Christopher Chabris-The Invisible Gorilla (Unplugged)

8/7/2019 Christopher Chabris-The Invisible Gorilla (Unplugged)

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THE INVISIBLE GORILLA (UnpluggeA conversation between Christopher Chabris & Moe Ab

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The Invisible Gorilla (Unplugged) Christopher Chabris with Moe Abdou

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About Christopher Chabris & Moe AbdouChristopher ChabrisChristopher Chabris is an Assistant Professor in the Department ofPsychology at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He is also anAdjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology at Albany Medical College, aResearch Economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and aVisiting Scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence inCambridge, Massachusetts.

Moe AbdouMoe Abdou is the creator of 33voices a global conversation about things

that matter in business and in life. [email protected]

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Its very fascinating and Im sure its something that is just evolving foryou guys.

Yeah, its very gratifying to see the good reviews and to see the response andespecially to hear from people who have when people say things like, I look

at X in a whole different way now. Or, I see things differently now or whatever.Thats especially what we were hoping to hear. Were not out to change theworld. We were hoping that people would really have a response where theysee themselves in some of the stories and they see their own behavior in someof the experiments and so on and they think about it a little bit.

Ill tell you, maybe you can change the world a little bit because you makesome pretty compelling points.

Thank you.

What Id like to do is just for the time that we have together, I really liketo be able to tackle a lot of these illusions. I have to tell you, I did see theGorilla a few years ago. I used this experiment. I used to a run a wealthmanagement firm in the Washington D.C. area. I had a significant numberof advisors. I really used it to show them your exact point; that a lot oftimes, we miss whats right in front of us whether its serving our clientsor making investment decisions or financial decisions in general.

Obviously with the book, you take it to a completely different level. Ever

since reading it, I notice just in walking through my gym this morning, youencounter these things all the time. People just walk by you. You say helloto somebody and they dont even recognize that youre there althoughyoure friends with them. Ironically enough, knowing that you and I aregoing to speak this morning, Ive been very attentive and it happenedtwice.

Well it may happen just as often when youre not out there looking for them.

I bet. Its really been interesting. Chris, what has been most surprising toyou guys since this book has come out - and since people have at least

the ones who have embraced it the way we have? Im starting to thinkdifferently. Whats been surprising to you guys about the outcome?

I wish had a great answer I could just throw right out at you. I think one thingthat has been surprising and gratifying is the number of people who haveresponded and said, this is really important stuff and this is stuff that happensall the time. When we wrote the book, we really had no idea what the

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response was going to be. We thought it might go out there and maybe get afew reviews and that would be it. Of course, nowadays with things like Twitterand Facebook, and so on, you can sort of pay attention to what people aresaying. Its been sort of that in that sense, surprising that this sat with peopleand rseems to be saying something about their everyday lives and what

happens in decisions they make all the time.

I think its one of the things, I think its a different kind of self help book ifpeople would even consider it that. In keeping with your prize, it certainlymakes you entertain but at the same time, it definitely makes you think.

!Thats good. Thats what were really going for. I was hoping we wouldnt beplaced in the self-help category because a lot of self-help books of course are

not really based on research and not really based on solid scientific findings.Thats one thing we did try to do is we always tried to pair up stories withexperiments and studies and data to back them up.

But maybe instead of a self-help book maybe its more like a self awarenessbook. Its sort of learning more about how your own minds work and how theminds of other people work and just learning to pay attention to things aboutyour own behavior and your own thoughts that you werent paying attention tobefore.

I love that. In fact, I just wrote it down, self-awareness book. Maybeinvent a new category there. I love your writing style. I have to ask aquestion that many people probably have asked you. Why is it so difficultor why, as human beings, we have difficulty or resistance towards trulytrying to understand who we are as people and maybe just starting tounderstand ourselves as individuals?

Its not easy. The main reason I think is that our minds and brains did notevolve for the purpose of understanding themselves. The mind and brainevolved for purposes of promoting the reproduction of our genes. That doesntnecessarily require understanding how your own mind and brain or body works

for that matter. You could equally ask how come we have such a poorunderstanding of how our hearts work and why do we eat foods that causeheart disease? Probably because the evolutionary design of the mind and thedigestive system and so on was not setup to optimize longevity and minimizeheart disease and so on.

