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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
Today, I'm chatting with the researcher behind one of the most widely demonstrated and discussed studies in all of psychology. It earned him an IG Nobel Prize and was even discussed by characters in an episode of csi. It's an experiment you've almost certainly heard about before, and today we'll explore its findings. All of that coming up.
- [00:25]
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- [00:56]
Phil Agnew
In a study conducted with Survey USA, a representative sample of American adults were asked if they would notice unexpected expected events. Even when they were focused on something else. 75% said they would notice unexpected events. 75% of Americans think they'll notice the unusual, even when not paying attention. However, my guest on Nudge today, well, he disagrees.
- [01:22]
Dan Simons
My name is Dan Simons. I'm a psychology professor at the University of Illinois, where I study things like visual attention, perception and distraction, mostly. But in recent years, my colleague Christopher Chabri and I have been working on the cognitive underpinnings of deception.
- [01:39]
Phil Agnew
Dan knows that most people overlook unusual events because he's run a notorious study to prove it. His study involves watching a video of students passing a basketball. Now, I can't show you this video as you're listening to a podcast, but fortunately for me, a researcher named Polly Dalton has replicated Dan's study in audio form. So, without giving anything away, let me play the experiment for you. And please note, this experiment works best if you're wearing headphones. This is Polly Dalton introducing the test.
- [02:20]
Polly Dalton
Hello, and welcome to the experiment. The sounds you are about to hear have been recorded in a special way to make them sound amazingly realistic, almost as if they're in the same room as you. In a moment, you'll hear some people preparing for a party. Listen carefully to what the women are saying and try not to be distracted by what the men are saying. Afterwards, you'll be asked a couple of questions about what you heard. So do try to listen carefully.
- [02:51]
Phil Agnew
Hey, Jackie. Hi, Charlie.
- [02:54]
Dan Simons
Hi, Jackie.
- [03:14]
Phil Agnew
Yeah, we've got wrapping paper. What color do you think? We've got silver in the cups, though. Sarah.
- [03:56]
Dan Simons
Good stuff.
- [03:57]
Phil Agnew
Excellent. Beautiful. So you were listening to women preparing for the party, but did you notice anything unusual, anything unexpected? More to the point, did you notice the man who walked through the room saying, I'm a gorilla. Let's listen again. Now I'm going to guess, actually, many of you probably did hear the man saying, I'm a gorilla. You were expecting to hear something unexpected after all. That's the pitch I shared at the start of the episode. The title of this episode mentions a gorilla and your behavioural science fans, who probably look out for the unusual on this show. However, Polly Dalton found that only 30% of the listeners in her study heard the man saying, I'm a gorilla. Only 30% of her listeners heard that man. Most of us miss the unexpected when focused on something else. This replicates the findings that Dan, his notorious invisible gorilla study.
- [05:19]
Dan Simons
Yeah, so this was a study that Chris Shabri and I did, actually, as part of a class project for a class I was teaching at the time, back in the late 1990s. The study was actually designed as an attempt to replicate and extend some work from my colleague Ulrich Neisser, who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and he'd done some similar studies in the late 1970s. And they got some attention, but people didn't quite know what to do with them. They were ahead of their time. So our study was designed to replicate and sort of push the boundaries of that. So we had people watch videos, and in the video we'd have people passing a basketball. So we'd have people wearing a white shirt, three of them, and they'd pass a ball to each other. And we'd tell people, your task is to count how many times the players wearing white complete a pass and they'll sometimes bounce past it and sometimes pass it in the air. But there are also three people wearing black shirts and they're passing their own ball and you should not count their passes. And we, of course, counterbalance this. Some people paid attention to the players wearing black, others wearing the players wearing white. So as they're doing this counting task, which we can do remarkably well, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the scene and in one variant of it, they turn and face the camera, thump their chest and then walk off the other side, like eight seconds on screen. And what we find is that about half of the people we show this to didn't notice the gorilla. They were focusing on counting the passes by the players wearing white.
- [06:46]
Phil Agnew
Dan found that half of the people who watched the video missed the gorilla. That Gorilla is very obvious. Once you look out for it, you cannot miss it. But what's especially strange is that those who recall not seeing the gorilla did actually look at it. Dan knows this because he's shared how the study was replicated using an eye tracker. An eye tracker can provide a continuous trace of where the eye's looking, showing where and for how long a subject is looking at anything during a certain period of time. Sports scientist Daniel Memert from Heidelberg University ran a version of the gorilla experiment using an eye tracker. He found that subjects who failed to notice the gorilla had on average spent a full second looking right at it. That's the same amount of time as those who did notice the gorilla. People were looking at the gorilla, yet their brains weren't noticing it.
