Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Denise RQ
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
It's one of the most famous lines from all of poetry.
It was written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
around 1845, when she was being courted by her future husband, Robert Browning.
But it wasn't published until about 5 years later, in 1850,
as part of the collection known as "Sonnets from the Portuguese."
It was published in her second edition of her poems.
At least that's what people thought
until Thomas Wise, a rare book collector and dealer,
about 40 years later discovered a previously unknown private printing
of the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
that was marked not for publication and was dated 1847,
right in between the time the poems were written
and the time that the poems were eventually officially published.
This discovery made a lot of sense to Wise;
it was intuitively plausible.
Here was the publication that had lingered for 5 years,
a set of poems that lingered for 5 years before being published.
The pamphlet that he found
was typical of private printings of publications at the time.
It made sense that Browning would have maybe compiled
these poems together into a collection
before they eventually ended up published for public consumption,
and other experts of the time agreed.
He trusted his intuitions,
other experts trusted his intuitions and their own intuitions
by looking at this pamphlet and realizing that it looked legitimate;
it made sense.
But should they really have trusted their intuitions in this case?
Let's come back to that in a few minutes.
But first, what I want to do is test your own intuitions.
I want to show you a task
that you might intuitively think is pretty difficult,
but, as will turn out, you actually can be pretty good at doing it.
Some of you may have seen this before.
If you have, that'll make it that much easier for you,
but you should still try your best to do it.
The task is simple:
all you have to do is count how many times
three people wearing white shirts pass a basketball.
They'd be running around, passing the ball, dribbling it.
Sometimes they're going to fake passes to make it harder to keep track,
but all you have to do is count how many total times they passed the ball.
Now, we are going to make it that much harder
by also having 3 people wearing black shirts passing their own ball,
and you're not supposed to count those;
you're only supposed to count the passes by the players wearing white.
OK, let's give it a shot.
(Video)
OK, how many people got 15 passes?
Some of you'll probably get 14, some of you'll probably get 16.
For those of you who haven't seen this before,
did anybody spot a gorilla?
(Laughter)
Did anybody not spot a gorilla?
(Laughter)
Good. OK.
Here's where he is.
Let me just rewind, and you can see what happens here.
There's the gorilla.
(Laughter)
The gorilla is walking thought the scene,
it stops there, thumps his chest for a second
(Laughter)
ducks under a pass.
The gorilla is there for 9 seconds,
but when you do this
under more controlled conditions in a lab
where you bring in one person at a time,
you find that fully 50% of people don't notice the gorilla.
In fact, if you ask them about it, they’d say, "What?"
We had people accused us of showing them different videos before and after.
(Laughter)
Why is that?
This is a compelling example for a number of reasons,
but mostly it's compelling because it's counter-intuitive.
It's hard to imagine that a person in a gorilla suit
could be in the middle of the video for 9 seconds, fully visible,
right there in front of you, and you could still not see it.
We intuitively believe that the mechanisms of attention
will automatically bring to focus things that matter to us,
and it turns out that intuition is dangerously wrong.
Just to illustrate how strongly people hold this conviction,
if you ask people just before showing them this video,
you ask them, "Would you notice
if I’d showed you a video of people passing basketballs,
and you had to do counting,
and you had this person in the gorilla suit go through the middle?
Would people notice it?
This was a study done by Bonnie Angelone and Dan Levin,
and what they found was that fully 90% said yes,
and they were sure of it.
People are confident
that when something unexpected or distinctive happens
right in front of you,
you'll automatically notice it, and it'll draw attention to itself.
Our intuitions about what we notice
are consistently wrong under these conditions.
When does this matter? Here's one example.
This is Ben Roethlisberger, Pro Bawl quarterback
for the Pittsburgh Steelers Super Bowl winner.
He was leaving his practice facility in Pittsburgh,
driving down the road on his sport motorcycle one day
- so the couple of years ago -
and ended up in this accident,
in which he was driving along, had a green light, had the right of way,
was going about 30 miles an hour,
and this car right here turned in front of him.
He ran into the car at full speed, bounced off the hood and the windshield,
landed in the street some distance away, required 7 hours of emergency surgery,
and was actually really lucky to be alive.
He came very close to bleeding out on the street.
Amazingly, he was back playing football the next year,
still not wearing his helmet,
which is another issue that I won't talk about today.
(Laughter)
What happened in this case?
You might think that this is unusual sort of thing to happen,
but if you look at the records of accidents
between cars and motorcycles,
this is actually the most common kind of accident.
A car fails to yield the right of way to a motorcycle,
and simply turns left right in front of it, at full speed.
The motorcycle often has no opportunity to react and hits it.
If you ask the drivers of the car afterwards,
"What happened? Why did you turn?
You didn't yield to the motorcycle; it was right there,"
what do they say?
"Well, I looked right there. They came out of nowhere.
I never saw them. They hit me."
Why did they miss it?
To them, it's just like the invisible gorilla
in the last video.
They aren't looking for motorcycles,
just like you weren't looking for gorillas;
they were looking for cars.
A motorcycle in this context is unexpected.