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Whats going on nowadays especially is somewhat of a mismatch between theenvironment that our brains and minds evolved to succeed in the presentenvironment that we live in. So to take a simple example, during the timewhen our minds were evolving, most things around us didnt move very fast andwe didnt move very fast ourselves. Nowadays, we can travel at incredibly high

speeds. In a car, youre routinely going 60, 65, 70, 75 miles an hour. If you flyin an airplane, youre going a lot faster than that.

Our visual systems werent necessarily designed to be able to detect thingswith extreme rapidity at those speeds and our system for paying attention wasdesigned to focus on a few things or one task that we want to pay attention toand devote extra effort to and not notice what else is going on. Thats notmuch of a problem when things dont change in your environment that fast andthere is not a lot of information, not a lot of stimuli, not a lot of signals to payattention to.

Nowadays, we look at CNBC, we got a hundred numbers on the screen at onceon CNBC. Thats not the visual environment our minds evolved in. So thismismatch is growing and I think thats part of the source of a lot of theproblems that we talk about in a way the source of these illusions.

Chris, is that maybe why were starting to see perhaps a shift in trying tounderstand more Eastern philosophies of consciousness and trying to be inthe moment and more presence. I assume that people are starting tounderstand that thats going to play a significant role if were going to

evolve as individuals the way we want to.

I dont know that much about Eastern philosophy, Eastern spirituality and so onmyself. So I dont want to pretend Im an expert on that. But I think it ispossible that the growing interest in different philosophies, different ways ofthinking about the mind and about behavior and consciousness and so on, mayhave something to do with the growing sort of disconnect between the way themind is designed which was for a time period, thousands, tens of thousands, oreven millions of years ago and our present circumstances.

That said, I dont know that turning to Eastern or any other kind of philosophiesor spiritualism is really going to help solve that problem because in our view,what were dealing with here are fundamental aspects of the architecture ofthe mind and those things cant be change easily. True, the brain has plasticity

and its possible for us to learn skills to a high degree of effectiveness.

But wholesale lifting of inherent limits like the fact that when we pay attentionto one thing or one area, we dont notice whats going on in other places or in

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other events. Or, the fact that our memories are not perfect records of ourexperiences that instead, theyre records of meaning and emotion and theyhave goals to satisfy and so on. I mean a wholesale changing of those thingswould require redesigning the brain and that doesnt happen except on the

scale of millions of years or longer.

I totally agree. In fact, when I started to think about your analogy in thefirst chapter about intentionalblindness, one of the first things that Iequate it to is when I hear the term that an athlete is in the zone.Basically, its them and the ball or them in the hoop and they see or hearnothing around them. Then I started to think, is that good or bad? Maybeits good for the moment but how much do we want to be in that zone ifwere dealing with it from a personal perspective or a businessperspective.

Being in the zone for an athlete, I think is related to the psychological statethat some psychologists call flow. Where you are extremely focused and youreperforming optimally and there is even sort of a pleasurable sensation to allthe suffering. Normally, we associate effort not with pleasure but with pain orat least its something to avoid. But, when youre in that state where yourepaying attention and its enjoyable and youre really high achieving and so on,in that sense its good that youre shutting out other stimuli and youre notpaying attention to all these other things.

Perhaps its a tradeoff. Its a necessary tradeoff. You need to be able to close

out those other stimuli in order to increase your attention to this optimal state.I dont know personally because Im not an expert on flow and sport psychologyand so on. Would we want to sacrifice the ability to do that for an increasednoticing of unexpected events lets say. Or, things were not paying attentionto. Im sure about that tradeoff. It might turn out to be a bad trade still. Butbeing aware of the fact that when you get into that state, or even when yourejust paying attention to one thing like talking on a cellphone while youredriving, that your attention for unexpected events in your visual field as well,youre just being aware of that and help you change your behavior and changeyour practices and change your environment even. Take the cellphone charger

out of the car, zip the cellphone up and put it on the backseat or somethinglike that rather than run the risk of really seriously increasing your chances ofgetting into an accident in that case.