- [07:41]
Dan Simons
That finding more or less replicates what Nicer had shown much earlier, just with a little more vivid displays with a single camera shot. There's no ambiguity about what you'd seen. And what's interesting about it to me is not just that people miss things because we'd known that people miss things for years. It's that people can miss something so obvious that when they do, they're shocked. When they're shown what they missed, they have a hard time believing that they missed it. And it's that intuition for me, that's the really powerful thing. We assume that if something important would happen, we'll notice it, that it will draw attention to it.
- [08:16]
Phil Agnew
In Dan's book, he shares some real world implications for this finding. Take driving while having a hands free phone call. We all know that driving while holding a phone next to our ears and having a conversation, well, we know that's wrong. We have one hand off the wheel and that impairs our driving. Hands free driving, however, is fine, right? Because both hands are on the wheel. Well, Dan disagrees. Additional research on his gorilla experiment findings show that hands free phone calls aren't actually that much safer. Brian Scholl and his students at Yale used a variant of the gorilla experiment to explore the effects of mobile phone conversations on inattention. They compared a group of people who watched the gorilla experiment video as usual with another group who watched the video as usual while simultaneously carrying out a mobile phone conversation. In Brian Scholl's version, He found that 30% of the participants missed the gorilla when they were just doing the counting task, so not having the phone call. However, the participant who watched the video while taking a miss the gorilla. 90% of the time. Simply having a conversation on the phone tripled the chances that they would fail to see something unexpected. Dan writes that this sobering finding shows how mobile phone conversations dramatically impair visual perception and awareness. He says the finding may explain why people falsely believe that mobile phones do nothing to affect their driving. People are lured into thinking that they drive fine because they can still perform the primary task of staying on the road properly. The problem is, is that they're much less likely to notice rare, unexpected and potentially catastrophic events.
- [09:57]
Dan Simons
We tend to think that, you know, we can trust our gut. Who better can know us than we know ourselves? We should be able to trust our own intuitions about how our own minds work. And the reality is that our intuitions can be misleading, and that's because they're based on our experiences and our experiences are misleading. We only get experiences of we're only aware of the things that we experience consciously and we don't know about all the things we're missing.
- [10:22]
Phil Agnew
We are only aware of what we experience and we don't know what we're missing. There's another little audio trick I can run on you to prove this. It's From a wonderful AsapSCIENCE YouTube video called this will trick your ears. Let's see if you spot what's missing from this audio clip. The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. Okay, now listen again, but this time with the cough removed. The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. There's a whole syllable missing from that sentence, but because of the cough, our brains fill in the gap and we don't hear what's missing. The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. We don't expect to hear a missing syllable, so we don't hear it. In fact, we often miss unexpected events and no study proves this better than one conducted at the L'Enfant Pl subway stop in Washington D.C. on Friday morning rush hour. A busker set up shop between the entrance and an escalator, opened his violin case to take donations and began performing. However, this wasn't any normal busker. This was the world famous violinist Joshua Bell. Bell is a bit of a musical prodigy. As a four year old in Indiana, Bell impressed his parents by using rubber bands to pluck out songs he had heard. By the age of 17, Bell had played at Carnegie Hall. In his 20s, he repeatedly topped the classical music charts, receiving numerous awards for his performances and he even appeared on Sesame Street. The official biography on his website began with the words Joshua Bell has captured the public's attention like no other classical violinist of his time. But that wasn't the case at the subway stop in Washington. Over the course of his 43 minute performance, more than 1000 people passed within a few feet of him. But only seven stopped to listen. And not counting a donation of $20 from a passerby who recognised him, Bell only made $32.17 for his work. This was an awful lot less than what he would have made performing for 43 minutes in a concert theatre. This was a genuine surprise to classical music fans. It's like the Arctic monkeys busking at Oxford Circus and only making enough money to cover the train ride home. The famous conductor Leonard Slatkin, who directs the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked to predict how a professional performer would do as a subway artist. Slatkin was convinced a crowd would gather. He said maybe 75 to 100 people would stop and spend some time listening. During Bell's actual performance, only seven stopped. When Bell watched the video of his performance back, he was really surprised. He says it's as if I'm invisible because you know what, I'm making a lot of noise. But unlike Bell, I'm not surprised by this. The invisible gorilla experiment teaches us that we miss unexpected events if we're not looking for them. People weren't looking for the world's best violinist so they didn't spot him. This unintentional blindness isn't just a problem for busy commuters or lab participants. It affects Veter. Navy sailors captaining billion dollar submarines. At the helm, Commander Scott Waddle, the captain of the USS Greenville at the time. With one of the visitors seated at the subs controls, the USS Greenville performed what's called a main ballast blow, a move reserved for emergencies and training.
