How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

Enlarge / Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It. (credit: Basic Books)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It's one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, "Gorillas in Our Midst"—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.  Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.