[Peace-discuss] humans / attention / and how little people notice

[John W.]

At 03:13 PM 3/12/2008, Karen Medina wrote:

>I think I've just seen something that helps me make sense of why people 
>don't see what is wrong with a War on Terrorism.
>
>http://www.dothetest.co.uk/
>
>This video has two groups tossing basketballs. Before they start, it asks 
>how many times the team in white passes the ball. So you watch really 
>closely. At the end, I was so proud of myself when they confirmed my 
>count, but then it asks if I noticed the bear dancing. It then rewinds the 
>video and plays it again. There indeed is a bear dancing through. The 
>point of this video is that people should look out for bicyclists. But it 
>really makes a very important point about what we don't notice.


That was fascinating.  I pretty quickly lost count of the number of white 
passes, KNEW I was supposed to see a bear, and STILL missed the bear.  :-)

The test definitely provides much insight into the unreliability of 
eyewitness testimony in criminal cases.  But I utterly fail to see what it 
has to do with people's attitude toward the "War on Terrorism".  NONE of us 
sees the war in Iraq, for example, because it's physically taking place on 
another continent, and it's not really shown on the news.  If the war were 
taking place in our own community, we would hardly fail to see it no matter 
what else was going on in our lives.

Or maybe I do see the connection, but it seems like quite a stretch.  Are 
you suggesting, for example, that Americans' focus on the injury done to 
us, as in 9/11, makes them unable to focus on the global situation from the 
so-called "terrorists'" point of view?  Or unable to focus on America's own 
role as a terrorist nation?

John Wason



>As Stuart Levy reminded me: U ofI psychologist, Dan Simons, studies 
>attention. His studies are really quite eerie.
>
>Some arguments Simons makes:
>
>    - People are *much worse* at noticing unexpected things than they 
> think they are. Training doesn't really help people become better 
> noticers, he reported. What training *does* help is for them to more 
> accurately understand their own cognitive limitations.  (This was in a 
> different context: showing films to people, and asking them to pick out 
> inconsistencies, the kinds of things that film buffs love to do, and some 
> say they do really well.  But even expert film-inconsistency-catchers 
> missed a lot, and people who *said* they did it well weren't really 
> better, IIRC.)
>
>    - Alternate cues help enormously.  In the movie he showed, somebody in 
> a gorilla suit dances silently on stage while the ball is being 
> passed.  If there were, say, even a little noise accompanying the 
> dancing, people become very good at catching on fast.