Dialogic Magazine

By: Barbara Yuki Schwartz On: June 21, 2011

Think you’ve got a good attention span? Take this little test and see. Watch the video below and count how many times the basketball players wearing white pass the basketball between them. The answer will be posted below the video — don’t look!

If you watched the video all the way through, then you know the answer — but did you notice the gorilla? Most people don’t.

This test was invented about 10 years ago by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, who use it to show how our brains trick us into thinking that we’re paying more attention than we really are. Chabris and Simons have a new book out, The Invisible Gorilla, that explains how our attention span can be very selective — we only notice what we’re paying attention to. And there’s a lot we’re not paying attention to. Anecdotal information and eye-witness testimony may have to be taken with a very big grain of salt.

NPR recently followed up with Chabris and his latest experiment, in which he strapped a video camera to volunteers and told them to chase a jogger wearing a brightly colored shirt down a jogging path. So intent were the volunteers on giving chase, that they completely missed the people who were beating a man on the side of the path. The beating was staged for the experiment; the implications of the narrowed focus, however, have real-world roots. According to NPR, Chabris came up with the experiment after reading about the real-life case of Boston police officer Kenneth Conley, who had been convicted of lying in the beating of Michael Cox, an undercover police officer, purportedly by other police officers who had mistaken Cox for a suspect whom they were pursuing. During the investigation, Conley said he did not see the beating, even though he ran right by it.

Chabris read about the case and realized that not noticing a gorilla walking through a video on a computer screen was different than a real-world situation in which emotions and distractions of the outdoors might influence one’s attention span. So he had volunteers run after a jogger and see how many times the jogger touched his hat. The results:

“The question was whether the students would see the fight, and under the conditions — nighttime — that most closely resembled Conley’s experience. The numbers were shockingly low.

“‘Only about a third of the subjects reported seeing the fight that we had staged,’ says Chabris.

“And broad daylight didn’t cure the problem. In the light of day 40 percent still didn’t notice the student being beaten.”

Chabris and Simons believe that the results of this experiment can have an influence on other cases like Conley’s, and on people in general as well. After all, they say, the test shows that people aren’t really absorbing as much information as they think they are. Or they might be mistaken about the details of a story that might have life-or-death consequences.

Chabris and Simons’ experiment brings to mind questions about how we know what we know. How sure are we about the details of our lives? Or in the case of social causes — such as hunger, climate change, poverty, human rights — can we get people to notice how these issues are affecting them if the folks have already decided to direct their attention span elsewhere?

I remember, a long time ago, talking with a co-worker about poverty in my town. He told me that there couldn’t possibly be poor people in our town, because would have noticed them. Which was kind of amazing, since we lived in a county that had a high number of citizens living below the poverty line, and many different organizations up and running across our town that were directed at helping those folks receive food, medical services and other vital necessities. But he was adamant — poverty didn’t exist where we lived. And I wonder now if it’s just that he had his attention focused on other things deemed so important that his brain was incapable of seeing them.

I don’t know that there’s an answer to this, how to get people to pay attention or widen their attention spans. Perhaps it’s enough just to question our certainty about how we know what we know.

Tags: psychology, society and culture

Barbara Yuki Schwartz

Barbara Yuki Schwartz is the editorial director for The Xenia Institute and the online editor for Dialogic Magazine, The Xenia Institute’s Web publication. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the theology, ethics and history program at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. At her blog at Dialogic Magazine, Barbara blogs primarily about race and racism, sexuality, religion, justice and globalization.