![]() Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. ![]() The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. Like my colleagues, I had trusted tradition and my intuition in planning my experiments and had never thought seriously about the issue. But I had never chosen a sample size by computation. My mistake was particularly embarrassing because I taught statistics and knew how to compute the sample size that would reduce the risk of failure to an acceptable level. Now I knew why: the odd results were actually artifacts of my research method. ![]() Like most research psychologists, I had routinely chosen samples that were too small and had often obtained results that made no sense. The article shocked me, because it explained some troubles I had had in my own research. A plausible explanation was that psychologists' decisions about sample size reflected prevalent intuitive misconceptions of the extent of sampling variation. The author pointed out that psychologists commonly chose samples so small that they exposed themselves to a 50% risk of failing to confirm their true hypotheses! No researcher in his right mind would accept such a risk. The topics I chose as examples are mentioned often equally important issues that are less available did not come to my mind.)Ĥ. (As I write this, I notice that my choice of "little-covered" examples was guided by availability. In contrast, there is little coverage of critical but unexciting issues that provide less drama, such as declining educational standards or overinvestment of medical resources in the last year of life. For several weeks after Michael Jackson's death, for example, it was virtually impossible to find a television channel reporting on another topic. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public's mind. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory-and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Our minds choose the familiar over the true: If you cannot remember the source of a statement, and have no way to relate it to other things you know, you have no option but to go with the sense of cognitive ease.ģ. The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true. People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase "the body temperature of a chicken" were more likely to accept as true the statement that "the body temperature of a chicken is 144 °" (or any other arbitrary number). But it was psychologists who discovered that you do not have to repeat the entire statement of a fact or idea to make it appear true. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. The fertilization of these three eggs had momentous consequences, and it makes a joke of the idea that long-term developments are predictable.Ī reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Compounding the three events, there was a probability of one-eighth of a twentieth century without any of the three great villains and it is impossible to argue that history would have been roughly the same in their absence. But there was a moment in time, just before an egg was fertilized, when there was a fifty-fifty chance that the embryo that became Hitler could have been a female. It is hard to think of the history of the twentieth century, including its large social movements, without bringing in the role of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. The idea that large historical events are determined by luck is profoundly shocking, although it is demonstrably true. ![]()
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