The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (35 page)
Read The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Online
Authors: Christopher Chabris,Daniel Simons
A more subtle concern is that the experts might not actually be any better at these cognitive tasks even if they do show better performance in the lab. How could that be? Some other factor unrelated to cognitive abilities might enhance performance. In his interview with Dan, Walter Boot raised a possibility rarely discussed in the scientific literature:
Video-game experts might perform better because they know they have been selected to be in the study based on their expertise.
Participants recruited through advertisements or flyers targeting gamers know they’re being selected because they’re an expert, because they are special, and they might be more motivated, more attentive, and have expectations that they should perform well. Because of all the media coverage, especially in blogs frequented by gamers, they know that they are expected to do better. And the nonexperts might not even know they are in a video-game study.
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In other words, the experts might outperform the novices not because they are inherently better at these tasks or because they have thousands of hours of video-game experience, but because they know that the study is about video-game expertise and that they are expected to do better. This sort of “expectancy effect” is a well-known issue in this kind of experiment. One way to address the problem would be to recruit subjects without any mention of video games and then measure video-game expertise only after subjects are finished with all the cognitive tasks. That way, subjects would have no way of knowing that the study is about video-game expertise. Unfortunately, it’s an inefficient way to conduct a study, because you might need to test many additional subjects in order to have enough who meet the criteria for a novice or expert.
Regardless of how the subjects are recruited, it is dangerous to draw any causal conclusions about the role of video games in cognition from studies of differences between expert and novice players—training experiments are essential to draw proper inferences about cause.
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Watch out for misreporting of such expertise effects in the media—journalists regularly claim that video games cause improvements when the studies they describe show only a difference between expert and novice players. Some writers have promoted the idea that video games have benefits extending far beyond increased attention or perceptual abilities—enhancing general intelligence, social ability, confidence, and logical thinking—with even less actual evidence for these claims.
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In promoting Brain Age, Nintendo’s website makes the following broad claim about how its products enhance brain function:
Everyone knows you can prevent muscle loss with exercise, and use such activities to improve your body over time. And the same could be said for your brain. The design of Brain Age is based on the premise that cognitive exercise can improve blood flow to the brain. All it takes is as little as a few minutes of play time a day. For everyone who spends all their play time at the gym working out the major muscle groups, don’t forget—your brain is like a muscle, too. And it craves exercise.
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As it turns out, the final sentence is accurate, but not in the way that Nintendo’s marketers intended. They meant to imply that cognitive exercise is necessary to keep your brain functioning well. In reality, aerobic physical exercise is likely far better for your brain.
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Cognitive neuroscientist Arthur Kramer, a colleague of Dan’s at the University of Illinois, led one of the best-known studies of how improving physical fitness can affect cognitive abilities.
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Their experiment, published in
Nature
, randomly assigned 124 sedentary but otherwise healthy seniors to one of two training conditions for six months: aerobic fitness, in which the subjects spent about three hours each week walking, and an anaerobic exercise condition, in which subjects spent the same amount of time doing stretching and toning exercises. Although both forms of exercise are good for your body and lead to better overall fitness, aerobic exercise more effectively improves the health of your heart and increases blood flow to your brain.
Not surprisingly, both training groups experienced the expected benefits to their physical fitness. The surprising result, though, is that walking for as little as a few hours a week also led to large improvements on
cognitive
tasks, particularly those that rely on executive functions like planning and multitasking. The stretching and toning exercise had no cognitive benefits. Kramer’s group also conducted a meta-analysis of all the
clinical trials of the effects of aerobic fitness training on cognition through 2001; the results confirmed a sizable benefit of this type of fitness training for cognition.
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The benefits of exercise are deeper than improvements in behavior and cognition. With age, most adults start to lose some of the gray matter in their brains. (This could be part of the reason for the accompanying cognitive declines.) In another clinical trial, Kramer’s group randomly assigned seniors to the same aerobic and anaerobic six-month training regimens just described, except this time, they first used MRI scanning to acquire a complete picture of each subject’s brain before and after the fitness training.
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The result was astounding: Seniors who had walked for just forty-five minutes a day for three days each week preserved much more gray matter in their frontal brain regions than did those who had done stretching and toning. Aerobic exercise actually did keep their brains healthier and younger.
