401. The Art of Deception: Recognizing and Overcoming Cognitive Blindspots w/ Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris

Welcome to episode 401 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Dan Simons and Dr. Chris Chabri. Ready? Let's get started.

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Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Dr. Dan Simons and Dr. Chris Chabri. They are the authors of the 2010 New York Times bestseller the Invisible Gorilla How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, which has been translated into 20 languages. They have collaborated on research for more than 25 years and they jointly received the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize, given for research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. They have contributed to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and other national publications and their work has appeared in science museums worldwide. They spent nearly a dec decade researching and writing Nobody's Fool. I'm so excited to have them here with me today to discuss their work from the beginning with the Invisible Gorilla all the way to the newly released Nobody's Fool. It's all fun and fascinating and a delightful way to kick off this next hundred episodes of the Brainy Business podcast really quickly. Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything, including my top related past episodes, all articles and books, including of course, the Invisible Gorilla and Nobody's Fool. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 401 Dan Simons Chris Chabri welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast podcast.

Whoa.

See, I was so focused on your names because of what we were just talking about that I've never been on a podcast before. I know. Or a broadcast or whatever. That sounds much more aggressive. What we have planned, I promise. So with that, I guess welcome to the show. Whatever's gonna happen, we're here for it.

Thanks for having me on.

Great to be here on whatever this is.

We're making it up as we go. We're going to figure it out. So for everyone who does not yet know you, the few people here, I guess, that haven't heard of you or your work before, can you share a little bit about yourselves and I Guess we can do one at a time and then how you came together to create all of your amazing work.

Sure, I can start. I'm Dan and Chris and I met in at Harvard when I was a new professor there, and Chris was a graduate student there, and we worked together on a couple of classes. I taught a couple of classes that he was a teaching assistant for. And then we jointly ran a laboratory class together where we had a bunch of undergraduates doing different kinds of projects with us. And. And one of the projects that's probably the one that most of your listeners have heard of before is one in which people are watching a video of people playing basketball and a person in a gorilla suit unexpectedly walks through the middle of the scene. And that was actually an undergraduate class project that we ran that eventually ended up going viral for its own reason. It has a life of its own. But that led us to collaborate for many years on both that phenomenon that's known as inattentional blindness. A failure to notice something unexpected when you're actively doing something else that's attention demanding. But it also led to us thinking a lot about how our intuitions work. So the thing that's most interesting about that is not so much that people miss the unexpected gorilla. I mean, that's fun and interesting and goes viral. But to me, at least, what's most interesting about it is that people firmly believe that of course, they would see a person in a gorilla suit. And it's that mismatch between what people actually notice and what they think they'll notice that I find the most interesting about that. So I think most of our work has kind of sprung from those joint projects together and then where those led.

Yeah, and I think it's a. I never would have thought that a class project would turn out to be my most cited paper and most well known work of my lifetime, you know, by a factor of two or three or what. So, yeah, you know, great ideas and great things can happen in any kind of setting. And probably we should, you know, be aware that they might be happening and, you know, not let them, not let them go to waste. Honestly, we didn't think that that would happen. When we did the study. We. I mean, maybe we should have submitted it to a fancier journal or something like that. But it was a little bit after it had actually been published in the journal that it was picked up by some media and started to get more public attention. We honestly did not realize how important and relevant it was, I think when we were doing it or how it would be how much importance and relevance would attach to it in the future. So it's hard to make predictions about the future. As someone. As someone famous said, if we had.

Known it was going to go viral, we probably would have filmed it in much better quality and not against this weird elevator background that was marked for demolition.

But I think that helps.

That's some of the charm of it, right?

It adds to it. Yeah, yeah.

You don't want to overproduce it. Then it won't look too, you know, it'll look too fake. But, yeah, that's the. That Dan has. Dan has the story. Dan has the story. Right. And I think the. That's why it went viral. It was because of the mismatch between what people thought they would notice and what they didn't notice. So that's really what caused it to become so popular. And for people to see applications of this phenomenon way beyond, you know, way beyond visual attention and maybe distracted driving, which was one of the. Or eyewitness testimony, which were kind of some of the original applications we were thinking of even, you know, while doing that work and other people in the field had talked about, too, but people. People, you know, related it to things way far beyond what we thought and really, I think, helped us realize that this was an illustration of a broader, you know, a broader, more basic problem with applying. Well, not with applying cognitive psychology or cognitive science to the real world, but with applying one's intuitive understanding of the mind and behavior to the real world. That there were going to be a lot of mistakes were going to result from that.

