Stay Informed!

Posted on 02/18/2010 @ 11:47 AM

Mindy Hernandez, Founder, One Decision

Before we begin, if you want to experience the interesting psychological phenomenon this post will be discussing, then watch the video below and test yourself before reading on and checking out the second video.  It's short and worth it.

For those who would rather read about the phenomenon, just skip to the text below. 

Awareness Test Video

OK- let's continue...

While we may think that we're capable of taking in and analyzing all of the information around us, reality is often different. The video below is a great example of our limited capacity to take in every aspect of our environment- especially when our attention is claimed by another task. The limits of our attention are not the real problem, however. The danger is that we often fail to recognize our attentional limits so that when something escapes us--even something as big and strange as a gorilla-- our first instinct may be to deny it, reject it, or come up with some other explanation. In the video below, note the experiment participants' initial response to the gorilla-- a wave of "no way!","that didn't happen!" and "they must have switched the tapes!"

Inattention and the Gorilla Video

How does the lesson of inattentional blindness relate to the real world? Here are some (untested) thoughts:  Many non-profit programs work very hard to motivate low-income clients at free tax prep sites to take advantage of a variety of helpful programs like food stamps or Children's health insurance and products like savings bonds in which some of their tax refunds could be invested.  By and large, these efforts produce very modest results. There are likely a variety of reasons for this (perhaps I know my money is better spent paying off debt, or my EITC refund has already been spent in my mind on a few precious items). But it is also possible that these offers made at the tax prep site- sometimes with attractive interest or matching rates on savings accounts- are like the gorilla in the background. Our attention at tax time is on one thing: how much will our return be? (well, maybe also: and how quickly can I get out of this crowded office?) So information about anything else is basically lost-- it's not that people are hearing and rejecting offers but that they are not really processing them at all. Or, perhaps, that those offers have to be very big and attention grabbing to get through.

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