What are some examples of psychological studies demonstrating how people are less perceptive than they believe?

August 1, 2008 8:22 AM

What are some examples of psychological studies demonstrating how people are less perceptive than they believe?

I'm working on a story on the subject.

The idea is people are not nearly as perceptive as they believe, and tend to create false narratives and explanations without realizing it.

A good example is a study where a researcher shows a subject two photos of different faces. The subject is asked which one they prefer. At some point, the researcher does some sleight of hand and presents a photo the subject said they did not prefer. The researcher then asks why they preferred it over the other (the one they actually said they liked more), and then the subject goes on to explain why.

Another study I vaguely remember involved convincing people they had visited a theme park they hadn't actually stepped foot in.

Yet another involved interviewing subjects, then distracting the subject for a moment, swiftly replacing the interviewer, and checking to see if the subject noticed - which they often did not.

The common thread here is people will often explain their decisions or observations to others and themselves even when they have no idea why, or if, they made those decisions or observations.

Examples and links to journals, videos, blogs, etc. are greatly appreciated.

posted by Lownotes to science & nature (11 comments total)

Here's a lot of videos of various change blindness experiments. This is the homepage, there may be more videos and there's definitely more explanations.
posted by chndrcks at 8:33 AM on August 1

try looking up the phenomena of false memories. also, there have been plenty of research into the unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
posted by buka at 8:33 AM on August 1

Watch this video. Your task is to count the number of times the people in white pass a ball. Do not count passes made by the people in black.

Then, go here for interpretation of your results. Don't read before viewing the video, as it will ruin the experience.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 8:37 AM on August 1 [3 favorites]

Third person effect?
posted by k8t at 9:18 AM on August 1

Eye witness research is a great example of the process of implanted memory. Here's a beginning link
posted by hworth at 9:20 AM on August 1

Following on from buka, Loftus and Palmer's classic 'broken glass' experiment.
posted by ashaw at 9:21 AM on August 1

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (PDF)
posted by scalefree at 9:24 AM on August 1

In believe it's in the documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know?, where they mention that Native Americans could not see the first of Columbus's ships anchored on the horizon because they could not cognitively comprehend their existence. It was not until a shaman carefully explained it that the ships actually appeared.

Whether or not you believe that, well, that's up to you. But I, for one, do think there's probably a lot of stuff happening right in front of us that we don't see because we don't believe it can be happening.
posted by BirdD0g at 9:24 AM on August 1

Elizabeth Loftus is an expert in this area. I'm pretty sure she did a study where she planted false memories into test subjects, convincing them that they had been lost in a shopping mall as a child. She has done other similar experiments as well, and is kind of a "celebrity" with respect eyewitness testimony and the like.
posted by Shebear at 9:31 AM on August 1

This is a brilliant trick, by a guy who actually wrote a book called Quirkology that's about this kind of stuff (it also contains two examples of your theme And here's Derren Brown doing the interviewer switcheroo.

Also, I read an article the other day discussing how people are bad at spotting the absence of things. For instance, you present people with a series of three-letter strings (XJF, DMN, etc...) and tell them that some are special, others aren't, and they have to work out why that is. People are very quick to work out the pattern if all the "special" strings have the letter "T" in them. But it takes them many, many more strings to work it out if the reason a string is special is because it doesn't have the letter T. Apparently it's also the case that while you can easily train a pigeon to peck a button that lights up in exchange for some bird seed, it's almost impossible to train them to peck the button that doesn't light up. Sorry I can't find a link though!

There are counter-examples of this idea that we are less perceptive than we realise - if you deal cards in a logical but hard to identify order, and ask the subject to guess what the next card will be, they'll often start guessing accurately before they can explain what the actual pattern is. This sort of "good" subconscious phenomenon is discussed in Blink.
posted by so_necessary at 12:06 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]

I think the theme park example you're thinking of might be this:

The perhaps most sensational aspect of false memories was described by Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues (e.g., Loftus 2003) who demonstrated the ease with which fake memories can be generated. In a typical experiment they asked subjects who had visited Disneyland before to evaluate advertisements and answer questions about their trip to Disneyland. The first group of subjects received an ad about the theme park that did not mention any cartoon characters. The second group read the same text while a four-foot-tall cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny was placed in the room. The third group received a fake Disneyland ad featuring Bugs Bunny. And the fourth, double-exposure group got both the fake ad and the cardboard cutout. Afterwards all participants were asked whether they had met Bug Bunny on their visit to Disneyland and whether they had shaken his hand. A remarkable 30 percent of subjects in group 3, and 40 percent in group 4 said that they indeed have met him while only eight percent of the first group, and four percent of the second, thought they had met the rabbit in Disneyland. It seems that the mere suggestion of the cartoon figure, either in a fake ad and/or as life-size cardboard figure was enough to convince many of the participants of having met him-although Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. cartoon character and would never be featured at a Disney park.

posted by hades at 12:25 PM on August 1 [1 favorite]