And because it's unexpected,
even if they did look right in the direction
where the motorcycle was coming,
they might not see it.
This idea that we don't notice things that are unexpected
can have dramatic consequences,
but it can also - this faulty intuition about what we will notice
can lead us to do things that are dangerous to ourselves.
For example, if you talk on a cell phone while you're driving,
you're making an implicit assumption
that that's not affecting what you'll notice.
But in reality, it has a huge impact on what you notice,
dramatically increases your risk of an accident;
it's comparable to driving under the influence of alcohol.
The reason it's so impactful
is that talking on a cell phone uses up some of your attention.
It makes you that much less likely to notice those invisible gorillas
that are out there.
So this is one of many everyday intuitions:
we think that we'll notice, see, and remember
far more than we actually do.
This is one of many cases
in which our intuitions about how the mind works
are dangerously wrong.
Let me show you a few other examples.
Now that you know what I'm up to,
you can try and test your own intuitions here.
Here's another example:
all you have to do in this case
is try to find what's changing in this scene.
It's nothing else happening. It's just a scene.
Try and find what's changing.
When you do, just raise your hand. See if you can find it.
Nobody found it yet?
I get maybe one person.
If you haven't found it yet, you are probably not going to.
Again, only one thing changing; I'm not tricking you here.
No? Anybody? Nobody. OK.
Dead silence.
Here's what was changing; let me show it to you.
This is pretty big area right in the front of the scene.
It wasn't changing like that; it was changing more gradually.
But let me show it to you again,
and now that you know what's changing, you can see it happening.
You can see the grass kind of going away.
Now, what's going on here?
Again, intuitively, we tend to think
if there's nothing else happening in the scene,
it'll draw our attention,
but in reality, it doesn't draw attention at all.
In order to notice it,
you have to actually be focusing attention on it in the first place.
We simply don't see things that we don't focus our attention on.
Let's take another example.
This example is a phenomenon known as change blindness.
It's a failure to notice things that are changing in a scene
when we're otherwise distracted -
in this case, distracted by looking for the change elsewhere.
But the change here is kind of irrelevant,
and we had the intuition that maybe, when we were doing these studies,
if we made a change to something
that wasn't kind of a marginal interest in the scene,
maybe then people would keep track of it,
maybe they would remember.
That was our intuition.
It turns out it was wrong.
Here's a study that I did with Dan Levin many years ago.
What you'll see here is a colleague of ours, Lion,
approaching this pedestrian to ask for directions.
As he's kindly providing directions, watch what happens behind them,
as two people are going to approach, carrying a big, wooden door.
Leon goes away, and somebody else is left behind, asking the directions.
(Laughter)
What we find here
(Laughter)
is that 50% of the people have no idea they're talking to somebody else.
(Laughter)
After they finish giving directions,
which they do regardless of whether or not they noticed the change
- it's kind of another interesting odd point -
we tell them we were actually doing a study
as part of the Psychology Department, which was right next door,
and ask them, "Did you notice anything unusual
when those people went by with the door?"
If they notice the change, they say, "Yeah, you're a different person."
We didn't ask them why they kept giving directions.
(Laughter)
If they didn't notice the change,
they'd say things like, "Well, it was kind of rude.
They could've gone right around us,"
but they had no idea that it's a different person.
In fact, if you give them eyewitness lineup,
just like a photographic lineup you might see in the movies,
or in the police station,
with the person who they originally saw asking them directions,
along with several other people who had similar characteristics,
they're at chance at picking that person out of the lineup.
Think about the implications of this.
This is one second later you've made a change
to the person they're interacting with.
Think about what this means for memory under more real-world sorts of conditions,
where people aren't changing instantly,
but for which you might be asked to give testimony.
One of the most dramatic examples of an intuition about memory going awry
is cases of people who are exonerated from death row
based on DNA testing.
So here's a case in which,
if I asked you afterwards to describe the person you saw,
and you didn't notice the change,
you'd be perfectly confident that you could describe the person;
you just wouldn't realize that there were two people.
If you look at people who were exonerated from death row,
in the majority of cases, the conviction was based
on the confident testimony of eyewitnesses.
That means some witness to the crime not only identified that person;
they probably did it in court, and they probably did it confidently,
saying, "Yeah, that's the person who attacked me,"
or, "That's the person I saw running away from the crime scene."
Because they were exonerated by the DNA testing,
they were wrong.
They were perfectly confident,
they were convinced that their memory was accurate.
The jury was as well,
because juries are very much swayed
by how confidently somebody testifies about their memory,
but it turns out that there's not much of a link
between how confident somebody is about their memory
and how accurate they are about their memory.
So this is a nice case
in which our intuitions really don't map onto the reality
of how our memory works.
You can think about this in your own case.
You probably have vivid memories of some events in your life.
For example, you can probably vividly remember
how you first heard about the attacks on 9/11.
You can probably remember who you were with,
who told you about it, where you got follow-up information,
where you were exactly,
what you were doing before and after you heard about it,
maybe if you were watching TV,
you can probably remember the characteristics of the television
that you were watching it on.