It might seem counterintuitive, but the best thing you can do to preserve and maintain your mental abilities may have little to do with cognition at all. Training your brain directly might have less impact than exercising your body, particularly if you exercise in a way that maintains your aerobic fitness. The exercise doesn’t even need to be particularly strenuous. You don’t need to compete in triathlons; just walking at a reasonable clip for thirty minutes or more a few times a week leads to better executive functioning and a healthier brain. Despite Nintendo’s claims that you need to exercise your brain, it seems that sitting in a chair and doing cognitive puzzles is far less beneficial than walking around the block a few times. Exercise improves cognition broadly by increasing the fitness of your brain itself. And doing puzzles does nothing for your longevity, your health, or your looks.
conclusion
the myth of intuitionW
HAT DO YOU LEARN WHEN
you read profiles of corporate CEOs? You expect to find out what makes them tick: how they got to their current position, what inspired them to make the decisions they did, why their management style sets them up for success. And most important, you expect to learn about someone whose approach to business—and perhaps life in general—is worth emulating.As we discussed in
Chapter 4
, the only way to be sure that you understand something is to test your knowledge. Let’s do that now. Apply what you’ve learned about everyday illusions to this profile of business leader Larry Taylor. Some of the illusions will shine through, but others will be more subtle. See if you can spot them all.
Larry Taylor is on his way to work. A stocky man with a military-style buzz cut and intense blue eyes, he sits ramrod straight behind the steering wheel. Despite being the CEO of Chimera Information Systems, a privately held corporation with more than $900 million in annual sales, he doesn’t have a driver. It would be awkward
to have a driver when your car is just a Toyota Camry with cloth seats, not a Mercedes or Lexus with full leather and burl-wood interior. Taylor makes the forty-minute commute every day. En route, he talks with several of his top managers by phone, getting updates on software development projects, marketing plans, and sales progress—all before he arrives at the office.All you need to do is follow Taylor around for a few hours to see why his company’s revenues are growing at a rate of 45 percent per year, and why he was voted the most innovative and effective executive in the Midwest last year. According to industry analysts, Taylor’s arrival in the corner office in 2003 is
the
reason why Chimera has changed from a dowdy vendor of inventory-management software to an industry-leading developer of “middleware” for Web 2.0—applications that sit between a company’s public website and private data warehouses, managing communication between the two. Taylor’s next move will be to create software that enables even the smallest Internet retailers—the hundreds of thousands of EdsArgyleSocks.coms and eBay storefronts of the world—to manage their supply chains with the sophistication of an Amazon or a Walmart. According to Taylor, this is a $2 billion market opportunity that is wide open.Today, Taylor is talking to his chief financial officer, Jane Flynt, about Chimera’s quarterly earnings release that’s due in a week. Taylor speaks with the slight Texas drawl he acquired growing up in San Antonio. There is a pause in the conversation when Flynt steps away from her phone to ask an assistant to run some new analyses that Taylor suggested. At this moment, Taylor mutes his phone and explains the real reason he hired Flynt, who had never been the head of finance at a large company, over other candidates with Ivy League pedigrees and much more experience.
“It was almost two years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Taylor. “It was a crazy time … we needed to have a new CFO in place for the next board meeting, which was coming up fast, but I was traveling to see customers most days of the week back then. So I had them come in on a Sunday morning.” The four
candidates on the short list duly showed up at 9:00 a.m., in their Sunday best. As a final “test” in the interview, Taylor handed out laptops with PowerPoint installed and asked each candidate to prepare and deliver a five-minute presentation on why he or she should be chosen as Chimera’s new CFO. And he told them that they had to deliver their presentations to him
and
to the other candidates, in the company boardroom. “When I said that, their jaws all dropped at once,” Taylor recalled. “They all had to be as nervous as a bunch of cats in a room full of rocking chairs.” He gave them just ten minutes with the computers to make their slides. “I picked Flynt to go first, and I thought she would wet herself. But she didn’t. She gave one of the best speeches I had ever heard in my life. What I kept thinking about was how self-assured she was under all the pressure of the situation I’d set up. I let the other guys give their talks, but I knew right then that I wanted Jane, and when the interviews were over I hired her on the spot.”Taylor is renowned at Chimera for the quickness with which he grasps complex ideas and information. “I only need to read a document once, and I pretty much completely understand it, and I’ll remember all of the details, too,” he tells us. A recent profile of Taylor in
Inventory World
reported that “Taylor says that he knows everything about how Chimera’s products work, often more than their own developers, whom he sometimes embarrasses with tough questions about software architecture and standards.”He is a voracious reader—not just of company reports, trade journals, and business books, but also the latest science and history, and even an occasional vampire novel to keep up with the current obsession of his teenage daughters. From his business and science reading, he’s picked up dozens of ideas that he’s implemented at Chimera. To boost the inventiveness and productivity of his software engineers, he ordered their managers to play classical music on the public address system for thirty minutes every day; behind the music, subliminal messages exhort employees to do their best.
