Conjurers and magicians have long known how to distract people so they miss a move that should be obvious. But it is only recently that social psychologists have come up with dramatic demonstrations of just how tight the limits on our attention can be. One of the most compelling is a 75-second video, by the psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, that shows six male and female students, in black or white T-shirts, passing basketballs to one another. The observer is asked to count the number of passes.
About 45 seconds in, a person in a gorilla suit walks onscreen. She strolls between passers to the center of the screen, faces the camera, beats her chest, and then exits. You can’t possibly miss her—unless, that is, you’ve been instructed to pay attention to the basketballs. When each observer in the experiment was asked, “Did you notice anything unusual in the video?” about half said no. That’s inattentional blindness, the effect of competition for the observer’s attention: by looking for one thing, we miss another that should have been obvious.
The miseducation that U.S. drivers are receiving is not as explicit as the instructions to these students, but it extends over years and is in some ways more forceful: the legal penalties for failing to notice traffic signs are severe. I believe that U.S. traffic policies are inducing a form of inattentional blindness in American drivers. When so many drivers say, after an accident, “I didn’t see him,” they’re not all lying.