I have to tell you, Oprah started to get on the path of convincing me butwithout a doubt, when I read your book, I was convinced because my wifeand kids have been after me for awhile to stay off the phone while driving.Its pretty clear now that there is no question that it has impact.

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I am glad to hear you say that we were more convincing than Oprah.

You made a strong enough point for me to say, you know what, its notworth it.

Now what we need to do is get our own TV show and well really be the rockstars.

You are definitely on your way to rock star status because Im sure this isthe beginning of a lot of things. One of the things that happens a lot oftimes, Chris as you know and certainly as I have experienced in my life iswhen people have an opportunity to be exposed to compelling books likethat. One of the greatest passions that I have as an individual is betweenthe time somebody puts its down because they finished it and the timethey pickup the next book, we want to try to keep those ideas moving. We

want to give them almost the how-to, take what you learn, take the keypoints that you learn and apply them in your life to kind of see betterresults. So if we take the attention piece for example, whats the greatestpiece of advice that you can give to people out there to be more attentiveor to minimize the chance of them having to deal with this blindness issue?

I cant say anything that will make people more attentive. I mean, one thingwe did find out in which people asked us about a lot of the time, is that in ourgorilla experiment where people dont notice a gorilla walking through, Ill pickpeople, a crowd of people passing basketballs around. People will always say

who notices the gorilla and who doesnt? The answer is we dont really knowanything that differentiates the noticers from the missers.

If I did know of something that could differentiate the noticers from themissers maybe I could teach the missers to do what the noticers are doing; tosomehow be more attentive or more open to those unexpected events orobjects. But we dont really know what are the differences. As far as we know,its luck circumstance on something but the mental state you just happen tofind yourself in at that moment when youre doing the experiment.

So I cant really say anything that will help people become more attentive but Ithink the number one piece of advice would be know about the fact that youare noticing and paying attention to the less of your world than you think youare. When you have an important decision to make, think about perhaps whatyoure not thinking of. Think about the information you dont have or theinformation youre not paying attention to or think about whether youre being

distracted right now and whether youre not devoting your full attention to it.

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One thing I like to do sometimes, some people think this is a bad habit but Imnot sure it is that bad. I like to put off important decisions. Im not sure that Ido it consciously because I know that I might be distracted. I might need tothink again and think twice but maybe Im just a procrastinator. It does havesome benefits to come back and think again a second time when youre not in a

hurry, when you can give it more attention, when perhaps you had a chance tothink about it in between and so on. So dont be in such a rush is another greatpiece of advice. You cant think twice if you dont have the time to thinktwice. That might be some of what I would advice.

I think thats fabulous advice. I want to jump around here a little bitbecause one of the most intriguing things for me was I think it was chapter6 when we started talking about potential. The big take away for me therewas when you referenced Mozart and train the brains and so forth. We all Iguess have heard and we all understand that there is a lot of untapped

potential inside of us. Its difficult sometimes Chris, for people to realizethat because of the clutter that goes on in our mind sometimes. For us torecognize we all have tremendous abilities and each one of us hasuntapped potential. Whats the starting point for people to understand ifthey want to make that shift and really start to tackle some of thisuntapped potential that they can work towards?

The starting point as far as were concerned is to realize yes there is untappedpotential. Pretty much everybody has extraordinary capacities to increase theirabilities. But its not a kind of potential that can be easily and trivially released

by doing something like listening to more classical music or by playing braintraining games or by listening to subliminal tapes while you sleep or somethinglike that.

Also, its not a generic or a general form of potential. So its not that easy tojust make yourself generally smarter or make your memory generally better ormake your visual acuity generally better except of course by putting on theright glasses or contact lenses that will do it for vision. But there is no suchthing as glasses or contact lenses for memory in general or for intelligence ingeneral. What there is, is the ability to learn particular skills to a high degree

of expertise.