- [14:02]
Dan Simons
We have a vessel that has had a collision approximately nine miles south of Diamond Head.
- [14:08]
Phil Agnew
Commercial ship with a submarine vessel has sunk.
- [14:12]
Dan Simons
People are in the water.
- [14:13]
Phil Agnew
At 1:40pm on February 9, 2001, the USS Grenville surfaced at high speed directly under a Japanese fishing vessel. Six people on board the fishing vessel died. But what went wrong? How could a state of the art modern day sub with sonar and an experienced crew not detect a 200 foot long fishing ship right above it? Well, it's another invisible gorilla. Commander Waddle made all of the necessary preparations before performing an emergency deep manoeuvre. He lifted the periscope to search for other ships and the Japanese boat should have been visible through the periscope. Waddle looked right towards it, but he still missed it. Dan writes in his book that the USS Grenville's commanding officer, with all of his experience and expertise, could have looked right at the other ship and not seen it. The key lies in what he thought he would see when he looked. As he said later, I wasn't looking for it, nor did I expect it. We miss what we don't expect. That's why illusions like the Invisible Gorilla work. But this illusion affects us in more ways than we might expect, altering our memory, our confidence, and our knowledge. And all these illusions affect businesses and marketers as well. In fact, understanding these illusions might change the way you advertise your brand. But we'll cover all of that after this quick break. Create like the Greats, hosted by Ross Simmons, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the Go to audio destination for business professionals. In each episode, Ross dives into the stories behind some of history's greatest creations and creators. He unpacks the strategies, processes, and lessons that shaped them. His episodes are engaging, his insights are practical, and he's been living these principles that he shares for over a decade. If you enjoy exploring creativity, the history of creators, and actionable advice, this podcast is for you. Listen to Create like the Greats wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. Dan has shared how we miss the unexpected, like a gorilla in a video. But this illusion has come with some interesting consequences.
- [16:31]
Dan Simons
If I ran the gorilla study, I showed it to you, you'd never seen it before. I don't ask you about a gorilla and you missed the gorilla and I don't ask you about it. You'd continue going through life assuming that, of course, you would see a gorilla in a video. You continue to go through life assuming that something important will grab my attention because you're aware of those cases. You notice if you go to movies a lot and you spot errors in them, you might assume that you always notice errors because you're only aware of the errors you spotted. You don't know about the hundreds you've missed. So our intuitions are built up from these experiences of these positive events. But we don't think about what we're missing. And that's a really potent thing. It actually leads into what we talk about. For deception, our habit of focus. We tend to focus on the information we have and not to think much about the information we don't have. So our intuitions are built up from this experience that we have of what's right in front of us, not from the information that's lacking.
- [17:27]
Phil Agnew
We miss more than we'd expect. And this affects not only our present day experiences, but also our memories. Dan shares that our memories are just as fallible as illusions in his book. An Australian psychologist, Stephanie Sharman and her colleagues conducted an experiment highlighting our lacklustre memory. The researchers interviewed adults and asked them to make donations about which life sustaining treatment they would want if they were seriously ill. Decisions like would you want to be fed artificially if necessary or would you want CPR performed? So they asked people those questions and took down what they said. Then 12 months later, they interviewed the same people using the same questions. Now here's what's interesting. 23% of the decisions had changed between the initial interview and the follow up. Meaning that people who said during the first interview that they wanted life extending treatment said during the second interview that they didn't want that treatment. Now it's not a surprise that people changed their minds. That should happen. That's common. But what is surprising is that 75% of the people who changed their minds were unaware that they had done so. They thought the decision they reported in the second interview was the same as the one they reported in the first interview. Their memory was wrong, but they were convinced it was not. This is what Dan calls the illusion of memory. He writes about how our memory alters after unexpected events like an assassination. Amid the national grief after President Kennedy's assassination, a poll showed that 66% of people claimed they had voted for him. In reality, JFK only received just above 50% of the vote. 16% of the respondents altered their memory to match their current beliefs. There are more examples like on the morning of January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. The very next morning, psychologists Ulrich Neisser and Nicole Harsh asked a class of Emory University undergraduates to write a description of how they heard about the explosion and then to answer a set of detailed questions about the disaster. Two and a half years later, Neisse and Harsh asked the same students to complete a similar questionnaire about the Challenger explosion. The students memories of the events had changed dramatically over the time. One remembered somebody shouting the news at them down a hallway, but that never happened. Another remembered being called by a friend in Switzerland to be told about the explosion, but that