What strange realities are you missing? (Image: Graphic House/Archive Photos/Getty)
See for yourself in our gallery: “Invisible: How to see hidden truths in a picture“
You only see what your mind wants you to see, and this exerts a profound influence on your behaviour
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TAKE a look around you. Whatever you see – be it an office, your living room, a crowded train carriage – you might well think you’re getting the whole picture. Yet the mind has a strange way of filtering the information hitting your retina, hiding even what’s in plain sight.
The most shocking events can easily pass under your mental radar without you as much as raising an eyebrow. But just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t affect your behaviour. These small unnoticed cues can direct your future actions and set you on a course you have no idea you are taking. So why did our mind evolve like this, and should we be worried about all those details that we’re missing?
Recognition of the mind’s “blinkers” first emerged from a classic experiment in the 1970s. Volunteers were asked to watch a video of people passing a basketball and to count the number of passes. While they were busy tallying up, a surprising number failed to see a person walk into the middle of the court – dressed as a gorilla.
It sounds unlikely, but the experiment has been repeated many times. How can we possibly miss a hairy ape right under our noses? In fact, this phenomenon, dubbed inattentional blindness, is crucial for our survival. Because our senses are continually bombarded with information, our brains have developed a mental framework to help us home in on the sights, sounds and other stimuli that it deems most important.
“If we didn’t have those conceptual frameworks, we’d be trying to process so much information we’d never be able to cope,” says George Slavich, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. So we have evolved to direct our attention in the most efficient way possible – but there’s a trade-off. “When things happen that are relatively rare, we often tend not to notice them,” he says.
In some cases, inattentional blindness can have much more serious consequences than missing a gorilla in our midst. In one study last year, 83 per cent of surgeons instructed to check X-rays for lung nodules failed to notice an image of a gorilla embedded in the scan (). If gorillas go unseen, what unexpected medical signs are doctors missing?
“83 per cent of surgeons failed to see an image of a gorilla embedded in an X-ray scan”
Intriguingly, some of those neglected bits of information still shape our behaviour. This effect is known as priming. The idea has come under heavy fire after attempts to replicate several key findings ended in disaster. Priming may not be straightforward, but that does not mean it doesn’t exist, as one recent study rather amusingly showed. Stéphane Doyen from the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and his colleagues set out to test the results of a classic study by John Bargh, which had shown that people exposed to words associated with old age, like “bingo”, “lonely” and “grey”, tended to walk more slowly. Doyen’s automatic, computerised recordings failed to spot any difference in walking speed, however – a find that would seem to question the entire idea of priming. Yet Doyen then revealed that something more subtle may have been going on in Bargh’s study, if you instead look at the expectations of the experimenters, and not the subjects. This time, the experiments were led by students who either did or didn’t know the priming effect; when they did know about it, the subjects exposed to the “old” words actually slowed down. For this reason, Doyen .
Hidden in plain sight
Bargh’s and Doyen’s findings have been widely debated, but many other studies show that when priming is harnessed correctly, the phenomenon can have powerful effects in the real world. Gary Latham, an organisational psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and doctoral student Amanda Shantz recently assigned fund-raising, call-centre employees to two groups. Each group received written instructions for speaking to potential donors, but one group’s instruction sheet also showed a photo of a person winning a race (). “Much to my astonishment, the group that saw the photo raised significantly more money than the control group,” Latham says.
He was so surprised that he ran the experiment again in another call centre. And then another. Each time, primed workers raised more money than their unprimed counterparts. Importantly, almost every time Latham asked the employees what effect the picture had on their performance, he got the same response: “What picture?” The photo had influenced them on a purely subconscious level. There are many similar results; one paper showed that subtle cues related to .
Priming seems to be particularly important for guiding our attention. For instance, if you’ve just seen the word “doctor”, you’re likely to spot the word “nurse” more quickly than the word “table” when strings of letters are flashed before you.
That means that with the right kind of priming, you might counteract the effects of inattentional blindness. Like an airport ground crew directing a plane to the right gate, priming might help guide our minds toward the details that matter. Slavich, for instance, has showed more than 1500 students a vintage photograph of a city street. At the centre of the image is a woman in mid-air, accidentally captured by the photographer as she jumped to her death.
When the students viewed the photo for a few seconds, only 2 per cent noticed the woman – as might be expected from the work on inattentional blindness. Even when Slavich instructed them to look for animate objects or unusual events, viewers still missed her. But when the students read a story about a depressed woman first, the recognition rate increased to 12 per cent. Although the number was still low, the result suggests that our subconscious mind is actively taking stock of all that goes on around us to direct our limited attention to the events that matter most to our past experience. Such findings are ringing alarm bells.
“It’s troubling to realise how easily goals can be implanted without us being aware of it,” Latham says. “I think the CIA is probably watching this stuff very closely.” At least officially, however, priming is only being used for benign effects: The UK and US governments have set up a “nudge unit” to see if well-placed primes could increase the effectiveness of health campaigns, for instance. Researchers in the Netherlands have found, for example, that when dieters passed a poster advertising low-calorie recipes as they entered a butcher shop, they were less likely to accept free snacks. Others are hoping that priming could be employed to boost the benefits of drugs – through a mechanism akin to the placebo effect.
Smoking gun
The big question is this: when does priming work and when does it fall flat? Anyone hoping to prod us towards a healthier lifestyle will need to be aware of the treacherous twists of the subconscious mind. Graduate student Brian D. Earp at the University of Oxford and his colleagues recently showed smokers photos of scenes that contained inconspicuous “no smoking” signs or no signs at all. In a follow-up task, those who on a computer screen than those who hadn’t. This suggests the smokers had been cued to think about lighting up.
Negating a concept is an extra step for the brain, Earp explains. So when a smoker sees “no smoking”, her first thought is “smoking”. Although this was just a small pilot study, anyone hoping to nudge our behaviour should do so carefully.
Clearly, we are only beginning to understand the strings that subtly pull and push the course of our lives. “We’re constantly being nudged in one direction or another,” Earp says. “Sometimes we’re aware of it, and sometimes not.”
Read more: “The invisible issue: The world as you don’t see it“
This article appeared in print under the headline “Your cheating brain”
