by Paul Dolan
The missing gorilla
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at Harvard University conducted one of the most famous experiments on attention with the help of an “invisible gorilla.” They made a short film of two teams of their students, dressed in either black or white, who passed a basketball back and forth between themselves. They then asked students from around campus to watch the video and count how many passes the players dressed in white made. After the experiment, the participants were asked if they had seen anything unusual or odd during the video, or if they’d seen anyone other than the players. More than half of the participants had failed to notice a large furry gorilla walking directly through the teams passing the basketball back and forth; they were shocked when they rewatched the video to find out that they had not noticed something that was now very obvious. Because the participants were paying attention to counting the number of passes the players made, they did not attend to the gorilla at all.7 I did this task when I was at Princeton before I knew about the results and did not notice the gorilla, and I was just as shocked as the Harvard students to find out that I had missed it completely.
Radiologists trained in the art of detecting a different kind of invisible gorilla—cancerous tumors—also failed to notice a small picture of a gorilla when it was placed in the upper corner of a CT lung scan. These specialists, trained in seeing the unusual, missed out on the extraordinarily unusual. They still did better than nonspecialists, though: 20 percent of radiologists said they saw the gorilla in the scan compared to no one from a general public sample.8
Now, gorillas may not often cross your path, but here they are simply standing in for anything out of the ordinary that many people should notice but fail to. These experiments illustrate powerfully that when you attend to one aspect of your environment you do not attend to another. This can lead to situational blindness, whereby you are so focused on one aspect of your environment that you fail to notice the bigger picture. This is most frequently discussed in the aviation and medical sectors to describe the causes of errors made by pilots and surgeons when they miss crucial information in their environment.9
In 2005, Elaine Bromiley was undergoing a routine operation on her nasal passages at a UK hospital when she suffered unusual complications that stopped her breathing. The medics involved in treating her were so overly focused on attempting to clear her airway that they did not perform emergency surgery to open it, which would have saved her life. This mistake occurred even with the appropriate medical specialists and equipment in the room.10 Elaine Bromiley’s husband, Martin Bromiley, a commercial pilot, investigated the circumstances of her death and concluded that the procedures used by the airline industry to respond to emergencies could also be applied to medicine to reduce human error.
Pilots have relied on routine checklists to improve their situational awareness for quite a while. The checklists contain some quite simple information but serve to ensure that the cabin crew have a complete picture of the factors associated with airline safety. Thanks to the efforts of Martin Bromiley and some pretty compelling and robust evidence that medical checklists literally save lives, they’re now increasingly used in hospitals around the world. They contain some glaringly obvious but sometimes overlooked items such as checking the patient’s name.
Situational awareness is an issue in any environment, not just the operating theater and cockpit. Research shows that drivers who use adaptive cruise control (which adjusts the speed of your car according to the speed of the car in front of you) report being less situationally aware, which may increase the likelihood of accidents when unexpected events occur on the road.11 Given this, it seems likely that all of us can be blinded from the obvious in understanding the causes of our happiness. Nothing is ever that obvious.
Above and below the surface
The foregoing discussion suggests that you might automatically pay more attention to some stimuli than to others. It was actually recognized 150 years ago that a great deal of perception, memory, and behavior occurs without conscious deliberation or will.12 We therefore need to distinguish between two types of attention. Conscious attention is when you are in some way aware of where your attention is being directed and unconscious attention is when you are unaware of what you are attending to. Unconscious attention encompasses the thought processes that occur while conscious attention is directed elsewhere.13 Understanding the distinction is critical if you are to give yourself the best shot of being happier for longer; and ultimately in being so without exhausting yourself through the effort of trying to be happier. Some of the time, you are aware of what you are paying attention to, and much of the time, you are not.
As with the intuition behind the production process of attention, my aim isn’t to be literal here. We don’t really allocate unconscious attention in any meaningful way—it just gets allocated without us having to make any real decision about what is attended to. But, as we shall see, you can consciously select the environments that your unconscious attention can roam in. Although you can’t consciously dictate how your dog runs around a field, you can choose which park you take it to. We are a lot like dogs in how we react to situational triggers.
System 1 and system 2
To get a better sense of the distinction between conscious and unconscious attention we need to go back a bit in time. The first stage of humankind, in terms of our evolution, is thought to be Ardipithecus ramidus, a four-foot-tall tree-dweller who lived about four and a half million years ago. He’s dead now but, to some extent, his brain lives on in all of us. We are Ard-wired, if you will. Much of how our brains work today owes a lot to our ancestors.
