On one hand, consider the famous “Invisible Gorilla experiment,” done by psychologists Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons and made famous by their book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive us. In the experiment, subjects viewed a 30 second clip of two teams of four, one dressed in white and the other in black, passing around basketballs. The task was simple: count how many passes the white team makes. Most people got it correct – 34 passes. However, while the two teams are passing basketballs to each other, a student dressed in a full gorilla suit walks into the middle of the scene, stops, faces the camera, thumps his chest a few times, and walks off. When subjects were asked if they noticed anything unusual, roughly half said nothing of the gorilla. Chabris and Simons rightly conclude that “we experience far less of our visual world than we think we do.”
On the other hand, there is the 1993 experiment by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, as highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which participants were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a professor based off a few silent two-second video clips. Ambady and Rosenthal compared the ratings of the participants with those of students who had been enrolled with the same professor in a semester long class and found that the ratings of the participants were statistically consistent with the ratings of the students; that is, a silent two-second video clip was all the participants needed in order to accurately judge the effectiveness of a professor. As Ambady and Rosenthal conclude, “our consensual intuitive judgments might be unexpectedly accurate.”
So do my intuitions “deceive me?” Or are they “unexpectedly accurate?”
Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?
- More Here on the most important debate of this century. Our instincts have been to honed perceptually using that rehearsal loop. My favorite quote from Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error sums it up beautifully ...
"In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about)."
- Phillip Johnson-Laird
On the other hand, there is the 1993 experiment by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, as highlighted by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which participants were asked to evaluate the effectiveness of a professor based off a few silent two-second video clips. Ambady and Rosenthal compared the ratings of the participants with those of students who had been enrolled with the same professor in a semester long class and found that the ratings of the participants were statistically consistent with the ratings of the students; that is, a silent two-second video clip was all the participants needed in order to accurately judge the effectiveness of a professor. As Ambady and Rosenthal conclude, “our consensual intuitive judgments might be unexpectedly accurate.”
So do my intuitions “deceive me?” Or are they “unexpectedly accurate?”
Second, there is a question about judgment and decision-making: Should I go with my gut? Or think things through?
- More Here on the most important debate of this century. Our instincts have been to honed perceptually using that rehearsal loop. My favorite quote from Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error sums it up beautifully ...
"In order to decide, judge; in order to judge, reason; in order to reason, decide (what to reason about)."
- Phillip Johnson-Laird
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