Posts Tagged ‘metacognition’

The Monkey Business Illusion

Monday, August 2nd, 2010


The video below tests your perceptual acuity. Listen carefully to the directions and then watch the video. (Note: if you think you’ve seen this video, you probably have not. It is a May 2010 sequel to the widely viewed 1999 selective attention test video that many of you probably have seen.)




How did you do? Miss anything? If you did, you are in good company. I, for one, counted the number of passes correctly but failed to see the gorilla in the 1999 version. And in this new version I missed the player in black dropping out. On a positive note: I did notice the color change!

Cognitive scientist Daniel Simons showed the video to 76 University of Illinois students. As reported in i-PERCEPTION, for those who had not seen the 1999 version, only 56% noticed the gorilla (23 out of 41). Just “11% of subjects noticed the curtain change, and 16% noticed the change to the number of players on the black team. Only 1 participant noticed both the curtain and the player change.”

Simons defines the phenomenon as inattentional blindness, “the failure to notice unusual and salient events in their visual world when attention is otherwise engaged and the events are unexpected.” In a Seed Magazine interview, he discusses the implications to our everyday life:

In inattentional blindness you’re not seeing something that’s right there because your attention is engaged. The most obvious practical application of that is driving. We intuitively think that if something important happens right in front of us, we will see it…Dan Levin has done studies where he just asked people, would you notice if something like this happens? He shows people the video, gives them the instructions, points out the gorilla, and then asks them “how likely would you be to notice the gorilla if you were doing this task and counting the passes?” Ninety percent of people say they’d notice. Regardless of how you ask that question, you get high confidence, and a high percentage saying “yeah, of course I’d notice that.”

That’s the intuition that’s interesting, and that’s the one that’s dangerous. If we were completely aware of these limits on attention, we wouldn’t do things like talking on cell phone while driving: We would know that it would make us just that much less likely to notice something. But we don’t have that insight into our own awareness. It’s only in that rare case where you actually have an accident that you become aware that you’ve missed something.

As Simon’s studies have demonstrated, we are all prone to innattentional blindness. What impact does it have on our problem solving? What salient events in our visual field are we missing, even though we are confident we are not? How often do we see what we are looking for and not what is there?

Post script

Science News reports on April 25, 2011 that a new study purports that multitaskers are better at spotting “invisible” Gorillas.


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Lebron’s Decision-making Fallacy

Friday, July 9th, 2010


I suppose that if you are regularly referred to as the “Chosen One” and the “Second Coming,” it’s understandable that you would anoint yourself the “King.” And then why not have an appropriately regal coronation on ESPN? Certainly, your subjects — prostrated and intoxicated by awe and wonder — will praise the wisdom of your decision-making.

Like Homer’s ancient heroes, Lebron James is driven by a deep desire to defeat mortality and to live perpetually as the greatest and most admired basketball player ever. And he was likely traveling that path, until his certainty bias washed out the road.

Outside of Miami, fan and media response to his narcissistic self-annointing has been nearly universally scathing. Just a few examples:

How did James miscalculate so egregiously? He was a victim of certainty bias.

Robert Burton, author of On Being Certain, has exposed the hazards of “believing you are right even when you’re not.” His central premise: “Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ‘knowing what we know’ are sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason.”

In an October 2008 article in Scientific American entitled The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw, Burton discusses how to avoid its pitfalls: “I don’t believe that we can avoid certainty bias, but we can mitigate its effect by becoming aware of how our mind assesses itself…I’ve taken strong exception to the popular notion that we can rely upon hunches and gut feelings as though they reflect the accuracy of a thought.

“My hope is the converse; we need to recognize that the feelings of certainty and conviction are involuntary mental sensations, not logical conclusions. Intuitions, gut feelings and hunches are neither right nor wrong but tentative ideas that must then be submitted to empirical testing. If such testing isn’t possible (such as in deciding whether or not to pull out of Iraq), then we must accept that any absolute stance is merely a personal vision, not a statement of fact.”

No one reading this blog has been deified. But like Lebron James, we are all susceptible to certainty bias. Good thinking requires that we be aware of and avoid its dangers. As Burton concludes: “Only in the absence of certainty can we have open-mindedness, mental flexibility and willingness to contemplate alternative ideas.”


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The Multitasking Illusion

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Most of us believe that multitasking increases our productivity. That belief turns out to be an illusion.

The New York Times reports that “heavy multitaskers” have more “trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information” than non-multitaskers. And they “experience more stress.”

Stanford researcher Eyal Ophir was studying whether or not our brains have evolved to make us “efficient and effective multitaskers.” Ophir divided study subjects into two groups: those who are heavy multitaskers and those who are not.