In more recent times, there has been an emerging consensus in behavioral science that we are all driven much more by the automatic processes of “system 1”—the hardwired bit of our brain—than by the deliberative reasoning of “system 2,” which is the Spock-like bit of our brain. The word “system” is used here as shorthand for two processing systems.14 According to my classification, unconscious attention is all system 1. There aren’t really two separate processing systems in the brain; it’s much more complex than this, with significant overlaps between brain regions. But it is a useful distinction for illustrating the different influences of context and cognition.
All of us have an automatic system 1 that is wired in pretty much the same way. It has not evolved differently in an East End boy and a West End girl. You may have a deliberative system 2 that is quite different from mine because of the cultural and other forces that shape us, and this will result in us behaving quite differently some of the time. But, even then, our system 1 is still reacting in a similar way. And as we’ve learned, context will dominate much of the time, making it likely that you’ll act just like this East End boy.
System 1 is always active and is constantly being primed in ways we’re unaware of. The literature on this is ever expanding. Take fast food, which has become a modern symbol for time efficiency and instant gratification.15 When we think about fast food, we feel and act more impatiently: show us pictures of restaurants like McDonald’s and KFC so quickly that we are not even consciously aware of having seen them, and we’ll subsequently read a paragraph about the city of Toronto fifteen seconds faster than people who have simply seen blank squares. Ask us to critique the design of fast-food logos rather than those of inexpensive diners and we can’t wait to get paid: we are more likely to prefer $3.00 right then than to wait a week and receive more money (anywhere from $3.05 to $7.00).16
In fighting matches at the 2004 Olympics (in boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling), competitors were randomly assigned blue or red uniforms. If the color of uniform were unrelated to performance and the judges’ assessments, there should have been a similar amount of winners wearing blue or red. But those wearing blue won about one-third of the time and those wearing red won about two-thirds of the time.17 Remarkably, then, competitors were twice as likely to win
if they were lucky enough to be given red at the start of the contest. Red is an aggressive, sexual color that “beats up” the creativity of blue, not only in the performance, but also in how the judges then assess the performance.
When wine shoppers pass by a display of French and German wines with French accordion music playing in the background, they’re more likely to pick up a French bottle. Play a German song by a brass Bierkeller band, and they’re more likely to pick up the German brand. Indeed, a study looking at just this showed that 70 percent of the bottles sold in the store reflected the music playing in the background. But when asked, only 14 percent of the shoppers said that the music was what influenced their purchase.18
The sharp rise in our understanding of unconscious processes has led to many books on the subject and opened up a wealth of new possibilities.19 One prospect I find amazing is encrypting computers with passcodes that are embedded in the unconscious mind but that are not accessible by conscious thought.20 The research evidence has even led some to question whether conscious thought has any influence on behavior at all.21 This might be an overstatement, but the causal role of conscious thought has certainly been overstated.22
One thing is for sure. Our brains are lazy and want to conserve attentional energy. Looking to automate behaviors where it can means that many decisions that start out as system 2 end up as system 1. Have you ever gone the wrong way to a meeting that is not at your office because you are used to going to your office? Or have you ever gone back home to check that you have locked the house properly even though you had locked up without realizing it? I have done these two things within the last week. And both came about as a result of my brain wanting to create a habit and conserve energy. A habit is a behavioral pattern enacted automatically in response to a situation where the behavior has been previously performed repeatedly and consistently.23 Why waste attentional energy thinking about how to get to work or whether to lock the house when you can automatically do both in the same ways every day?
Sports stars are able to shut out various distractions completely in order to focus only on the task at hand. They have to get themselves “in the zone” until being there becomes automatic for them. In a similar way, art historians are better able to spot a fake work of art when they transfer their wealth of knowledge and wisdom from system 2 to system 1, and thus make what appears to be a snap judgment.24 Ideally, much of what you must initially concentrate on to improve your happiness similarly becomes automatic in time.
The last thing that experts who have transferred from “slow” to “fast” thinking should want to happen is to start thinking consciously again. For stars in sports like weight lifting, golf, and snooker, thinking consciously about the task can lead to “choking”—freezing up and failing because of the pressure of the situation. In a weight-lifting competition, you would be more likely to lift a given weight if you were ranked tenth after the first round than if you were ranked first.25 The guy ranked first is the one to aim at; he knows it, and he often chokes as a result. Decisions can move from system 2 to system 1 and back again over time.
A quick task
The main message from this section and the evidence introduced is that the world is a complex place and your brain tries to make it easier for you by devising simplifying strategies to help you cope. We can see this for ourselves with things like the “Stroop task.”26 This is a popular psychological exercise that was developed by John Ridley Stroop in Tennessee in 1935 as part of his PhD dissertation. Stroop was one of the first to see how putting colors and words together affects the time taken to process and respond to them, although there were certainly other researchers working on similar topics around that time.27 I’ve adapted the exercise to black-and-white print but it works just the same.
