6 questions with...Chris Chabris
PopTech’s series, 6 questions with… gives us a chance to get into the heads of social innovators, technologists, artists, designers, and scientists to see what makes them tick.
You’ve likely seen the ‘gorilla experiment’ that continues to make the rounds on the Internet. While watching the video, you’re instructed to keep a silent count of the passes made by the people wearing white shirts. This viral video, which was co-created by Chris Chabris (PopTech 2010) and Dan Simons, was then followed by the book they co-wrote The Invisible Gorilla: and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. The book explains six “everyday illusions,” which are intuitive but mistaken beliefs that we all hold about how our minds work. It shows how these illusions function, how we can spot and avoid them in our lives, and how relying on our intuition is a perilous decision-making strategy in law, medicine, business, and politics.
The paperback version of The Invisible Gorilla just arrived on bookstands this week so we thought we’d check in with Chabris to see what he’s up to these days.
If I'd been a fly on the wall of your office, what would I have seen you doing yesterday?
Yesterday I had lunch with two doctors who are interested in medical decision making. We spoke about how intuition may be overrated in clinical medicine, about ways physicians and other health professionals might compensate for the inherent limitations of our mental equipment, and about why people make so many mistakes. Later I talked to three economists I collaborate with; we are trying to find genes related to how people make decisions, and the results have been a bit disappointing to date. I am struck by how interdisciplinary science, perhaps especially social science, has become in recent years. Psychologists didn't talk to so many doctors, economists, and people from other specialties 20, or even 10 years ago.
What’s the mark you’re hoping to leave on the world? Why is your work with The Invisible Gorilla - and your corresponding research - relevant at this point in time?
I don't have a master plan or goal to leave a specific mark. I doubt I'm smart enough, or have enough foresight, for that sort of thing. But I do think that every time someone makes a better decision, everyone gains, at least a tiny bit. Improving how we think is important now because the world is more complex than it ever has been. There are more people, more institutions, more disciplines, and more interlocking relationships among them all than ever before. Gaining a clearer understanding of how our own minds really work -- their true strengths and limitations -- can help us greatly in navigating this complexity, because our minds are adapted to an earlier, simpler cognitive environment than the one we find ourselves in now.
What do you wish you had known when you began working on this project and the corresponding research?
Dan Simons and I started this research with a fairly simple experiment involving a video of some people passing basketballs around. The idea was to see what making people focus their attention on counting the passes while watching the video would do to their awareness of other things taking place in the video. To our surprise, it had a big effect. I wish I had known then how large an impact this experiment would have -- it won us an Ig Nobel prize, was discussed by characters on C.S.I., and even formed the premise for a stage play. Had we known, Dan and I might have written "The Invisible Gorilla" five years earlier than we did!
What was the pathway that brought you to this work?
Serendipity! When I was studying cognitive psychology in graduate school, during the year my advisor was on sabbatical, Dan Simons arrived as a new professor with an office down the hall from mine. We had similar interests, and I had known his brother a little bit, so we started working together. It was Dan's idea to run the invisible gorilla experiment as a group project on visual attention in a class that we were teaching together -- but again, it was pure luck that a gorilla suit was involved. We "borrowed" it from the lab of another faculty member who used it in infant temperament studies. Things would have been different if he had a rabbit suit or a two-person horse costume.
Who or what has most influenced your life and work?
This question is hard to answer. There are uncountably many circumstances that lead people to where they wind up. I can trace one particular chain that seems salient to me right now: My father introduced me to the game of chess in 1972 when Bobby Fischer was playing Boris Spassky for the world championship. I was 5. Eventually I became a chess master. In college I got interested in artificial intelligence (AI), one of whose classic problems was programming computers to play grandmaster-level chess. From AI I wandered into cognitive psychology, mostly because my friend Jack Chen was raving about a course he had taken at Harvard with Steve Kosslyn, the professor who eventually became my mentor. The example of rigorous scientific thinking that Steve set, and his willingness to let me pursue my own ideas, were invaluable. And then he left for Paris right when Dan Simons arrived, and I got to broaden my interests even further.
What book is on your nightstand right now?
In my case, the question is what BOOKS have piled up there! Right now I am reading Paul Offit's Deadly Choices, about the movement against vaccines. Anti-vaccine sentiments illustrate a crucial fact about how we think: When we encounter or hear about a case where a child developed autism right after being vaccinated, our intuitive tendency is to assume that the vaccine caused the illness. I'll admit to feeling a twinge of worry when my son was getting his first shots. Large-scale studies have repeatedly found no statistical association between vaccination and autism, so there can't possibly be a causal relationship. But our minds weren't build to reason with abstract statistics and large numbers. They were built to generalize from examples, and the result is often an illusory -- and dangerous -- sense that we understand cause and effect when all we really understand is a vivid, emotional story.
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BONUS: If you purchase the paperback before June 11 and visit the Invisible Gorilla website, you can select a charity to which the authors will donate $5. Additionally, the authors partnered with a costume company to give away one gorilla costume to a paperback buyer who registers, also through June 11.
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