So an example we talked about in the book is most people can only rememberabout six or seven random numbers, single digit numbers longer than a fewseconds, for as long as a few seconds. After that, if you try to keep them toremember nine they will remember them all. But, in a famous study, inindividuals who are able to train themselves to remember I believe 88 randomdigits, sets as long as that. Thats a huge increase. Thats about a factor of 12

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more than he was able to do at the beginning. But when they tested him for hisability to remember random sequences of letters, after he had increased hisdigit span to 88, his letter span was still only six or seven. What it was in thebeginning.

So learning and the plasticity that his brain was capable of were specific to thiskind of material he was learning with. Remember in string of numbers, it didntmake him better at remembering letters; it didnt make him better atcalculating the tip or anything like that. Its hard to really sort of producethese general improvements but its possible to learn specific skills andlearning to a really high degree of expertise.

My advice is you throw out the idea that youre just going to sort of magicallybecome smarter overnight and think about what you really want to do well andthen work on training yourself to do it and you actually probably can.

Chris, what about failure and adversity? How does that impact ourillusions? When we have bad days or when a business venture or arelationship goes south, does that increase our illusions? What happenswhen our brain kind of stays with those very challenging things to dealwith.

This is not necessarily an area that Im an expert in but one thing that ourbrains are very good at is coming up with reasons why things happen. So letssay we have a business failure. Some business venture doesnt go well like you

said. One thing we probably try to do is figure out the causes of that. One thingour brains are very good at is basically jumping to conclusions, sort of pickingup on associations in our environment or things that happen in sequence.

For example, maybe something happened and then business started goingdownhill and so you assume that that thing that happened was the cause of thebusiness going downhill. You focus in on that. You start to think thats thesingle reason. That might not necessarily be true. Most of the time, there aremultiple causes for things that happen in our lives or in work and business andso on. But were not very good at appreciating that all those causes kind ofinterrelate.

In the book, we have an example of Chris Matthews, the political commentatorwho has the show Hardball on TV. We noticed that he tends to ask his guests,or did tend to ask his guests over and over again one is the one reason why theUnited States launched the war in Iraq? He kept on saying, what is the reason?Was it weapons of mass destruction? Was it this? Was it that? That focussuggests that he thinks there is only one reason when in fact it could be that

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there were 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 reasons all of which had to be in place. All of whichplayed a role in the decision.

If there wasnt some part of their weapons of mass destruction, the war mightnot have been started but likewise if there hadnt been any attacks on

September 11th, the war might not have started. If there hadnt been a wholehistory of things that went on in that region, the war might not have happened.There is rarely a single cause for a complex event like a business failure or aproject that goes wrong or a marriage that breaks up or whatever.

There are usually multiple causes and we have trouble figuring out if there aremultiple causes so opening your mind to the possibility that its not as simpleas you think it is, that its not just one thing causing another. It would be oneway to start trying to deal with that more realistically from my point of view.Thats my point of view as cognitive psychologist who thinks about how we

think. Im not a clinical psychologist who thinks about depression and thingslike that. This is sort of just from a cognitive point of view.

So Chris, when you think about that then when we think about how weneed to think and certainly from a cognitive perspective, is there a betterway for us to learn. For example, when I take a look at this book, at leastfor me personally, I have recommended it to probably 25 or 30 people thatare personal friends of mine who I really believe this would benefit. Isthere a different learning model now? I see the process that youve takenand its brilliant. I want to ask you from a business context in a minute

about here you see your stories and then you have scientific evidence toback your stories so they become not only more believable but real. If wewanted to really become better at a particular skill or become better atlearning certain things, should we shift our thinking about how we think orhow we learn?

Thats a great question. If youre trying to learn a particular skill or becomeexpert in a particular area, one lesson of cognitive psychology research overdecades and this is not my own personal research. Im going to sort of tell you

what the field, as a whole has found, is that there is a difference betweengetting experience in something and deliberately practicing and studying it andworking on self improvement.