Step 1: Name the colors of each of the boxes (black, white, or gray) as quickly as you can.
Step 2: Name the colors inside the letters of each word as quickly as you can.
It takes most of us longer to name the colors in the second step than in the first. In step 1, you can just rely on system 1, which automatically names the colors by association with their display. In step 2, your system 1 wants to automatically read the words as written instead of their color and so it takes your system 2 a bit of time to override this automatic tendency. By the way, as a nice example of the importance of context, the time taken on accurately completing step 2 of this exercise will be reduced when you have a full bladder: your system 1 is partly overridden by the urge to wee.28
Behavioral spillovers
So far, we have been implicitly considering each behavior or attentional process, and their effects on happiness, in isolation. But no action or thought sits in a vacuum: there are often significant spillover effects from one context to the next. So you need to consider not only what you do and feel now but also what effect your current actions and feelings might have on what you do and feel next. These spillovers are brought about by the allocation of conscious and unconscious attention.
Like ripples on a pond
I first thought about spillover effects when I was working with the UK government to consider behavior change policies. I was presented with some evidence that enlarging the front compartment of a supermarket cart leads to increased sales of fruit and vegetables. The policy wonk that told me was very excited. I was excited to know if these increased sales led to increased consumption of fruit and veg. “What do you mean?” he said. Well, I have never seen a Mars bar rot in the fridge but, as the comedian Eddie Izzard can tell you better than I can, it is never the right time to eat a pear. So these extra sales of fruit and veg might simply mean more waste.
Okay, let’s assume that at least some of it does get eaten. My next question was, “Does the consumption of more fruit and veg lead to healthier lives or does it simply give people license to eat more Mars bars?” Remarkably, we do not know the answer to this question. But after you have read the next few paragraphs, you might well conclude (as I have) that the increased consumption of fruit and veg that has taken place in recent years, in the UK at least, has probably led to weight gain and not weight loss, as people (unconsciously) reward themselves with a piece of cake for having eaten an apple. To inform research, policy, and our own choices, we should ideally capture all the ripples of behavior when a pebble of behavior change intervention is thrown into the pond.
Promoting, permitting, and purging
Inspired by the lack of evidence on such a basic question, Matteo Galizzi and I have developed a conceptual frame within which a broad range of spillovers can be systematically interpreted. We begin by assuming that two different behaviors take place sequentially and are linked, at a conscious or unconscious level, by some underlying motivation, such as the desire to lose weight (which is ultimately motivated by a desire to be happier). The first behavior leads to another subsequent behavior, which, so far as the motivation is concerned, can either work in the same direction as the first or push back against it. So you might start exercising to lose weight. This could lead to another behavior that also leads to weight loss, such as eating healthily. We refer to this as a promoting spillover. This is shown in box 1 in the table below.
But it might instead lead to another behavior, one that increases weight gain, such as eating more. This will happen if we reward ourselves with something “naughty” when we have just done something “nice.” We refer to this as a permitting spillover and it is shown in box 2. There is then a third class of spillovers, which we call purging, where the second behavior is motivated out of a (conscious or unconscious) desire to undo some of the damage caused by the first behavior. So you might eat healthily because you did not exercise, as shown in box 3. Finally, there is box 4, where the initial inability to exercise promotes the subsequent desire to say “what the heck” and to eat less healthily.
Second Behavior
First behavior
Eat healthily
Eat less healthily
A workout after work
1. PROMOTING
2. PERMITTING
I worked hard at the gym, let’s keep up the good work
I worked hard at the gym, I deserve a big slice of cake
Sofa-sitting after work
3. PURGING
4. PROMOTING
I’ve been lazy today, best not eat so much tonight
I’ve been lazy today, so, what the heck, let’s have a big slice of cake
To conduct a controlled test of the impact of exercise on eating, Matteo and I asked students at the London School of Economics to step onto and off a wooden box for two minutes. We randomized the students into one of four different groups: (1) paid ten pence per step; (2) paid two pence per step; (3) simply encouraged to keep going by the researcher at fifteen-second intervals in the two minutes; and (4) a control group that was asked to perform the task without further incentive. Those being offered the cash exercised more: about 105 steps in groups 1 and 2 compared to 90 steps in groups 3 and 4. Those being paid ten pence, or who were being encouraged to exercise, were more satisfied with their performance: about a whole point difference on a ten-point scale. All groups were remarkably accurate at estimating how many calories they’d burned off in the task: between 20 and 30.