In one test, subjects were briefly shown an image of red rectangles and blue rectangles and asked whether any of the red rectangles had moved. In another test, subjects were briefly shown a number and a letter and then asked to say whether the number was odd or even, or whether the letter was a vowel or a consonant.

The findings? Multitaskers scored significantly more poorly on each test than non-multitaskers, because

  • They had more trouble ignoring the “irrelevant information” (i.e., filtering out the blue from the red triangles).
  • They took longer “switching between tasks” (i.e., focusing on the number or letter as instructed).

You can take the two tests yourself:

It turns out that mutltitasking has other deleterious effects. The Times article also reports that a University of California, Irvine, study found that “people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus.”

The implications to your personal productivity are clear. Not only is multitasking inefficient, it is unhealthy. When addressing an important task that requires your full intellectual focus and engagement, eliminate distractions. Monotask. Shut down your e-mail client. Close your web browser. Turn your smart phone to silent. Log out of Facebook, Skype and G-Chat. Switch off the Twitter feed. Mute Pandora. Direct the full focus of your mental energies solely to the task at hand.

While writing this blog post, I followed all those prescriptions…honest…well…mostly!

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Putting on the Blinders of Partisan Bias

Monday, May 24th, 2010


Lately, I have noticed a striking phenomenon. My republican friends regularly complain about the nation’s budget deficit. My democratic friends suddenly are not complaining about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Why do I find this striking? Well, just a short time ago when George W. Bush was president, my republican friends did not complain about the nation’s budget deficit, despite the fact that Mr. Bush ran up $4 trillion in debt. Similarly, before Barack Obama‘s election, my democratic friends couldn’t stop complaining about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Hold on,” you might say, “things have changed.” Well, yes, the deficit has continued to grow and, yes, our involvement in Iraq has diminished. However, much of the current deficit accumulated under President Bush and, while our troops have begun to withdraw from Iraq, there has been continued escalation of their involvement in Afghanistan.

I like my republican and democratic friends. I think they are reasonable people. So what is going on here?

In How We Decide, Jonathan Lehrer describes how partisan bias prevents sound thinking, reasoning and decision-making. Lehrer highlights Emory University professor Drew Westen‘s study of voters in the 2004 election. Weston showed study subjects statements made by candidates George Bush and John Kerry that were clearly self-contradictory. Subjects were then asked to rate the level of contradiction. As you might expect, voters ratings were “largely determined by their partisan allegiances.”

“Well, that makes sense,” you might say, “it’s a matter of loyalty.” In fact, the root of partisan bias is deeper.

fMRI studies showed what was happening in the brains of the biased voters. “Westen realized the voters weren’t using their reasoning faculties to analyze the facts; they were using reason to preserve their partisan certainty. And then, once the subjects had arrived at a favorable interpretation of the evidence, blithely excusing the contradictions of their chosen candidate, they activated the internal reward circuits in their brains and experienced a rush of pleasurable emotion. Self-delusion, in other words, felt really good. ‘Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want,’ Westin says, ‘and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.’”

In short, we are hard-wired for self-delusion and partisan bias. As Lehrer goes on to say: “… rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to justify practically any belief. The prefrontal cortex is turned into an information filter, a way to block out disagreeable points of view.”

Clear thinking and sound decision-making requires that we be aware of and counter our natural inclination to partisan bias.

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Status Quo Bias

Monday, March 29th, 2010


Often, when making difficult decisions, we choose what is familiar and reject novelty. We favor the status quo because it is “within our comfort zone.” This is a natural human tendency. However, new research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that effective decision makers need to beware of the potential pitfalls of “status quo bias.”

The research construct was simple. Participants watched a video monitor displaying a tennis match. On cue, they were asked to decide whether a tennis ball was “in” or “out.” In each case, there was a default option, either “in” or “out.” So, when making a judgment, participants could select the default option or choose to over rule it. Results demonstrated that there was clear bias toward the status quo (i.e., the default option) and that this bias resulted in errors in judgment. “This bias toward default acceptance was seen in 13 of 16 subjects and importantly resulted in suboptimal choice behavior.”

The study authors observe that when “faced with a complex decision, people tend to accept the status quo, as reflected in the old adage, ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’ Indeed, across a range of everyday decisions, such as whether to move house or trade in a car…there is a considerable tendency to maintain the status quo and refrain from acting.”

Effective decision-making requires that we be aware of status quo bias, the “suboptimal acceptance of a default choice option.” To avoid this bias and to ensure optimal decision-making, an effective problem solver will diverge to generate all possible options and then converge with a clear set of criteria to select the best from among them. For simple strategies to do so, see these additional blog posts: Solution Webs and The Matrix.

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