It's kind of interesting to see what catches on like this and becomes viral and has that kind of impact and what doesn't. I mean, the idea that people could focus attention on some aspects of a scene and miss others was known for decades before we did the work. In fact, our work was built to replicate work by Ulrich neisser from the 1970s. It was kind of replicating and extending what he had already shown. So. But for whatever reason, his work was known, but it didn't really have this sort of viral character to it, probably because it was done in the 70s and we didn't have YouTube and things like that.

Well, he didn't have a gorilla.

He didn't have a gorilla. That's right. And it's really those sort of, you know, idiosyncratic aspects of it. Things that sort of capture, you know, the imagination more, that can make the same sort of conclusions, have much bigger scope.

Definitely. And we will, of Course link to the video in the show notes the illusion. The. The trick of it, of course, being spoiled for those who haven't been through it yet when they're going to watch it, because you now know what's going to be happening. But with that, as far as the people to note the level of. It's not like it's saying, like, do this complex math problem and you aren't looking at the screen or something like that. Right. It's saying, like you said, people pass a basketball, but you're specifically said the people wearing white shirts. Right. So you're passing. You're watching that. And I believe there are some people wearing black shirts. So we're canceling out, like the things in black we don't want to be paying attention to. We're paying attention to the white T shirts and the basketball moving around. And because we're not doing that when the gorilla, which is also the same color as the other shirts, walks through, we're not paying attention to it. Even though it's, you know, and you go back, you watch it and it like stops and beats the chest in the middle of the thing where basketball is going by it. And we don't pay attention to it at all when it's really, really right there.

Yeah. And I mean, a large part of what's interesting there is that this reflects something that we do really well. So our failure to notice the gorilla is a consequence of something that we have to be able to do, which is to focus our attention and ignore distractions. We don't want to constantly be distracted by everything else around us that isn't what we're trying to do. And if we were, we'd never get anything done. So it's a remarkable ability that we do have to zero in on what we care about and block out the stuff that we don't care about. It's just every now and then there are consequences for that. And that leads into lots of other sorts of situations where because our intuitions are wrong, because we assume that even if we're blocking it out, we'd notice something as weird as a gorilla. That intuition leads us to do things that are dangerous or problematic in many other contexts because we think we'll automatically notice those really rare events. And we really don't.

Right. Yes. And that, like you said, I think. And whether, you know, having the video of this and like you said, Time of YouTube. When did the original, like, when did you post the original video?

Well, I mean, there wasn't really posting. The study was done in 1998 and published in 1999. So that was before YouTube existed. So we had a demo tape back in those days that we'd send to people. We had some online studies. VHS videotapes.

Yeah.

So we had some demo tapes that we'd sent around. We were, you know, some people were using it in classes. So it was well before YouTube existed. We didn't end up posting it till YouTube until maybe 2010. It was on some other websites before that, but, you know, personal websites. But yeah, it. It kind of went viral before there was YouTube and viral and TikTok and things like that that caused videos to.

Take off, which is amazing. I mean, it's interesting always to look back and think, what. What might it have been like if.

Well, it's a little bit of media coverage was a much bigger deal back then.

True. Right. Yeah, Different. Different time. Different. Different aspects of that. Very interesting. Well, and so I guess there's the question. Like you said, you didn't necessarily expect that your life and work would now center around gorillas. So I don't think you had too much intention of picking it, being a gorilla as much as it just sort of ended up with that. Right?

No, we. We didn't have. Even have a gorilla. The gorilla was in someone else's lab. Yeah.

That we borrowed. Yeah.

Yeah. Nicer. Didn't have a gorilla. Well, neither did Dan Simons have a gorilla.

Yeah, Now I do, but that's a different issue.

And now we all. Now we all do, of course.

But.

No, but that was in the lab of another professor who one of the graduate students who's in the video was working with. And so he, quote, as Dan said, he, quote, borrowed the gorilla suit. And years later, I recovered the gorilla suit when that professor retired and they closed down his lab. And I happened to see it in the closet, you know, of stuff that was getting thrown away. So I do have the. I still do have the gorilla suit decaying as it is. But that was luck, right? That was luck that Steve had access to a gorilla suit and thought to say, hey, how about we try the gorilla suit?

We thought about, you know, could we rent a bunny suit or something? So. Well, you know, I know this guy has a gorilla suit.

And so here we. Here we are. And we ended up with that, and now we can see. So, Dan, you've embraced gorilla life, right? I guess. Like, we've got the. Are gorillas now anyone's favorite animal or we just sort of.

It.

It exists still for us. Are we sick of gorillas at this point. Or we still like them?

No, still like them.

No. I'll play the greatest hits as long as people want to. Want to hear them? No. I have the same gorilla den does. I just don't display it. You know, I have too many books. So there's no space, you know, back there to actually have the gorilla. But there are little gorilla icons around from, you know, like various places around here.

I probably own more gorilla suits than Chris does too. And I've probably used them more in public than Chris has. But, you know.