I will give you personal anecdote. I used to play a lot of chess when I wasyounger. I havent played a serious tournament game in probably about 12years now but I used to be much more active. I remember when I was an

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improving player, I would go to the chess club and there would be some guysthere at the chess club who are really great guys, nice guys. I would playagainst them and so on but they never seem to get better year after year. Theyalways had the same level of skills but they were there every week playing forhours. They had a lot of experience. They played and played but they didnt

get better.

Whereas other people, played the same amount of time or even less and gotbetter. Whats the difference between those people? Well, the people who gotbetter actually went and studied and actually went and practiced. Its thisnotion of deliberate practice, of spending time actually practicing to try to getbetter as opposed to just doing the thing that is really important to focus on it.Its easy to lose to sight of that because we think that that just by doingsomething we are practicing and we are getting better but not nearly as muchas we could if we had a systematic plan of study.

So if you want to become better at golf or better at tennis or something likethat, dont just play more golf or tennis; if youre really serious about gettingbetter, you have to seriously approach studying, get a coach or a trainer and soon. It seems kind of obvious once Ive said it but its amazing how much wedont do it. You know, people say they want to get better at something but allthey actually do is they do the thing. They dont really take any specific stepsto get better at it. They think theyre just going to get better naturally andthey frustrated when they dont. Then when you hear about it, you have tostudy, get a trainer and so on. Its like duh that seems obvious. We dont do it

for some reason.

Thats not a new approach that comes out of our book. Thats an approachfrom cognitive psychology thats been sort of developed over decades and itdoes match with common sense once you think about it.

Chris, one of the things I did personally was just on an index card, I justkind of wrote the six illusions down. Since I read the book, I just kind offound myself at the end of each day reminding myself of what card number1 and number 2; if there any thing that happened throughout the course ofthe day that made me more conscious with each one of these illusions. Isthere a recommendation? Is that something that you think might be helpfulto trying to help me maybe be more attentive?

I love that idea. I have never heard of defraud but I love the fact that peopleare thinking so deeply about what we wrote. Thats extremely gratifying to beas a practical matter I like that. I like that idea.

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One thing we did say in the book was, you know, when youre watching thenews, or reading the newspaper or something like that, think about whetherthe events youre reading about could possibly be explained by some of theillusions were talking about whether people who were overconfident or peoplewho misinterpreted other peoples confidence or whether people who had

conflicting memories and didnt realized it. Thats just the way memory worksas opposed to lying whether people who misinterpret it cause an affect and soon.

But your notion, your idea of reviewing what happened and thinking about itexclusively as a great way to do that because that sort of forces you to thinkabout what you did during the day and what other people did and see if youcan find an example of that. I think thats a wonderful idea. I would love tofind out whether that actually makes you more sensitive to the stuff andwhether you think it winds up sort of improving your decision making in the

long run. That would be great to see.

Well, to be continued. One of the things that we always struggled with inthe 25 years that I spent in the Wall Street arena is this whole issue ofconfidence. Especially nowadays, as you know, consumer confidence isprobably at an all time low even from a customer service perspective, letalone investment management and so forth. As I delved into this wholeconfidence issue and the illusion of confidence it made a heck of a lot ofsense to me.

Now, I have a better understanding of what caused that. So when I look at thisfrom entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial perspective and sales people to reallytry to be very conscious of this whole issue of confidence. How would yourecommend that people both from a consumer perspective as well as a sales orentrepreneurial perspective begin to really make this an issue that will at least

minimize this illusion a little bit?

As with all of the evolutions we talked about in our book. The first piece ofadvice that we have is to become aware of it and to focus more on it. Andthink about when you see someone expressing confidence whether theyre justa confident person in general, whether they always express that kind ofconfidence or whether its really a valid signal of what they know or whattheyre claiming to be able to do or what theyre claiming to be rememberingaccurately whatever the case may be.

The problem with the illusion of confidence is that our tendency is to thinkthat how confident someone is, is a valid indicator of the underlying ability orskill or ability to meet some delivery data or whatever. I cant tell you how

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many times personally in the last year since we moved to a new house, wedealt with contractors and they say, Im going to be there on that date. Itsgoing to be done by that time. Its going to cost only this much. Even knowingall I do and having already finished writing that check doing this little book, myfirst reaction is always, Oh thats great. It will be done at the end of

Monday.

