The Invisible Gorilla

The Invisible Gorilla, a social experiment by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, is considered to be one of the best studies of human psychology in the world.

This fascinating study highlighted two amazing insights about our mind:

a. We can be blind to the obvious

b. We are also blind to our blindness

Chabris and Simons setupa small experiment where respondents have to see a video about a bunch of people passing basketball internally. There are two team at play here – one team wearing white t-shirt and another one wearing black. In the short video, both the teams are shown passing the basketball within their team. The viewer of the team are instructed to count the number of passes made by the team wearing white t-shirt. Halfway through the video, a person wearing black gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps chest and moves on. The gorilla is in the frame for a full 9 seconds.

The findings are super surprising and impossible to guess.

a. More than half of the viewers did not notice the black gorilla at all!

b. Most users did get the number of passes right

c. Post the experiment, the people who missed the gorilla refused to believe that there was a one in the video.

Here is a link to this famous video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

The reasons of why people missed the gorilla is quite intuitive but not very obvious and that is the beauty of this study. When viewers are told to count the passes made by the white team, their mind single handedly focuses the attention on this single task. The attention requirement is such that most viewers completely fail to spot the gorilla.

Chabris and Simons published a book with the same title and explores in depth about how our minds operate and intuition can deceive us. Here is the link for this book: https://www.amazon.in/Invisible-Gorilla-Christopher-Chabris/dp/000731731X/ref=sr_1_1