Well, I also love that that spurred some, you know, additional research. So there's for that inattentional blindness on research looking at. And I don't want to like give away sort of as we're looking for a type of a, I guess a tumor. Right. Is that some additional research to talk about a little bit?

Well, there's a lot of work that's followed up on it. Some work by Trafton Drew and Jeremy Wolf and colleagues. Melissa Vo looked at radiologists scanning radiographs looking for a tumor or a lesion or something like that. As they're doing this, they would do things like insert an image of a gorilla into the radiograph and find that people miss it quite a bit. Believe it or not, there are a number of studies that have studied radiologists by inserting gorillas into radiographs, which is kind of a strange thing to do. At some level. It's kind of a nod to the earlier study. But there are also studies that insert other problems into medical images. And there's now not a lot of research. But there, you know, maybe a dozen studies or so looking at inattentional blindness in medical contexts. So whether or not people miss something that could be potentially life threatening, there's a lot of work. Most of the work in the literature these days doesn't use sort of videos of people passing basketballs because it's really hard to sort of systematically control that. And more often than not, we now use controlled computer based displays that allow us to sort of vary how similar the unexpected thing is to the things you're paying attention to and the things you're ignoring. So you mentioned that the gorilla is all black and that makes it more similar to the players wearing black. But it's not perfectly similar, it's not matched. There's nothing systematic about how different it is from what you're paying attention to, what you're ignoring. So a lot of our work now focuses on more systematically controlling those things so we can understand exactly what the Mechanism is do we notice things because they're like what we're paying attention to, or do we notice them because they're different from the things we're ignoring? Those are the sorts of questions you can ask now.

Fascinating. One of your other videos, and I remember seeing this years ago that I really liked, is where you're asking people if you can tell if someone is watching you, right. Or looking at you. Did you do that? Or where it was like. And there was someone like right behind.

You staring at the back of your head. Right. Dan, you did that? Yeah.

We actually had a survey that Chris and I both did, kind of a nationally representative survey. We did this in a couple of different ways. One was a phone survey with random digit dialing back in the day, and the other was an online self selection survey and found pretty similar results across the two of them. That a lot of people think that you can tell if somebody's staring at the back of your head. And we haven't published a journal article on that specific thing. But it's something that, believe it or not, has been studied for over 100 years. And there's basically no evidence for it, but people are convinced of it. And I think it's another one of those cases where our experiences mislead us.

Right.

So in the gorilla video, if you watched that video and you didn't notice a gorilla, and I never asked you about a gorilla, you'd continue going through life assuming that of course I'd notice.

Right.

Because you have no evidence of things you didn't see and you weren't aware of. The same thing happens with that phenomenon of somebody staring at the back of your head. If you happen to turn around and there's somebody staring at you, that's a remarkable event, right? That's, that's a big deal. And if you're staring at somebody and trying to secretly pay attention to them and they turn around and catch you, that's embarrassing. And you might think, oh, I could make them turn around. If you look around behind you and you see somebody staring at you, you've caught them in the act. That's noticeable. But if you turn around and there's nobody there, that's not a remarkable event. And it turns out that we look behind us a lot.

Right?

So the, the events that we happen to capture are the ones that kind of stick in our memory that are available to us. So we can take that as a spurious sort of relationship. We kind of assume that we're seeing something that's happening in reality. That's causal and we draw that inference really easily. That's I think, why people come on come to believe that. So. But a lot of people believe it.

It's a good example of the formation of lots of kinds of intuitions that, that, that many people have, for example, that they can have premonitions of things, you know, or that they can influence events by thinking about them. Right. So it's sort of the same pattern as like, you know, I was thinking about, you know, my friend and then suddenly they texted me, you know. Right. Which is like a coincidence. Right. Like the technical term for that is a coincidence. Although nobody really describes it that way. If they're a real believer in this stuff, they say things like there are no coincidences, which is something they have to say in order to preserve their belief that they actually do have the ability to control events or foresee them or whatever. You have to rule out coincidences. But of course, a lot of the times you think about your friend and they don't text you or call you or they call you when you're surprised or you don't think about them and they don't call you, which is most of the time. But as Dan says, the remarkable case is when you think about them and then they call you because. Exactly. That is, you know, a rare event. But if you only pay attention to the rare events, you think that they're. They're common or that they have some kind of causal connection, they have some kind of cause causality that underlies them as opposed to just luck, for sure.

Well, I wanted to note one. I'm going to link to Vanessa Bond's episode and her book of youf have More Influence Than youn Think where she talks about. A lot of these things we're talking about here, I think builds on this for people so they know that that exists for you in the show notes. And I feel like this conversation is the perf segue into a lot of what is talked about in Nobody's fool and the different area. Just even the boxes like you were talking about there. Right. Like what we notice and pay attention to and the boxes that we completely ignore. And however you feel like is the right way to move into the new book. Whether it's, you know, how this all came came about or whatever else, you know, it's your show to.

