This is the first of a three book reviews, of books on the topic of human fallibility. These three books were recommended to me by my friend, Mi Ae Lipe, who is a traffic safely advocate and expert. The first book, and the subject of this review, is The Invisible Gorilla. The next will be Why We Make Mistakes. The final book review will be on Careful.
The Invisible Gorilla
The Invisible Gorilla, subtitled How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is about the everyday illusions we all suffer from. The book is about the illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, cause, and potential. The title of the book refers to a now famous experiment the authors ran at Harvard University. Most of you will be aware of this experiment, where the viewer is asked to count the number of passes the players make during a basketball practice. In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks onto the basketball court. When watched, only half of viewers see the gorilla.
The Illusion of Attention
The focus of this part of the book is the lack of accurate recall from the witnesses of crimes, accidents, or other traumatic events. There is a section dealing with cell phones when driving. The hands-free phones are not the answer. Calls with hands-free are just as bad as holding the phone. It is the mental distraction that is the problem. We lack the positive evidence for our lack of attention. We are aware of the unexpected objects we notice but not the ones we miss. This gives us the illusion of attention.
The Illusion of Memory
With traumatic events, such as the 9/11 attacks, most people remember where they were when they heard about the attacks plus a lot of specific details. They remember much more about the event than everyday events. The problem is, our memories are unreliable and with the passage of time, get worse. Even in life or death situations, we do not remember accurately. Our memories simply are not reliable. When these things are tested in a clinical setting, our memories just aren’t as good as we think.
The Illusion of Confidence
We tend to believe people who are confident, which turns out to be misplaced. Doctors who are more confident are not better doctors. The most important example is eyewitnesses. We tend to believe confident eyewitnesses. It turns out the confident eyewitnesses are right about 70% of the time. That makes them wrong 30% of the time. This is the biggest reason for people being convicted for crimes that they did not commit, and their cases being overturned based on DNA evidence.
The Illusion of Knowledge
The illusion of knowledge, makes us think we know how common objects work when we really don’t.
When people are asked to draw a bicycle, most people can’t get the mechanics correct. They think they know how a bicycle works, but they don’t. They know how to operate a bicycle. This is even more true with complex systems. An example is the Big Dig in Boston. No one really understood the complexity of the project.
Another example of this is stock picking techniques. Projections are based on past data patterns (think Black Scholes), they are almost guaranteed to go wrong once conditions change. This is a statistical foible known as “overfitting.”
The Illusion of Cause
The text gets into correlation versus causation and how people are often confused. The best example is the strong correlation between ice cream consumption and drowning deaths. There is no causation, of course. Both ice cream consumption and drowning deaths are caused by summer weather.
An example in this chapter is the tendency of success books to favor examples that support their position. The authors give examples such as In Search of Excellence, Good to Great and The Tipping Point. In the first two examples, they track successful companies and trace what they did. They should have tracked other companies that did the same things and then weren’t successful. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the buzz around Hush Puppies shoes leading to sales. But he never tracks other companies that had buzz that never led to increased sales. All the examples are chosen to support the author’s point.
The last part of this section is on The Vaccination Hypothesis. Autism is typically diagnosed between ages two and five. Prior to age three, many children are nonverbal. After age two and before starting school is when normal childhood development and abnormal development is observed. It is this same period that most children get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Most clear-cut symptoms of autism are much more pronounced after the MMR vaccination is given. This association, including pattern, correlation, and chronology, have caused people to infer a causal relationship.
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, a prominent London physician, announced the discovery of a link between autism and MMR vaccine in 1998 in The Lancet. Clinical trials can’t be run to prove a causal relationship because of ethical concerns. However, extensive epidemiological evidence has completely debunked Dr. Wakefield’s assertions.
The problem with the anti-vaxxers is that there are many people who can’t be vaccinated, such as those on chemotherapy, or a bone marrow recipient, or someone taking steroids for asthma. These people, when they come in contact with measles, will often die.
The book was written in 2009, well before the current pandemic, but the topic is more relevant now than when written.
The Illusion of Potential
The Illusion of Potential leads us to think there are vast untapped reservoirs of potential in our brains. One example is the belief that listening to Mozart will make us more intelligent; it doesn’t. People buy Baby Einstein for their children thinking it will unlock their potential. It does nothing.
When surveyed, 72% of people believe that we use only ten percent of our brain capacity. We’ve all heard this. It is complete nonsense, but it sells self-help books.
As our population ages, many companies have offered products to improve memory. The idea is that the brain is like a muscle and needs to be exercised. By playing games or using apps, the story goes, mental function is improved and memory with it. It turns out to be untrue. The one thing that does improve brain function turns out to be physical exercise. Even mild exercise, such as walking, will improve brain function.
Everyday Illusions
Everyday illusions have a common characteristic: They all make us think that our mental abilities and capacities are greater than they actually are. Everyday illusions are so woven into our habits of mind that we don’t even realize that they undergird all of the “common sense” that leads to us accepting things as true we shouldn’t.
When you think about the world with an awareness of everyday illusions, you won’t be as sure of yourself as you used to be, but you will have new insights into how your mind works.
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