Expecting the unexpected will make you miss the unexpected
A recent study has been conducted by Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology and in the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, and it has proved that the people who are aware that something unexpected is about to happen have very low chances of noticing another unexpected event. Daniel Simons became famous when he released a clip in 1990 which is related to the recent study. In that clip two groups of people, each consisting of 3 people pass two basketballs. One group is dresses in white, and the other one is dressed in black. The viewers were asked to follow the group which was dressed in white, and to follow the ball which they are passing around. They were asked to count the passes which were performed by the members of the team dressed in white, but to ignore the passes of the team dressed in black. The video can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.
Half of the people however failed to notice that a man dressed in a gorilla suit passed near the people and was present in the clip for about nine seconds. The man, or gorilla, even pounded his chest while he was in the center of the screen. The phenomenon is called “inattentional blindness” and that is when we fail to notice something which is very obvious because we focus on something else instead. This is why most of the people failed to notice the gorilla, because they were preoccupied with counting the passes performed by the white team. The video has become an internet sensation, and as a result of has lots much of its effect. Whenever the people are asked to count the passes in similar clips, they know that something unexpected will happen, and as a result they will look for the unexpected thing, ignoring their task.
Because of this, Simons created another similar clip, which can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY.
The clip follows the same formula as in the case of the first one: there are two teams, one with black t-shirts, the other one with white ones; they are asked to pass the balls, and the viewer has to count the passes performed by the ones in white. A gorilla enters the scene once again, and most of the people were expecting for that to happen. However, once again, the clip has a twist. Since he knew that a majority of people knew about the gorilla, he wanted to try something else. He wanted to see if the viewers pay attention to something else besides the gorilla. He said that two things can happen: the first one is that the people will notice other events besides the gorilla because they know that something unexpected will happen, and because they know that the creator of the clip will try to put them to the test. The other situation is for the people to be mainly focused on noticing the gorilla and as a result they might not observe the other unexpected events which took place in the clip.
In the case of the people who have never seen the original clip before, half of them failed to notice the gorilla which appeared in the clip. In the case of the people who knew about the gorilla all of them spotted the gorilla this time. Even so, these people were not able to spot the other unexpected events which took place in the clip. Two unexpected events happened in the clip, and only 17% of the people managed to see both of them. 29% of the people managed to see only one of it. I’m not going to tell you what the unexpected things are, but I have to admit that I am one of those people who saw only one of the events. Simons wanted to prove that by knowing that something unexpected is bout to happen, you have very high chances of missing the other unexpected events. He said that even if the people knew that they will be fooled by something from the video, they will still miss that thing, since they are preoccupied with finding something else. Who knows how will he try to trick us next?
