- Experienced basketball players are more likely to notice the gorilla in the original basketball-passing video than are novice basketball players. In contrast, team handball players are no more likely to notice unexpected objects even though they are experts in a team sport that places demands on attention comparable to those of basketball.45 Expertise helps you notice unexpected events, but only when the event happens in the context of your expertise. Put experts in a situation where they have no special skill, and they are ordinary novices, taxing their attention just to keep up with the primary task (1)
- Subjects in their study were led to a graduate student office and asked to wait there for a minute while the experimenter made sure the previous subject was finished. About thirty seconds later, the experimenter returned and led the subjects to another room, where they unexpectedly were asked to write down a list of everything that they had seen in the waiting room. In most respects, the waiting room was a typical graduate student office, with a desk, chairs, shelves, and so on. Almost all of the subjects recalled such common objects. Thirty percent of them also recalled seeing books, and 10 percent recalled seeing a file cabinet. But this office was unusual—it contained no books or file cabinets (2)
- Overall, 23 percent of all their decisions changed between the initial interview and the follow-up, meaning that people who said during the first interview that they would want a life-extending treatment said during the second interview that they wouldn’t want it (or vice versa). That people would change their preferences is not terribly surprising. Perhaps they had discussed the possibilities with friends, relatives, or doctors in the interim; maybe they encountered news stories about end-oflife issues. What is striking is that 75 percent of the people who changed their minds were unaware that they had done so! They thought that the decision they reported in the second interview was the same as their decision in the first interview. Their memory for what they had said earlier was rewritten to match their current beliefs (3)
- remarkably, just by knowing how confident someone was on the first test, it was possible to predict how confident they would be on the second test. Of those people who scored in the top half on confidence in the first test they took, 90 percent scored in the top half on the second test. Yet confidence did not predict accuracy; the more confident people were no more accurate than the less confident people. Confidence also was unrelated to intelligence (4)
- Other experiments have shown that confidence is a general trait: People who are highly confident of their skills in one domain, such as visual perception, also tend to be highly confident of their skills in other domains, such as memory (5)
- identical twins are more similar to each other in how confident they are of their own abilities than are fraternal twins (6)
- In one of these tapes, the doctor just said, “You have nothing to lose,” and went ahead with the prescription. In another, he consulted a reference book before writing the prescription. The patients viewing these videos found the confident doctors most satisfying, and they rated the one who looked in a book to be the least satisfying of all. (7)
- Not surprisingly, subjects who had viewed the criminal only briefly were more than twice as likely to make an incorrect selection from the lineup as those who viewed the perpetrator for a long time. Yet they were nearly as confident in their selection as those who saw the perpetrator for a long time. The most interesting part of this experiment wasn’t the finding of overconfidence, which had been demonstrated before. After selecting a person from the lineup and judging their confidence in their selection, the subjects were then “cross-examined” by another experimenter who had no information about which choice they had made or how confident they were. Videotapes of these crossexaminations were shown to a new group of subjects—the “jurors”—who were asked to judge whether the witness had made an accurate identification. The jurors trusted the selections of highly confident witnesses 77 percent of the time and less confident witnesses 59 percent of the time (8)
- But the subjects rated the bad explanations that included neurobabble as more satisfying than those that did not. The neurobabble induced an illusion of knowledge; it made the bad explanations seem like they imparted more understanding than they actually did (9)
- Subjects who read the version with the brain porn thought that the article was significantly better written and made more sense. The kicker is that none of the fictitious studies actually made any sense—they all described dubious claims that were not at all improved by the decorative brain scans (10)
- what about those who wrote detailed notes about the suspect? They picked the right suspect only 38 percent of the time! The verbal information in the written notes overshadowed the nonverbal information captured by the initial visual perception of the face, and the verbal information turned out to be less accurate (11)
References
- The Effects of Eye Movements, Age, and Expertise on Inattentional Blindness,”, The Relationship Between Visual Attention and Expertise in Sports
- Role of Schemata in Memory for Places,”
- False Memories for End- of-Life Decisions,
- Individual Differences in Confidence Affect Judgments Made Collectively by Groups
- The Effect of Generalized Metacognitive Knowledge on Test Performance and Confidence Judgment, Individual Differences in Decision Processing and Confidence Judgments in Comparative Judgment Tasks: The Role of Cognitive Styles
- Heritability of Overconfidence
- Does Physician Uncertainty Affect Patient Satisfaction?
- Can People Detect Eyewitness-Identification Accuracy Within and Across Situations
- The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanation
- Seeing Is Believing: The Effect of Brain Images on Judgments of Scientific Reasoning
- Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid,The Influence of Interpolated Recall Upon Recognition