"The Invisible Gorilla: How our intuitions deceive us" by Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons is a book I picked at random while browsing shelves in a store. Turned out to be a good read dispelling my initial skepticism that was building up after reading the first chapter. :-)
Authors were Harvard University faculty couple of decades back when they ran an experiment that many of us have heard about on the media. They played just a one minute long video of students playing with a basketball in white and black shirts. They asked the test subjects to silently count the number of times the ball was passed between players wearing white while ignoring the passes between players wearing black. As it usually is the case, their goal was not to see how well people count passes but to see what percentage of test subjects notice a person wearing a full body gorilla suit that appear for 9 seconds in the video right in the middle facing the camera thumbing its chest! You can see the video here. Since you know, I am sure you will easily notice the Gorilla. But more than half the participants never notice the Gorilla and were quite surprised when they were told about it and shown the video later. You can try it out with your friends. Point here is that even if you change the conditions substantially, people won't notice things that they are not expecting to see.
I had heard about the experiment in the nineties and so after reading about it in the first chapter, thought the remaining book may be built around this same single experiment. But they move on to discuss how people, businesses, governments often miss basic/important points from the data they analyze and make decisions based on incomplete information, intuition, anecdotal evidence and so on that lead to disastrous consequences. One case in point is the subset of parents in US that refuse to vaccinate their children since they believe that MMR vaccine given to toddlers leads to autism in children though there has never been any scientifically proven connection between the two. This was caused by a paper published in Lancet in 1998 that suggested a possible connection between the vaccine and autism based on anecdotal statements by concerned parents of autistic children. Though as you can see here the article has been officially withdrawn, parents and some celebrities who didn't understand the difference between scientific randomized study results and anecdotal hypothesis, making emotional arguments on the media seems to have driven lot of parents to refuse vaccinations for their children. It has even resulted in small measles outbreak that has been successfully contained thanks to most of the US population been successfully vaccinated. But in non-US populations where the herd immunity may not exist, this can lead to disastrous consequences.
Similar ideas apply to businesses that make decisions based on gut feeling (Motorola's Iridium project is quoted as one example), eye witnesses who think they are 100% sure they are picking out the criminal from a lineup that turns out to be wrong, people mistaking familiarity for understanding (most people are familiar with toilet flushing, bicycle or zipper mechanisms and presume they fully understand how they work; their depth of knowledge is exposed if a middle school child forces them to explain the mechanism with a simple but recurring why/how), hedge fund managers making billion dollar bets, etc. In each case we overestimate how much we know/understand. Authors suggest caution and advise readers to take the time to see if the presented plan is based on proper evidence. In other words, understanding that Psych 101 concept that "correlation doesn't mean causation". They even quote, The Simpsons bear patrol episode clip to illustrate the point as shown by the dialog here. :-)
To give another example, there are claims that listening to Mozart improves your crossword puzzle solving skill that is "proven" by showing a small group of people listening to Mozart and solving crossword puzzles faster and faster over time. Unless trials are conducted to show that randomized set of people doing crossword with and without Mozart music in the background (while holding all the other variables constant) linearly improve/don't improve their skill respectively, it doesn't prove anything. They may be improving simply because they keep working on it irrespective of whether any music is playing in the background or not. But I do remember Georgia Governor Zell Miller in the 90's spending state money to play Mozart music to make the infants in that state smart. This was followed by the Baby Einstein, Baby Mozart DVDs sold by Disney, though as reported on this Time article, it wasn't founded in good science! Reporters in the media often in a rush to present the story first, don't bother to examine the test results to see if they are from a test run correctly. They present the result in a sensational & simplistic way and don't bother to report later if the findings are disputed as it doesn't bring in ratings.
It is an academic lite book that is easy to read while not being all fluff. :-)
-sundar.
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