Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab concocted an experiment that seems borne out of many hours of viewing Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Simons and Chabris wanted to test for the hypothesis that when we pay attention to detail(s) we often miss things that are obvious to others (the old can’t see the forest for the trees proverb). This phenomenon is known as inattention blindness—in other words, rapt attention on pre-determined stimuli can lead to serious inattention deficits for stimuli outside your attentional set. Enough of my yakking, let’s allow Simons and Chabris’s experiment to do the talking.
The duo showed a video of a basketball game with the crowd plainly seen in the background to test subjects. The test subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by players on the team wearing white shirts. At one point in the video an assistant wearing a gorilla suit (yep, you read that right) walks through the middle of the game, stops in the middle of the screen and then walks out of frame. Keep in mind, the game never halts and there are more than a few passes that occurred with the gorilla suited accomplice partially obscuring the action. After viewing the video, test subjects were asked to report the number of passes, (most of which did quite well at this task by the way) and then they were asked about the presence of the gorilla. Approximately half of all test subjects never saw the gorilla.
What’s going on here is two things, the first—the aforementioned inattention blindness—the second is a bit of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a fascinating concept from cognitive psychology that says that we humans tend to search for and interpret new information in a manner that confirms our preconceived notions while at the same time discounting evidence that contradicts those preconceived notions—the old liberal/conservative divide with zero gray area in between. We are all subject to confirmation bias to varying degrees of irrationality that may differ from subject to subject. Confirmation bias can be seen in the amusing statistic that approximately 90% of the US population considers itself above average in intelligence and above average in looks. It’s nice to like yourself despite the mathematical impossibility of the proposition.
Let’s bring inattention blindness and the confirmation bias to our world of interest combat sports, MMA, and street-defense. We, being human, often view data (fight footage, assault accounts, et cetera) under the sway of both stumbling blocks. The strikers often see evidence for striking solutions where it may not exist, grapplers often look for submission answers where they just may be inappropriate, and street tacticians may often try to apply certain concepts or strategies where the ideas may simply be out and out wrong. In our last two books NO SECOND CHANCE and THE ESSENTIALS we argue (in both the street and sportive environments, respectively) that we should not allow ourselves to shape our research but rather to allow the research to shape us.
We must be ever vigilant that inattention blindness and the confirmation bias may allow us to distort what we see (or don’t see) leading us down literal blind alleys causing us to train for contingencies that don’t exist, or apply techniques or tactics that hold little water in the real world. We must always keep our eyes open and look, really look at what’s before us and see if there is, indeed, an obvious detail staring us in the face that may aid our training. By being aware of our shortcomings we can better compensate for these stumbling blocks and see, perhaps a bit more clearly, just what strategies and tactics might really be called for in situations where our health and safety are on the line rather than simply retro-fitting what might be an outmoded (or completely wrong-headed) game plan onto a situation full of “hidden” gorillas. In other words, stop looking for favorite trees in a forest, look at each and every one of them and always be aware that there just may be gorillas in the woods—right in front of you.
