The Illusion Of Attention - Part 2

July 28, 2010

Interview with Daniel Simons, author of the book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

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Mike Carruthers:
The human brain is an incredible machine but it does have some interesting flaws.

Daniel Simons:
We notice as much as we think we do, we don’t remember as vividly as we think we do. We tend to place too much value in our confidence in general. We spot causes where they don’t exist.
 

Daniel Simons, author of the book The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, says a good example of this is the stupid criminals you occasionally read about in the news.

Criminals who do things that, really if they knew how bad they were at they did they wouldn’t try - so the criminal who spray-paints their name on the side of the wall as a form of vandalism. Or the person who robs a bank with no disguise what so ever. He clearly thought that he was good enough to rob a bank, and was certainly over-confident about it because he didn’t realize he actually needed a disguise.

This type of thinking and behavior is called the double curse of incompetence.

Basically if you think about it people who are unskilled already suffer from the fact that they’re not very good at what they do. But they also suffer from the fact that they think that they’re better at it than they are. So they’re much more likely to be over-confident in their own abilities. And the people who are the least skilled, the people who are unskilled are the most unaware of how unskilled they are. So this applies to everything from logic and reasoning to chess to sense of humor to lots of other things that you can measure in studies - and shows that the people who are the worst tend to think that they’re better than average.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here