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How Does Your Mind Really Work?

Computers, washing machines and vaccum cleaners all arrive with manuals. Unfortunately, we aren't born with a guide to our mind and so we have to figure out what makes us tick. Over the years, psychologists have challenged many of our most cherished intuitions and common-sense ideas about how our minds work, and often discovered that we are more remarkable than we ordinarily imagine. In this chapter, we will explore several examples of this surprising, interesting, and counter-intuitive work. Along the way, we will encounter people dressed as gorillas and ghosts, discover what happened when people tried to remember 10,000 photographs, find out why psychologists have staged hundreds of mock accidents, and much more.

Looking at Observation

Most people believe that they are good observers and that they would instantly spot a striking event happening right in front of them. However, psychologists have discovered that there's far more to vision than meets the eye.

British researcher Tony Cornell, who was interested in the possible existence of ghosts, decided to find out what would happen if people came face to face with a seemingly supernatural spectre. In one study, Cornell dressed up in a white sheet and strolled down a path near a busy city centre. Amazingly, almost no one seemed to spot his ghostly figure. In another piece of research, Cornell visited his local cinema, put on his ghost costume, waited until a film was showing and then walked out in front of the screen. He then asked the audience if they had noticed anything strange and discovered that around a third of them had completely missed his apparitional appearance.1

In the 1970s, Ulric Neisser and colleagues conducted more systematic research into people's inability to see what's happening in front of them. Neisser created a short film containing two teams of people.2 Each team consisted of three individuals, with those in one team wearing white tee-shirts and those in the other team wearing black tee-shirts. Each of the teams had their own basketball and during the film the players in each team constantly passed their basketball between one another. A few minutes into the film, a woman wearing a long black raincoat and carrying an open umbrella walked across the scene and through the players. Neisser showed the film to people and asked them to count the number of times that the players dressed in the white tee-shirts passed their basketball between one another. Amazingly, most people failed to spot the woman with the umbrella.

In the 1990s, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris made several versions of Neisser's classic film and replaced the umbrella-holding woman with other unexpected events.3 A member of their research team had recently conducted another experiment in which they had dressed up in a gorilla costume, and so in one of the films they put on the costume and walked through the basketball players. As a bonus, they even paused in the middle of the scene and beat their chest at the camera. Simons showed the film to people and asked them to count how many times the team wearing white tee-shirts passed their basketball. In line with Neisser's previous findings, around half of them failed to spot the gorilla.

Simons uploaded his wonderful gorilla film onto the internet, and it quickly became a viral hit. Inspired by both this work and my background in magic, I created a short online video called 'The Colour Changing Card Trick'. This film involved two people performing a card trick on a table. During the trick, the performers changed the colour of the tablecloth, their clothing, and the curtain behind them. Amazingly, most people watching the film fail to spot these changes. In another dramatic illustration of our ability to miss what is happening in front of our eyes, researchers discovered that students talking on a mobile telephone even failed to notice a clown riding past on a unicycle!4

These studies have helped psychologists to understand more about the innermost workings of our visual system. According to one model of perception, processing all the incoming information from our surroundings would quickly overwhelm our visual system. Instead, our mind automatically and unconsciously focuses attention on what appears to be important. This process usually works well and allows us to gain an accurate impression of what is happening around us. However, under certain circumstances, this process can cause us to miss the unexpected. When we are watching a film in a cinema, we don't expect to see a ghost walk in front of the screen. When we are asked to count the number of times people pass a basketball on a video, we are not looking out for someone dressed as a gorilla. And when we watch a card trick, we do not pay attention to the colour of the tablecloth, the performers' clothing, or the curtains. At one level, missing these striking events illustrates that our common-sense understanding of observation is deeply wrong. However, at another level, it demonstrates just how amazing and sophisticated our minds really are.

TOTAL RECALL

In the 1970s, Lionel Standing conducted a remarkable study into the power of memory. Standing persuaded five volunteers to spend several days looking at 10,000 photographs. The volunteers only saw each image for five seconds. To discover how many images they had remembered, the volunteers were shown several hundred photographs, and asked to identify the ones that they have seen in the earlier part of the study. Using this information, Standing estimated that the volunteers had remembered around 6,600 photographs, despite having only seen each of them for a few seconds. Similar work by Rob Jenkins and colleagues suggests that people have, on average, 5,000 faces stored in their memories. People often believe that they have a poor memory. In fact, most of us can store vast amounts of visual material, and researchers have used this remarkable ability to help people to pass exams, to remember online passwords, to deliver long speeches without notes, and much more.

Sources: L. Standing, 'Learning 10,000 pictures', Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 25, 207-222 (1973); R. Jenkins, A.J. Dowsett, & A.M. Burton, 'How many faces do people know?' Proceedings. Biological Sciences, 285(1888) (2018), 2018.1319.

Beliefs, Opinions, and Decisions

In the 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman conducted a now classic experiment using just eight numbers.5 They visited a high school and asked students to estimate the answer to one of two equations. Half of the students were asked to solve this equation:

8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = ?

whilst the others were shown this equation:

1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 = ?

Mathematically, the two equations are identical and so, if the students were being logical, the two groups should have come up with the same answers. However, the students who saw the first equation produced estimates that were around four times larger than those who were presented with the second equation. Tversky and Kahneman speculated that the students had taken a mental shortcut and based their answers on the initial part of each equation. The first equation starts off with relatively large numbers and so the students came up with a high estimate. In contrast, the second equation starts with much smaller numbers and so the students produced a much lower estimate. Further work has shown that this effect, which is often referred to as 'anchoring', can influence our decisions in many situations. For example, a furniture shop might display a sign saying that a £500 chair has been reduced to £250. By anchoring on the first price, the second figure seems surprisingly low. Conversely, during a negotiation, one party might open with a low opening offer in order that their subsequent offers appear more impressive.

Other work has revealed that many of our beliefs, judgements, and decisions are clouded by similar sorts of biases. Take, for instance, the way in which we account for the events in our lives. Research shows that we tend to attribute the outcome of such events either to ourselves (e.g. our personality, intelligence, or abilities) or to external factors (e.g. other people, chance, or fate). So far, so good. However, the way in which we make these attributions depends upon the outcome of the event. When we succeed, we tend to take the credit ourselves ('I did well at the exam because I revised hard and I am intelligent'), whereas when we fail, we tend towards blaming external factors ('I failed because there were distractions in the exam hall').6 On the upside, this bias can help us to feel good about ourselves, but on the downside, it can prevent us from taking responsibility for past errors and learning from them.

Once we have made a decision, or formed a belief, other types of biased thinking ensure that we are unlikely to change our mind. One of the most important of these can be illustrated with a simple game that you can play with your friends.7 Tell your friend that you have a rule for generating sets of three numbers and the following sequence fits your rule: 2, 4, 8. Now ask them to discover your rule by generating new sequences and explain that you will tell them whether their...