Taylor learned how to play poker in high school, and he showed a talent for it in college, quickly becoming the biggest winner at his fraternity’s regular game. After graduating, he spent a couple of years as a professional poker player on the tournament and cash-game circuit. Nowadays he finds his high-stakes action in the boardroom rather than the casino, but he still plays poker occasionally on the Internet, using the screen name “royalflushCEO.” Does his experience in poker influence his approach to business strategy? Is making a huge bluff to convince an opponent to fold a good hand the equivalent of making a risky but potentially rewarding investment in an unproven technology or market? “It doesn’t work like that,” Taylor says. “When I’m making a big decision for Chimera I don’t think about poker tactics. I think more about the broader lessons I took from the game. There’s a saying in poker that goes ‘think long, think wrong.’ It means that sometimes, the more you think about a decision, the more likely you are to make the wrong choice. I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book
Blink
, and it taught me that you have to go with your gut instincts, trust your intuition, when you’re faced with a complex, important decision.”Taylor relied on his instincts when he decided to bet his company’s future on the new logistics software for mom-and-pop Internet businesses. He’d learned from his reading that he was not using as much of his brainpower as he could be. His left brain was so busy analyzing every option in cost-benefit detail that his more emotional right brain never had a chance to take in the big picture. “I had two warring groups within Chimera on this launch question,” he says later in the day after coming out of a meeting with the project team. One group was gung ho for the new product, but the other had a laundry list of objections. Taylor had to referee and make the final call. “This time I told myself from the outset that I wouldn’t get bogged down in the specifics of the market, the pricing, the project timelines, and so on. Our marketing folks had prepared a profile of the target customer”—a
thirty-five-year-old single mother who runs an eBay business out of a spare bedroom in her house—“and I just thought about that woman, and how important her business was to her family and her future, and I visualized her making more money from that business thanks to our software, and I knew that jumping into this market was the right thing to do.”The product launch is set for the end of the year. On the drive home, Larry Taylor is a bit more relaxed than he was at the office, but he’s not completely at rest. He is on the phone again—this time talking to his kids.
In case it wasn’t obvious, the story you just read was entirely made up—100 percent fictitious. Taylor and Flynt don’t exist, and Chimera Information Systems is a chimera. We constructed this fake profile to mimic many similar articles we have seen in the business press.
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It’s full of commonsense notions, assumptions, and beliefs that portray Taylor as a somewhat unconventional, but no doubt successful, business leader. Realizing that the profile must be fake wasn’t the real test, though.We intentionally constructed the Larry Taylor story to spotlight the six everyday illusions we have discussed in this book. Did you catch all of them at work? Let’s look back and see where Taylor—and the “writer” of the profile—were led astray by everyday illusions:
Taylor starts his day by talking nonstop on his cell phone while he drives to work. We saw in
Chapter 1
that the illusion of attention insidiously makes us think we can do both of these things at once just as well as we can do either one alone.During his “interview,” Taylor gives an extremely precise recollection of how he hired his chief financial officer, emphasizing his own cleverness in announcing a surprise challenge. He may think he remembers the episode “like it was yesterday,” but as we learned in
Chapter 2
, our memories of even the
most salient events are subject to distortion—even as we remain confident that we are recalling them accurately.Confidence was an important signal to Taylor when he decided to hire his CFO: Jane Flynt stood out over more experienced, better-educated candidates precisely because of the confidence she exuded. But as we told you in
Chapter 3
, that sort of confidence is exactly what Jennifer Thompson exuded on the witness stand when Ronald Cotton was sentenced to life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.What makes Taylor such a good manager? According to Taylor himself, it is his broad and deep knowledge of Chimera; others praise his ability to grasp complex information quickly. But as
Chapter 4
illustrated, we habitually overestimate our own knowledge (especially of how things work), and we quickly make important decisions that we might profitably stop to reflect on if we realized how little we really do know.What’s behind Chimera’s recent success? The experts think it’s Taylor—before he became CEO, the company was an also-ran, but now it’s a leader. From
Chapter 5
, we can recognize the illusion of cause that can result from a chronological sequence of events: By itself, the fact that Chimera did better after Taylor than it did before him doesn’t prove that his arrival caused the improvement. Other changes to the company around the same time, or changes outside the company, like a general upswing in its industry, might have been responsible.The profile also reports that Taylor plays classical music and subliminal messages to his employees and has been trying to access the unused capacity of his own brain. He seems to be under the sway of the illusion of potential that we covered in
Chapter 6
.Earlier we mentioned that everyday illusions have a common characteristic: They all make us think that our mental abilities and capacities
are greater than they actually are. There’s another common thread that connects all of the illusions. In each case, we confuse how easily our minds can do something with how well they are doing it. In psychological lingo, we take the
fluency
with which we process information as a signal that we are processing a lot of information, that we are processing it deeply, and that we are processing it with great accuracy and skill. But effortless processing is not necessarily illusion-free. For example, retrieving memories almost never feels difficult to us. We experience the ease of retrieval, but we don’t experience all the distortions that happened to our memories after they were first stored. These distortions happen beneath the surface of our mental lives, without our awareness. We then mistakenly attribute the perceived fluency of our recall to the accuracy, completeness, and permanence of our memories. Fluency plays a similar role in our understanding of perception, attention, confidence, knowledge, and many other mental processes, and in all of these cases, we have seen that significant illusions result.
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