Dr. Christopher Chabris gives the 2018 Convocation Day lecture
Have you ever surfed the web while listening to your professor in class, or answered a text message while behind the wheel?
Common sense tells us that multitasking is real, even preferable; efficient people, we reason, should be able to do two things at once. We build our environments based on this assumption, such as the multiple computer terminals of a stock trading floor, or the many devices surrounding an operating table.
One problem: Common sense is utterly wrong, as the many Internet videos of people walking while texting can show you – and the inevitable ignominious end in a fountain, body of water or open manhole. Less humorous are the police reports of serious and even fatal accidents of drivers who thought they could text and drive at the same time.
“We don’t have enough mental resources to do multiple tasks at once, and when we do, we perform worse than if we do one task at a time,” explained Dr. Christopher Chabris, the 2018 Convocation Day keynote speaker.
The invisible gorilla
Professor Gian Roma and Dr. Christopher Chabris during the Convocation Day question and answer session
A cognitive psychologist and researcher, Chabris is the co-author of the best-selling book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.
He began his lecture with the tale of two Boston police officers, Michael Cox and Kenny Conley, who were involved in a pursuit of suspects who fled a stolen car and scaled a fence. Cox, a plain-clothes officer and an African-American, was mistaken for one of the perpetrators by his fellow officers, who severely beat him and then fled the scene once they realized what they had done.
Conley, a uniformed officer, responded at the same time, pursuing the actual suspect over a fence and making the arrest. Accused of covering up the assault, Conley said he never saw his fellow officers beating Cox. A jury didn’t believe him and Conley was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice, fired from the force and sentence to 34 months in prison.
The Boston case is an example of “inattentional blindness.” Paying attention closely to one thing, we often fail to notice others – even when they are obvious or we’re looking right at them, Chabris explained.
One popular experiment asks participants to watch a video of people bouncing and passing basketballs, asking them to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Invariably, they end up missing the gorilla walking behind them and thumping its chest on the screen – the invisible gorilla of Chabris’ book.
And it’s not just a product of today’s technology-inundated environment, or solely an American problem. People in South Korea missed the gorilla, as did Hadza hunter-gatherers in Africa.
“Inattentional blindness is part of the way all human minds work,” Chabris explained. “Attention is a limited, zero-sum resource.”
Our expectations also play a major role in what we see – and what we don’t, in the case of the gorilla. Another factor is “change blindness” – our inability to recognize changes in our visual field when we are not paying attention.
Playing into both concepts is also the “illusion of attention,” the belief that we pay attention to and notice more than we actually do, and the “illusion of memory,” the mistaken belief that our memories are more complete, objective and biased than they actually are.
“When we recall a memory, we combine different elements that go together into a coherent story,” he explained.
Sometimes, however, those stories are obviously wrong – such as President Donald Trump’s “memory” of thousands of people in Jersey City cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11, or Hillary Clinton on the 2008 campaign trail recounting a visit to Bosnia in a hail of bullets when she was First Lady. (Neither happened, as evidenced by news reports of the respective days’ events.)
In short, memories reconstruct what we expect to have seen or experienced, and are subject to distortion whenever we recall them and potentially mix them with new influences. Memories from traumatic events – considered by many to be inalterable – are not immune to this.
Taken as a whole, inattentional blindness, change blindness and the illusions of memory and attention are good explanations of why eyewitness testimony can be wrong – such as in the case of Officer Conley.
SUNY Broome President Kevin E. Drumm welcomes Dr. Christopher Chabris during Convocation Day
More illusions
Other types of illusion also affect our outlook. “The illusion of competence” makes us more likely to overestimate our abilities – and the less capable we are, the less we are aware of it. In a discussion following the main lecture, Chabris described his diagnosis of Lyme Disease during graduate school, in which he saw a physician consult reference books to confirm whether the rash met the parameters of Lyme.
It did, as it happens. Many people, however, would view such a physician more negatively than one who confidently diagnoses a problem without double-checking – even though the former might be doing the job more effectively.
There is also “illusory correlation,” when you believe that two things go together without evidence. This concept underlies such popular books as The Secret, which claims that we manifest our thoughts, a repackaging of the power of positive thinking. To remedy this illusion, Chabris suggests using the fourfold table: looking at not only when two phenomena correlate, but all the times they don’t.
Exonerating Officer Conley
Student Orion Barber welcomes the campus community to Convocation Day
While he was teaching at Union College, Chabris had his students put inattentional blindness to the test by conducting an experiment. The students were asked to jog 30 feet behind another runner, counting how many times she touched her head. Along the way, another group of students would be engaged in a brawl behind a fraternity house.
The experiment was designed to mimic as much as possible the conditions of the Conley case. Could the officer have missed the beating that occurred right in front of him?
The answer was yes. During nighttime, which is when the Conley incident occurred, only about a third saw the fight. In broad daylight, that number rose to 40 percent. No one stopped to intervene.
Officer Conley did, in fact, appeal and was granted a new trial nine years later after it turned out that one of the eyewitnesses was using hypnotically enhanced memory and didn’t disclose that to the jury. He was ultimately exonerated and returned to the Boston police force as a rookie, working his way up to detective and then sergeant. Michael Cox remained on the force as well, working his way up to deputy Superintendent.
Knowing such concepts as inattentional and change blindness, the illusions of confidence, memory and attention, and illusory correlation can help people become better decision-makers, Chabris said. While we cannot eliminate these tricks of the mind, we can learn to account for them.
“The first step in making better decisions is to keep in mind the limitations of how the human mind works,” he said. “It’s very counter-intuitive to think that something can be right in front of you, you set your eyes on it and you don’t see it,” he added during the question and answer session.
Student Elijah Summers performs during Convocation Day
Other Convocation Day events
Dr. Chabris’ discussion provided a springboard for multiple Convocation Day events. Dr. Steve Call led a discussion of “Intuition, Strategy and Warfare: A Deadly Mix,” while Criminal Justice Professor Darin Schmidt examined how the concepts Chabris presented relate to criminal trials. Nursing Professors Denisa Talovic and Julie Richards were joined by first-year Nursing students in the discussion of medical errors, while Professor Kennie Leet discussed the illusion of confidence in relation to the case of Kate Mastrosova, who died while hiking in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.
Professor Doug Garnar and student Orion Barber led a “public voice” style conversation on “Democracy: The Great Illusion?” while Professors Tim Skinner and Ed Evans held a film screening of “Nova – Memory Hackers.”
Additionally, student singer-songwriter Elijah Summers delighted the audience during two performances of his music, and student researchers shared their work during a poster session. The Hospitality Club provided lunchtime fare, and the campus community had the opportunity to learn about a variety of different groups and identities during the annual “Ask!” event.
