. Or as Gilbert puts it:

There is a difference between making love and reading about it, and it is the same difference that distinguishes our knowledge of our own mental lives from our knowledge of everyone else’s.

The problem, as the book skillfully explains, is that whenever our mind encounters ambiguity it tends to fill in the details without telling us about it. We assume things about the other person. Automatically. Without being aware that we are doing it.

This is something we need to remember. We are on the outside. To get a glance on the inside, we need to engage the other person. To listen with him or her. To ask questions. Because when it comes to the human mind, the only way to get a tiny window into the inside view is if the other person communicates it to us. And this process requires trust.

So, how do you make sure you get a glance of a person’s inside view and not only the outside view?

Elad

Are you as blind to your relationships as companies are blind to their levels of customer service?

Photo by Patrick Hoesly

Bruce Temkin from Customer Experience Matters writes about the disparity between workers beliefs that their companies delight customers and the costumers’ real perceptions. Here is a short excerpt:

Interestingly, respondents gave their companies the highest marks in customer service. In research that I completed earlier this year at Forrester, I found that consumers rated customer service the least satisfying interaction. So, there’s clearly a mismatch between companies and their customers in that area.

I find this amazing. People who deal with these issues every day, who work with customers every day, are so blind to what these same costumers really think about them.

And the question is – are you blind to what other people think of you? If I ask you to predict what you employees/teammates/peers will say about you and then go out and ask them how similar will the results be? Can you be confident about the results?

Maybe it’s time you stop assuming and guessing and start asking.

Elad

The name of the game

Photo by lrargerich

Many of you are probably familiar with the famous prisoner’s dilemma. Some of the research around this dilemma focuses on how to create cooperation in situations where each participant has a clear incentive to act in a self-serving way or “defect”. Standard economic theory predicts, generally speaking, that people will always “defect”, as this is the best option for them. However, many experiments have shown that people cooperate (at least to begin with) and do not adhere to the predictions of the standard economic theory.

One of the more interesting effects on people’s cooperation rates came from a simple manipulation of the name of the game. When the game is called: “The Wall-Street Game” people tend more to defect and act in a self-serving way. However, when the game is titled: “The Community Game”, people tend to cooperate more.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how language matters. And I think this is another illustration of it. We carry so many assumptions with us into every setting we walk into. And the names and language we use determines our attitudes and influences our behavior.

And I ask you this: Is your team playing “The Wall-Street Game” or “The Community Game”? What kind of language are you using and what kinds of assumptions are present at your organization? If you want your team to cooperate, maybe you should consider changing the same of the game.

Elad

The Continuum

I was watching Nancy Etcoff talk on TED about happiness. The subject is, for obvious reasons, of interest to me, and I found it quite entreating. But one part of the talk really spiked my interest.

During the 7^th minute of the talk, Etcoff talks about the fact that contrary to common belief, happiness and unhappiness are not on the endpoints of a single continuum. They are not on the same scale. Happiness is not simply absence of misery. There are actually two different continuums for each of these categories. Or as Etcoff says it, as you get less miserable you don’t become happy, you become less miserable.

This is a simple yet very powerful idea. But then I said to myself, haven’t I heard this idea before? Off course I have.

According to the Two-factor theory (also known as Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory) job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction act independently of each other. Two Factor Theory states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction (Motivators, e.g. challenging work, recognition, responsibility which give positive satisfaction, arising from intrinsic conditions of the job itself, such as recognition, achievement, or personal growth), while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction (Hygiene factors,e.g. status, job security, salary and fringe benefits, which do not give positive satisfaction, although dissatisfaction results from their absence. These are extrinsic to the work itself, and include aspects such as company policies, supervisory practices, or wages/salary).

In the book “First, Break all the rules“, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman explain what Gallup found about costumer’s satisfaction and dissatisfaction. You guessed it. They are different. Granted, here they are not on a different continuum, but according to the book, costumers have two expectations that determine their level of dissatisfaction: accuracy and availability, and two different expectations that determine their satisfaction: partnership and advice.

The implications of each if these separately are profound in each field by itself. But put together, they produce something even bigger. Our tendency to think about phenomena as a continuum. This tendency might actually be wrong. And I ask you – what other tendencies do we have that our wrong? How many mistakes we do every day, because of our underlining assumptions? When is the last time that you conducted an exercise with the sole purpose of challenging your assumptions?  It is a difficult exercise, but it is worth it.

Elad