You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (25 page)

The anchoring effect can also slip in unannounced. Drazen Prelec and Dan Ariely conducted an experiment at MIT in 2006 where they had students bid on items in a bizarre auction. The researchers would hold up a bottle of wine, or a textbook, or a cordless trackball, and then describe in detail how awesome it was. Then each student had to write down the last two digits of their social security number as if it was the price of the item. If the last two digits were 11, then the bottle of wine was priced at $11. If the two numbers were 88, the cordless trackball was $88. After they wrote down the pretend price, they bid. Sure enough, the anchoring effect scrambled their ability to judge the value of the items. People with high social security numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with low numbers. People with numbers from 80 to 99 paid on average $26 for the trackball, while those with 00 to 19 paid around $9. The source of the number was irrelevant. Any number would have worked as the anchor.

The auction experimenters conducted another study in which they asked people to listen to annoying sounds for money. The researchers initially offered either 90 cents or 10 cents for a blast of awful electronic screaming, and then they asked the subjects how much would be the lowest possible price they would need to be paid to listen to the sound again. People who were offered 10 cents said it would take about 33 cents to continue. People offered 90 said it would take 73.

The researchers repeated the experiment in other ways, but no matter how they messed with the sounds or the payouts, those who were first offered a low payment consistently agreed to lower amounts than those used to better wages. People who got more money at first were unwilling to accept lower payments later.

If you move up to a nice car or a big house, a nice computer or an expensive smartphone, you become anchored and find it difficult to move back down later, even if you should. Those who buy expensive purses know they are being hornswoggled, at least at some level, yet the anchoring effect still reaches into their bank account. Does an $800 Louis Vuitton purse function better than a $25 handbag from Wal-Mart? No, not even if it was hand-made from giraffe leather and stitched by real, magical leprechauns. It’s just a purse. But the anchor is set. Louis Vuitton bags are expensive, and that in itself has social value. People still buy them and are happy with their purchase. If Wal-Mart offered a purse at $800, it would never leave the shelf. The price would be so far from the anchors already set by the store it would seem like a bad deal.

Like most psychological phenomena, anchoring can be used to manipulate people to do good. The best example is a 1975 study by Catalan, Lewis, Vincent, and Wheeler, where they asked a group of students to volunteer as camp counselors two hours per week for two years. They all said no. The researchers followed up by asking if they would volunteer to supervise a single two-hour trip. Half said yes. Without first being asked for the two-year commitment, only 17 percent agreed.

Remember this study when you are in a negotiation—make your initial request far too high. You have to start somewhere, and your initial decision or calculation greatly influences all the choices that follow, cascading out, each tethered to the anchors set before. Many of the choices you make every day are reruns of past decisions; as if traveling channels dug into a dirt road by a wagon train of selections, you follow the path created by your former self. External anchors, like prices before a sale or ridiculous requests, are obvious and can be avoided. Internal, self-generated anchors, are not so easy to bypass. You visit the same circuit of Web sites every day, eat basically the same few breakfasts. When it comes time to buy new cat food or take your car in for repairs, you have old favorites. Come election time, you pretty much already know who will and will not get your vote. These choices, so predictable—ask yourself what drives them. Are old anchors controlling your current decisions?

When you are parting with your money, know the person on the other side of the deal thinks you are not so smart and is depending on the anchoring effect when telling you how much you are about to save.

Think of the last time you were in conversation at a crowded party or in a nightclub. The guy in the corner doing the running man, the girl dropping it like it’s hot, the pulse of low-budget techno—it all fades into the background as you strain to hear the other person’s voice and picture the trip to Ireland he or she is describing. The room is still loud, but inside your head, things have changed. When you focus your attention on one thing, everything else blurs into the periphery.

In science fiction movies like
Minority Report
and
Strange Days
people’s memories are played back for others, and they are usually depicted as short films. The way the camera captures the action is the way the memories are played back, but this isn’t how you see and remember the scenes in your life. You tune out sounds all the time at work, in a city, watching television, turning down the volume on what you aren’t interested in—but you don’t notice it as much when you do it visually. When you single out one voice among many, the rest of what is happening is not only getting turned down; most of it is also slipping through your mind without clinging to memory. You accept this easily when it comes to sound, but the same thing happens with the information coming through your eyeballs. The things you pay attention to create your moment-to-moment perception of reality. Everything else is lost or blurred.

Not only do you see only what you’re focused on, over time you can become so accustomed to seeing familiar environments, everything blends into the background. Where are those damn keys at? You left them right here, didn’t you? Oh, man. You’re running late. How can you lose your keys in your own house? No doubt, you’ve lost your purse, wallet, phone—something—and then found it sitting in plain sight. You go on a scavenger hunt among your own possessions wondering why your IQ has dropped thirty points.

Psychologists call missing information in plain sight inattentional blindness. You believe with confidence your eyes capture everything before them and your memories are recorded versions of those captured images. The truth, though, is you see only a small portion of your environment at any one moment. Your attention is like a spotlight, and only the illuminated portions of the world appear in your perception.

Psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris demonstrated this in 1999. They had students divide into two teams and pass a basketball back and forth. Half wore white shirts, and the others wore black. Simons and Chabris recorded a video of the action and then showed it to subjects in the lab. Before the video began, they asked people to count while watching it how many times the ball was passed from one person to another. If you want to try it yourself, they put the video online at
www.theinvisiblegorilla.com
. You should check it out right now before reading on if you don’t want me to spoil the experiment for you. Most people had no problem getting the answer as they stared intensely, hardly blinking. The researchers then asked the subjects if they noticed anything unusual during the action. Most people said they didn’t. What the subjects failed to notice was a woman in a gorilla suit who walked into the middle of the players and waved at the camera before casually strolling out of frame. When people were asked what they could recall, they could describe the background, the appearance of the players, the intensity of the action, but about half missed the gorilla.

Simons and Chabris showed tunnel vision is a fact of life—it is your default setting. In their research, they point out how easy it is to miss people you recognize in a movie theater as you scan for a seat, or how often you fail to notice when someone gets a new haircut. Your perception is built out of what you attend to. In the gorilla experiment, people are more likely to see the bizarre intruder if they are just allowed to watch the video without expectations, but it doesn’t guarantee they will see it. Your vision narrows to a keyhole view of the world when you are focused, but it doesn’t widen to take in everything when you are relaxed. You are usually ignoring the periphery or thinking about something else. When you end up in the closet wondering why you walked in there, you stand there and blink like a sleepwalker who just awoke because in many ways, this is what you are when the spell of your attention breaks.

The problem with inattentional blindness is not that it happens so often, it’s that you don’t believe it happens. Instead believe you see the whole world in front of you. In any event where eyewitnesses or close inspection are key, your tendency to believe you have perfect perception and recall leads to mistakes in judgment of your own mind and the minds of others. Human eyes aren’t video cameras, and the memories formed aren’t videos.

The fraternal twin of inattentional blindness is change blindness. The brain can’t keep up with the total amount of information coming in from your eyes, and so your experience from moment to moment is edited for simplicity. With change blindness, you don’t notice when things around you are altered to be drastically different than they were a moment ago. Reality, as you experience it, is a virtual experience generated by the brain based on the inputs coming in from your senses. You don’t get a raw feed from those inputs; instead, you get an edited version.

In another experiment by Simons and Chabris, subjects had to approach a man and sign a consent form before taking part in what they thought was the actual experiment. The man stood behind a tall desk, like a registration desk at a hotel, and once they signed, the man behind the desk ducked under it to put away the form. Another man then stood up and handed them a packet of information. Two-thirds of the subjects didn’t realize it was a different person. They had no problem recalling other aspects of the room and the interaction, but the actual identity of the person was just an impression, a shorthand. Their brains registered it was a young, Caucasian male, and that’s it. No more attention was paid to the person behind the desk, so the memory was no clearer. The fact that he changed into a new person raised no alarms.

In other experiments, Simons and Daniel T. Levin showed a conversation at a dinner table between actresses filmed in two separate shots. In one shot subjects saw one actress, and then the shot changed to show the other actress when she spoke. Between the shots, nine different aspects of the scene were changed. The color of the plates went from white to red, food items appeared and disappeared, and even the clothes changed as the camera cut from one perspective to the other. When subjects were asked if they noticed, most didn’t remember any changes. When the experimenters asked the subjects to specifically look for differences, on average only two of the nine changes were caught. When they ran the experiment again, but this time had one actor hear a phone ring and then a second actor appear in the following shot and answer it, only 33 percent of the people watching the video noticed the actor had been switched.

Magicians build careers around perceptual blindness. It takes just a smidgen of misdirection to conceal a change in your visual field. You believe when something unexpected happens the security guard in your brain will spit out his coffee and call the boss, but there is no security guard and there is no boss. Magicians know your brain isn’t a passive receiver of images from your eyes. Instead, you choose what to perceive. While driving and talking on a cell phone, how much of your world do you miss? The research findings suggest you could have your eyes wide open, but fail to see the car, the bike, or the deer about to cross your path.

In the late 1970s Richard Haines at NASA was testing heads-up displays on commercial airliners. His research showed how the unexpected doesn’t jump out at you, not even when you are in a situation where your senses are on alert. A heads-up display is a semitransparent glowing series of images that appear as if they float between the pilot and the windshield of the cockpit. The display was meant to keep pilots looking through the windshield at all times instead of diverting their attention to the control panels below. Haines tested the display in a flight simulator where he had pilots practice landing with its assistance. He found when it was turned on, the pilots took longer to react to the sight of another plane on the runway, and some even missed it completely. The pilots were paying so much attention to the new technology, they missed something that before would have been hard to miss. The technology designed to help them actually hurt them. The more your attention is engaged, the less you expect something out of the ordinary and the less prone you are to see it even when lives could be at stake.

One strange twist on this research comes from Richard Nisbett and Hanna-Faye Chua at the University of Michigan. In 2005, they showed people who grew up in Western cultures and people from East Asian cultures photos with one object as the focus of the action surrounded by interesting backgrounds. When they tracked their eye movements, they discovered the Western observers tended to ignore the background and fixate on the focal object, while the Asian subjects took in everything. If the image was a jet flying over mountains, Western eyes more quickly darted to the airplane and then spent more time examining it. A similar experiment at the University of Alberta had Westerners and Japanese subjects watch cartoons with one character in the foreground and four in the background. The study showed that the Japanese subjects spent 15 percent of their time looking at the background characters, while the Westerners spent 5 percent of theirs. The research into cultural cognition is new, but these studies suggest that Western culture is less concerned with context and more concerned with the center of attention, which means it is possible Westerners are more susceptible to both change blindness and inattentional blindness.