Only then later do I think, well, does he know what hes talking about? Is hejust saying that? Does he honestly believe that but hes not going to be able todo it because things are going to come up. Of course, then a month later, itsstill not done and I went back and I say, suckered again. So you got to payattention to that kind of thing. Whenever someone says to you this is one thatsgoing to be done. This is how much its going to cost. This is how its going to

work and so on. When they say, Im really confident. You have to apply somekind of discount factor to that.

In a way, its discounting your own tendency to believe in those things which isan inherent human tendency. Its not that you are stupid or you dont learnfrom experience or whatever. It takes a huge amount of cynicism to overcomethat inherent tendency that we have.

From the person presenting this, from the contractors perspective, if theyapproached you a little bit differently and maybe presented it or used adifferent framework in letting you know that there is probability that thisis going to be happening, you know, finished by X and were going to showup by X. Does that thinking or maybe language, would that increase yourability to be confident in that person? So should we, as entrepreneursand/or sales people, shift our presentation to more, you know, heres thetheory or heres a little more scientific thinking behind just, hey buy thisproduct because its going to work?

Heres the problem, with your contractor, instead of saying, Im going to haveit done by Friday afternoon, you said, there is a 30% chance Ill be done byFriday afternoon, a 10% chance the following Monday, a 10% chance the dayafter that and so on.

First of all, you would sound weird. Second of all, people might take theirbusiness elsewhere to someone who said, Alright, Ill definitely have it doneby the end of Friday even if that person knows no better than you how long

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its actually going to take. We tend to respond to expressions of certainty morethan we should. More than the facts justify our doing but we do it. Its reallykind of a trap. If youre going to be selling to people who have the mind thatall human beings do, what do you do? Give an honest assessment and run the

risk of losing the business to someone who is too optimistic and too confident.

Its a conundrum and I dont really know the solution to that. I think thatsophisticated purchasers complicated things should maybe be able to have aprocess where they can resist the natural tendency to take the highestconfidence option. Governments that are building public works or companiesthat are building buildings, stadium, complicated things, big pieces of softwareand so on. There are multiple sophisticated people involved there. They reallyought to be able to step back and say that these guys really know what theyretalking about.

In particular, are there any similar projects to the one that were about toembark on and how long do those take. Lets not delude ourselves into thinkingthat we know so much about our own project that were the only ones whocan forecast how long its going to take and our judgments are going to beright. Most projects that you do, other people have done similar thingselsewhere in the world. In fact some of them are extremely cookie cutter butyou dont even realize it like building skyscrapers. Skyscrapers seem like hugelycomplex project and they are but its been done thousands of times.

Instead of taking the estimate that you get you might want to look at how long

does it take the average-sized skyscraper of your size to get built and thinkthat thats a more realistic estimate; the same with pieces of software. Thatscalled taking the outside view. In a way, youre sort of like stepping outsideand your looking at your projectfrom the outside as an outsider would. Theoutsider is not emotionally invested in it. He doesnt think he knows all the

details better than everyone else.

In the book for example, we say writing our book, this is the first time that wewrote a book together. It was the first time either of us had written like this. Itseems like a really important project. We thought we really knew exactly whatwas going to be involved, to look at it from the publishers point of view. Wewere just another pair of authors writing a book where we had 300 pages longabout a non-fiction subject and theyve had that experience thousands oftimes.

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So they are actually much better than we are at predicting how long are wegoing to take to do it. If you can sort of step outside your projects and stepoutside your mindset and look at it as an outsider well you might get a betterimpression. I really dont know how to really answer the question of what to dowhen youre providing these estimates to your customers but thats a really

tough question because of the inherent psychology of confidence.