This is a long time ago now,
but you're probably really confident in that memory,
you're probably sure that it's right.
What these studies of memory suggest over the last 30 years or so
is that that confidence is misplaced,
that if you went back and checked to see how accurate your memory actually was,
you might find some systematic distortions.
The evidence suggests that you're no more likely to be accurate
about the details of that event
as you are about the details of an event, say, three days ago, or five years ago.
We don't remember those mundane events
that much worse than we remember the really vivid ones;
we just think we do.
We're really confident about them.
There's nothing that I can really do
to convince you short of finding documentary evidence that you are wrong.
There's nothing I could do that would easily convince you
that your memory was wrong.
That's why those witnesses to crimes are so convinced that they're right.
Let's take one other case of reasoning about intuition.
So these are cases in which people think they understand
how their mind works,
and actually don't have a good idea how their minds work.
But what's interesting about this
is in some cases, our intuitions are just fine,
but our reasoning about them is what's lousy.
So this is a nice study from Lars Hall and Peter Johansson,
and they had a very simple task.
They showed people two pictures,
and all they had to do was say which one was more attractive.
Then, on occasion, they would hand them the picture
and ask them to explain their judgment.
Here's what they would do. Here are the two pictures.
The person's going to pick the one on the left.
They hand them the picture,
and they make some explanation
for why they thought that woman was the more attractive.
But on some critical trials
- watch very carefully what happens here -
he's going to pick the one on the left, but be handed the one on the right
through some sleight of hand.
And what do people do?
First, they don't notice
that they're looking at the different picture,
and second, they give the same kind of explanation
that they gave for the faces that they had picked.
If you try and analyze the kinds of the reasons that people gave,
they're identical to the ones for the ones they had picked,
actually chosen.
This is a phenomenon known as choice blindness.
Here's one example:
"I picked that one because I prefer blondes,"
when they'd actually picked a brunette.
We get these justifications,
and we think these justifications
are actually the reasons why we made our choices,
so much so, and we're so confident in these
that if you ask people, "Would you notice
if I switched the face that you had picked?",
85% say, "Of course, because I had reasons for picking that one.
If you gave me a different face, it wouldn't match those reasons."
It turns out that those reasons have no bearing
on why people actually made the decision.
We're confident that there's a reason.
It's so powerful that we make up reasons that match our confidence.
So let's talk a little bit more about the case of Thomas Wise,
that we started with at the beginning.
He was the rare book collector
who found the previous printing of Elisabeth Barrett Browning sonnets
from the Portuguese.
This previous printing that he discovered was the private printing.
It was a pamphlet collection dated
between the time the poems were written and when the final version was published.
It turns out that he made the whole thing up.
He had it printed himself; it was a forgery.
And like all good forgeries,
it completely confused the experts of the time.
They relied on their intuitions;
they looked at this thing, and it made sense.
It was logical that there would have been a pamphlet
publishing of those works before.
It fit into the corpus of Browning’s larger collection of works.
It looked right, it had right looking field,
and it was thought to be legitimate for decades.
It was only through a systematic analysis of the paper content
- a couple of other book dealers in the early 1900s
looked at a paper content under a microscope
and realized that it was made from a wood pulp,
which hadn't been in use
till 25 years or 30 years after that publication in Britain.
Instead, it should have been made from straw or esparto,
another straw-like material used to make books of that time.
It was definitely a fake,
and it turned out that Wise,
who at the time had been known
as the greatest collector of rare books and poetry,
is now known as one of the greatest forgers of all times;
he forged works by Dickens, and Tennyson,
and lots of other great authors of that era.
So what happened here?
One thing that he knew, and that all great forgers know
is that you can rely on the intuitions of experts to be wrong
if you can match their intuitions,
if you can make something look like it fits,
and have right look and feel, then people will trust it.
Let's take a more recent example of this,
and how con artists can take advantage of intuitions.
This is one of my favorite examples.
It comes from Bernie Madoff, Ponzi scheme aficionado.
Madoff managed to get consistent returns, month after month, year after year,
despite huge fluctuations in the market.
Basically, that's statistically impossible.
He would have had to had superhuman ability to time the market
to make his investments
in order to get as consistent returns as he did over time.
When the SEC was investigating him, they asked him how he did it.
Reasonable question.
What did he say?
"I have great good intuitions about the market.
I can watch the trading floor, and assess the mood,
and know whether the whole market is going to go up or down."
And the SSE lawyers bought it.
They were more trusting of that belief
that he could have had that sort of great intuitive ability
than of the statistical evidence
that he would have had to be superhuman to have that kind of ability.
It was just not plausible.
So these people who were investigating were not simple rubes;
these were lawyers trained to investigate securities' fraud.
They were trained to look for Ponzi schemes.
Yet, they still trusted the possibility of intuition
more so than they should.
If you think about this,
if trained lawyers are overly trusting of their intuitions
in their area of expertise,
so are we all.
So the goal here is we have to teach ourselves to counter-intuitions
in those cases where they're likely to lead us astray.
Thank you.
(Applause)