Grove English Communication Ⅲ
LESSON 19
Why Can’t You See It?
Two researchers at Harvard, Chris Chabris and Dan Simons, published a fantastic experiment in 1999 under the title “Gorillas in Our Midst.” The study has since become one of the most widely known and discussed studies in psychology. Psychologists call it the “illusion of attention,” which occurs when people believe that they see everything in a scene with their own eyes.
Before starting their experiment, Chris and Dan made a short film of two teams of people moving around and passing basketballs, with several students as actors. One team wore white shirts, and the other wore black. After that, they recruited volunteers for their experiment on the campus. The volunteers were asked to watch the film and count the number of passes made only by players wearing white while ignoring any passes by the players wearing black. The video lasted less than a minute.
Immediately after the video ended, the researchers asked the subjects to report how many passes they had counted. In reality, it didn’t matter whether their answers were correct or not. The pass-counting task was intended to keep people engaged in doing something that demanded attention to the action on the screen. They were actually testing something else. Halfway through the video, a student wearing a full-bodied gorilla suit walked into the scene, stopped in the middle of the players, faced the camera, beat its chest, and then walked off, spending about nine seconds on the screen. After the researchers asked about the passes, they asked the more important questions:
Did you notice anything unusual while you were doing the counting task?
—No.
Did you notice anything or anyone other than the players?
—No.
Did you notice a gorilla?
—A what?
Amazingly, roughly half of the subjects in the study did not notice the gorilla! Since then, the experiment has been repeated many times, under different conditions and in many other countries, but the results are always the same: About half the people fail to see the gorilla. How could people not see a gorilla walk directly in front of them, turn to face them, beat its chest, and walk away? What made the gorilla invisible? The subjects were concentrating so hard on counting passes that they didn’t notice the gorilla right in front of them.
The fact that people miss things is important, but what impressed the researchers even more was the surprise people showed when they realized what they had missed. When they watched the video again, this time without counting passes, they all saw the gorilla easily, and they were shocked.
The gorilla study, the researchers say, illustrates that we experience far less of our visual world than we think we do. It’s true that we vividly experience some aspects of our world, particularly those that are the focus of our attention. But this rich experience inevitably leads to the incorrect belief that we process all of the information around us. We assume that visually distinctive or unusual objects will draw our attention, but in reality, they often go completely unnoticed. What the invisible gorilla shows us may not just be limited to visual attention, but apply equally well to all of our senses and even to broader patterns in the world around us. Why do we see some things while missing others? It’s an interesting question to consider.