Thats inherent everywhere. Certainly, we may not project it as consumersbut none of us like to be sold first and foremost as you know. It becomesvery difficult for anybody who is trying to present ideas to people. One ofthe things we used to do Chris, that seemed to help us at least a little bitdifferently was we always used to present the positives and the negatives.We had what we call our kind of our black hat thinking, kind of like thedrug commercials we see on TV. This may cause you a heart attack and itmay cause you this but if you still like it buy it. When you present the dark

side, I think it at least puts you in a position to say, this is the worse thatcould happen and as long as there is authenticity there, there is still alevel of trust that has to be established but I think that may help a littlebit.

It can especially with people, lets say with some customers I think that willhelp and I would like to think that Im one of the customers who appreciate amore nuance view and so on. Our tendency to hide the negative and be overoptimistic about the positive is exactly one of the reasons why laws are passedand regulations are instituted that require disclosing some of the negative

things and some of the bad possibilities that might happen because we havesort of an inherent tendency to minimize those and to think over confidentlyabout our likelihood of success.

Its not really a horrible thing either. Sometimes you want people to beconfident. Before you send your soldiers into battle, you probably want themto be a little bit overconfident. If they were under-confident, their unit mightfall apart. They might not be willing to enter battle or take those risks and soon. Sometimes excessive confidence is not necessarily such a bad thing. Butwhen making really important decisions and you dont have a clear view of the

true risks and likely problems and so on then its not a good thing.

Chris, you hear a lot of, I remember in my capacity as managing partner ofmy organization. One of the most critical things for us was talentmanagement. A lot of people, you see in a clich that hiring great people isa gut feel. Certainly there are some aspects where a little bit of that iscorrect but I always struggled with that as somebody who was reliant onthe cost of a miss-hire is a lot more expensive than hiring a great person.

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Whats your thought on that? When should we at least listen to thatintuition in a conscious way I guess?

We should always listen to it but we should probably never play Simon Says andjust do whatever it tells us to do. You should always listen to it because what

most people call intuition which means something like a perception of yourown emotional reactions to things and what makes you comfortable anduncomfortable or maybe youre perceiving some non-verbal signals that arecoming from someone in the sense of who youre deciding to hire. They justmake you uncomfortable or something like that. If there something seems offabout them. Thats valid and useful information.

The problem is when we pay too much attention to that and we pay lessattention to other information that is probably more valid. This belief thatsbeen promulgated quite a bit over the past few years especially on the wakeofbooks like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell that well all better off if we trusted ourguts more often, you know, went with our gut and so on. Thats not necessarily

true.

One interesting aspect of this is why do people think that its a good idea totrust your guts. Probably whats happening in a lot of cases is theyreremembering some instances in their lives when they wanted to do somethingone way and they want to make one decision, but they second guessedthemselves and they went a different way and then it didnt work out. Sotheyre saying if I only gone with my instinct. If Id only gone with my first

option things would have been better. Those are going to stick out in yourmemory because you have sort of tangible evidence that you made a wrongdecision.

However, the problem is that youre not paying attention to all the times whenyou change your mind and things went well. Those things dont standout inmemory. Youd probably dont even remember that you changed your mind anddidnt go with go with your instinct in those cases. You changed your mind,things went fine and you dont think about those decisions anymore. Nor do youremember the times when you had only one instinct and it was right all alongand there was no change involved.

So what winds up happening is we wind up paying much too much attention tothose couple of instances when we had a gut feeling that seemed to be correctin retrospect but we didnt follow it and then we over generalize from that. Wethink, well, we should really go with our guts much more often. You will hearpeople say sometimes every time I followed my instinct, followed my intuitionits been the right thing to do. People who say that have I dont want to be

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insulting but they dont really much of an idea what theyre talking aboutbecause theyre not actually tallying all their decisions properly in memory.Something stands out in memory.

The way memory works is not as a perfect record of all our experiences and

decisions, it is very meaning oriented. It preserves logistic things. It highlightssomething that distorts others. Its nothing like that kind of perfect record thatyou could use to make a statistical analysis of your life and figure out that itwas always a hundred percent correct to go with your gut. People areremembering a couple of times when they did it and things worked out andgeneralizing from that.