memory was totally imagined as well. Neisser and Harsh showed the subjects their own handwritten answers to the questionnaire from the day after the Challenger explosion. Many were shocked at the discrepancy between their original reports and their memories of what had happened. Dan writes that when confronted with their original reports, rather than suddenly realising that they had misremembered, many often persisted in believing their current memory rather than the real event. Now I'm a marketer and I can't help but think about the implications all of this has for marketing. We marketers believe that sticking up a billboard in a busy tube station will mean that thousands of people who walk past will notice it. But as Joshua Bell showed, even extremely unexpected events like a prolific musician won't be enough to capture the attention of busy commuters. I've perhaps naively shared on this podcast before that a distinctive ad will capture attention, but more often than not, even unexpected things like a gorilla staring at you and thumping its chest will avoid our attention. So I wondered how many ads do the typical commuters remember? What ads are able to break through our heads and get remembered? And why? Well, to find out, I took a look at the studies. Now a quick Google search brings up a Morning Brew report which backs up Dan's findings. The paper by provoke insights asked 1,500Americans how many ads they remembered seeing over the past 24 hours. It turns out that most Americans say they only remembered between 1 and 10% of the ads they'd seen in the past 24 hours. Another 20% said they remembered between 11 and 25%, and 16% said they remembered up to 50% of the ads they had seen. But there's a real problem with this study. This is self reported recall. The researchers weren't able to actually check how many of these Americans really remembered the ads. It wasn't a randomised controlled trial and because of that I think these results are quite meaningless. Fortunately, other scientists, Osborne and Coleman conducted a far more reliable study on outdoor advertising. For their study, the Researchers spoke to 517 adults in a mid sized southeastern US city who drove along a one mile stretch of the city's main interstate at least once a week. The researchers knew when the drivers took this drive and could cross reference their recall with the actual ads on the main interstate. So this is more reliable. Let's see what the results are. Well, when prompted by the name of the advertiser, 66 respondents recalled the Tri Vision board. The Tri Vision board is one billboard with three rotating sides, all for one advertiser. Two other billboards received 60% or Greater Aided recalls. Four more boards were remembered by 50% of the respondents and another four boards were recalled by more than 40%. All of the boards were recorded by at least some respondents with the lowest rate of aided recall at 7% for a deer management company and 6% for a firm called Bits Computers. The best billboards were these tri vision ones with multiple messages for one advertiser. According to the researcher, this worked best because of the repeat exposure, because the repeat exposure gave the message time to sink in. The worst billboards were actually smart billboards TV billboards with just 6% aided recall. The researchers write that this low recall is due to the low repetition. The smart boards rotated multiple advertisers at eight second intervals, meaning each advertiser was only briefly viewed. And it's the exposure that really seems critical to increasing recall. Further analysis by Osborne and Coleman found that there was a significant difference in aided recall based on the length of the campaign with longer campaigns. Campaigns that had been running for a lot longer had a much greater recall. And this finding compounds because once drivers were aware of a product or service, they were significantly more likely to remember it. It's repeat exposure that makes an ad memorable. If you watch the gorilla video more than once, you'll almost certainly see the gorilla. If you listen to Polly Dalton's audio version twice, you'll definitely hear the I am a gorilla Man. It's multiple exposure that causes recall Causes Memory If Joshua Bell performed at the L'Enfant Plaza subway stop in Washington D.C. every single week, the performance would eventually draw in massive crowds. And yet many marketers forget this. We believe, naively, that people notice the unexpected, just like the 75% of Americans who believe they would spot an unexpected event. We believe American commuters will spot one distinctive ad, but they don't. To be remembered correctly, you need multiple exposures. There is no silver bullet when it comes to marketing. It's a long, expensive slog that requires an extraordinary amount of visibility. We can dream of viral videos and effective click funnels, but that fallacy goes against all evidence. Dan Simons, Joshua Bell and Commander Waddle reveal the truth. Whether it's syllables, adverts or gorillas, we miss the unexpected. Alright folks, that is it for this week's episode of Nudge. A massive thank you to Dan Simons for coming on. His book Invisible Gorilla is a fantastic read, as is his later book, Nobody's Fall. I've left links to both of those books in this week's show. Notes, please do go and check them out. You can get in touch with Dan and learn more about him at his website. Just go to www.dansimons.com. that's www.dansimons.Com. this episode took me a couple of months to put together. So if you enjoyed it, I would greatly appreciate it if you left a review wherever you listen. A review on Apple or Spotify, it really, really does help me out. It helps the show get noticed. And, well, it just tells me that you enjoy listening, which is really nice for me to read. So if you haven a review, please do consider leaving one. Okay? That is all from me. Thank you again for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge, Cheers.