“The Invisible Gorilla” by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
2010
320 pages. Audio: 9 hours and 20 minutes
Nonfiction

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The Invisible Gorilla gets its title from the famous experiment conducted by the two authors, who are psychologists. Since almost everyone has seen it now, I think I will take the risk of being a spoiler. If you haven't seen it you can quit reading here and quickly go look it up on YouTube.

I consider this book one of the big three “must read” books on the limitations of human knowing. The other two which, I am also reviewing in this series, are Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Of the three, this one might be the most enjoyable.

The famous experiment shows the problem of selective attention. When we concentrate on one thing we may miss a great deal that may otherwise seem obvious. Countless other experiments have confirmed that our minds are very limited in their ability to focus. If we are not looking for something, we are very likely to miss it. This is one of the reasons why eyewitnesses are often unreliable. They testify to something they didn’t expect to see, and they probably weren’t focused on it.

Not only is attention a problem, but memory is often wrong. Despite enormous evidence that memory is highly unreliable we still have a hard time believing that we simply remember something wrongly. In fact, the problems just keep coming.

Chabris and Simons point out that we greatly overestimate our knowledge (that is, we often know a great deal less about a subject that we think we do) and we have far more confidence in ourselves than our abilities actually merit. According to the authors’ survey, 63% of Americans consider themselves more intelligent than the average American. Does anyone see a problem here? Or perhaps try asking people if they are better than the average driver. Of course, the number who should say “yes” to that should be 50%.

The studies in this book are fascinating and entertaining, though most of the news in this book is bad. Our minds and our perceptions of the world are not nearly as reliable as we tend to think they are. Sadly, mere awareness of this fact does not necessarily make us right more often. Maybe the good news is that, if we cannot be right, then perhaps we could go for humble. Ah, those powerful words: “I might be wrong.”

From time to time I have used The Invisible Gorilla as a textbook in my introductory philosophy class. After my students have read the book, I often find myself having to reassure them that there are some things you can know and that human beings are not wrong about everything. But if I had to make the choice, I guess I’d prefer trying to reassure the humble that there is such a thing as knowledge rather than trying to convince the hopelessly arrogant that they might be wrong.

Needless to say, in the religious and political worlds in which we find ourselves, where there is little consideration of anyone's view but our own, this book is a crucial corrective. So read this book. Epistemological humility is a tiny but crucial step toward healing our relational divides and opening us up to the truth. After all, we might be wrong.