We would never say ignore your intuition or ignore your instincts but dont getcaught up in the belief that theyre always right or theyre better thanstepping back and doing some rational analysis. They arent. Its just one more

piece of information we weighed. In some decisions, its a very crucial piece ofinformation to be weighed.

When youre deciding what kind of ice cream to have for dessert, go with yourgut. Put the flavors that seem really good to you, youll probably be happy withit. Dont try to analyze ice cream. Dont try to analyze what kind of music youlike. But when youre thinking about who to hire unless there is no other basisfor distinguishing between people which is rarely the case, dont just go withyour gut. Do a little more analysis of the qualities of these people that mightpredict how well theyre going to do. When youre making important financial

decisions and likewise, that I think is really not a time to rely too much oninstinct when its possible that instinct could lead you to make a huge mistake.

Incidentally, by the way, one more thing I want to add is that some peoplethink that people give this advice to test takers all the time like on the SATor something like that. They say, well, if you cant decide what the rightanswer is, go with your first instinct. Go with the one you thought was right atfirst. Thats actually, as far as research shows, a bad strategy because peoplewho change their answers more often change them to correct answers thanchange them to wrong answers. Be careful of those little pieces of advice. Theyare often not backed by any real scientific evidence.

I have a daughter that is taking the SAT and she got that exact sameadvice so its ironic you even bring that up.

Tell her I said otherwise. At some tests, one thing thats good to do issometimes penalize you for guessing. That is something to take into account

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but they dont penalize you for guessing. Then there is no reason that your firstinstinct is necessarily going to be right the way they say it is.

Chris where do you guys take this work from here? I think you opened upsome pretty you have enlightened a lot of people. At least Im speaking

for the people that I have exposed this to and the conversations that Ivehad. Where do you guys take this thing?There are a couple of things wed like to do more. One, we would like to findout more about actual problems that people have had in their organizationsand so on and how understanding these kind of illusions and understanding howI minds works can help make better decisions. So were sort of trying to take itmore in the direction of speaking out, reaching more audiences, you dontusually get exposed to scientific research and psychology and sort of interactmore with them, find out more what their concerns are, how it applies to their

lives and organizations and so on.

Were doing more research in all these areas trying to learn more about theways that our attention is limited and how attention works and how expertiseworks. How people become expert in different areas. One area that Imworking on especially is thinking about how organizations can become moreintelligent. We know how to measure the intelligence of individuals. We givethem an IQ test and thats a fairly good measure of how smart they are andlooking at SATs something like that. What about groups, you know, 3, 4, 5people who work together in a group or even large organizations; can we

measure how intelligent they are? Im involved in research on those kinds ofquestions. Thats really interesting stuff for me.

Especially from an organizational perspective. I think whathappens when people get exposed to these types of material,certainly as you want them to do or get them to think but itreally does also give them a framework. Your writing style,both of you guys, is fabulous and when you can take thesecomplex subjects and say, here are six areas - at least for mepersonally that I looked at. These are real. They impact all ofus. Perhaps as you said, a greater awareness of these six levels orgreater awareness of what could potentially be causing some ofthe issues that you have just that piece alone. I think wi llstimulate their thinking enough to say, hey maybe we ought tolook to other things, to shift our ideas or better strategies andso forth. Organizations and small ones in particular most of the

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time dont have access to this kind of material, and dont haveaccess to the resources they need to build their businesses. So Ithink if you are able to tackle that question and gear ittowards that type, the people all over the world will definitelyembrace it.I hope youre right from your lips to Gods ears.

I think they will and I want to be conscious of your time. I could spend allday with you. You guys are doing some really groundbreaking work. Im ahuge fan. Well get this stuff. Well get this transcribed and well send itout through various media outlets in the form of a PDF article and alsocreate a video PowerPoint around it and try to get the message out andhopefully, we can continue our dialog. If I can ever be a resource orassistance to you guys in any way, we have a pretty good roster of

entrepreneurs and businesses that we work with. Id be happy to makeintroductions or to get your stuff in front of them.

That would be amazing. Im sure well be in touch about that.

Well definitely do.

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Christopher Chabris-The Invisible Gorilla (Unplugged)