I'd say that what we've been talking about so far are cases where we think we understand how our own minds work and our intuitions are wrong because our experiences mislead us and you know, those are cases where we kind of feel like we have good intuitions about how our mind works. And we don't. But of course, deception often occurs when we think we know what's going on and we don't actually know what's going on. And it can rely on many of the same principles. So this idea that we're really good at focusing on what we care about, that's absolutely true. We're really good at focusing on what we care about. It's critical for most of our daily living. But of course, those looking to deceive us, whether they're scammers or just magicians or anybody else who wants to fool us, they're going to get us to focus our attention on the things they want us to see and not the things they don't want us to see. And take advantage of the fact that we're really, really good at focusing our attention. So the consequence of that is we only become aware of what they show us and not all of the things that they're hiding from us.

And they've evolved over time, techniques and knowledge for how to capture attention reliably and to hold it and so on. Like magicians, of course, would be the world class professionals at this, but three card money guys, you know, all kinds of people who want you to focus on what they're controlling, you know, and not what's relevant. And it can be broader than just visual attention, right. It can be like getting you not to look up inconvenient facts. Right. You know, or getting you to make a decision before you have time to pay attention to something else and so on. So attention is conceived a little more broadly here. It's more sort of like, you know, controlling the flow of information to you and making sure that you don't think about what information is missing, but what's missing from this set that I have in front of me. And also why do I need to make a decision now? Right? Why can't I just wait until I have, until I have better information?

So I think that theme, that theme that our cognitive tendencies that work well for us most of the time can be taken advantage of was really what led us to sort of structure the book this way. We'd been thinking a lot over many years about how basic mechanisms of attention and memory and perception and just our thinking and reasoning work and the ways in which we misunderstand them, but thinking about how other people can take advantage of those same tendencies without our realizing that they're doing it. And we're often unaware of the extent to which we're relying on these sorts of habits and ways of thinking that people can take advantage of and use to their own benefit.

For sure. Well, and here on the Brainy Business we're big fans of asking good questions, follow up questions, thoughtful questions. You had some really great advice and tips in the book about some questions that you recommend people be asking, which I think potentially is jumping ahead a bit. But like you said, you know, in the why I have to decide now in this moment. Because what? Right, like why, why are you saying I have to do this? Or like you said, the what are we not seeing? Like, did they actually answer the question I asked or did they say something that's sort of like the question that I asked?

That's a big one. I mean that's one of my favorites. And I think that's a common technique and sort of sophisticated deception, right? When you're trying to, when you're trying to deceive like smart people who maybe have some experience or something like that, or at least know that you're supposed to ask questions, right, Then you provide something that's not really an answer or not a complete answer or not the answer to the exact question they wanted, but you give them the sense that you've given an answer. And I would say, no offense to all the business listeners, but a lot of, I think a lot of business jargon sort of serves that purpose sometimes is to make you think that you've been told something useful and concrete, but in fact it's sort of abstract pablum, you know, in a lot of cases we did our due diligence, you know, we verified it, you know, it's authentic, you know, and so on. All of those words just sort of COVID up the important details of what exactly did you do and why should I trust it? My favorite example of this comes from the art, the art fraud, you know, world, which is I've come to believe after, you know, we've been working on this so much as is sort of one of the most fruitful areas for understanding deception. And you know, and even though not that many people are in the art business, right, like many more people are, you know, it's a little bit rarefied, you know, you need to have money to do it. But that's another reason why you have these sort of fancy deception techniques. So an art gallery was selling paintings purportedly by Mark Rothko, the famous mid century American artist. And if customers wondered whether their work was authentic or not, the gallerist would give them a piece of paper that had a list of people who had seen the painting or viewed the painting. And first of all, like, viewed. And there were some impressive names on there, including Rothko's son, who was sort of. I don't know if he was officially the executor, but he was basically the trustee of his father's reputation and legacy and so on, including his name. And it also did not say whether they had actually seen the painting in person or just seen a picture of it. So if you've seen a photograph of a painting, have you really seen it in such a way that you can even opine on its authenticity, let alone, you know, have you opined on it? So. But it was a very impressive list, right? So here's a list of impressive people. You know, organizations, you know, can go a long way, but you have to look. You have to then go further, right?

Yeah, definitely a lot in the. So it's interesting. I enjoyed reading your. The book just in looking at the. With everything, like you're saying, even with inattentional blindness, it's a feature, and there's always a dark side. And if we don't understand the other side, then it can become harmful. Either, you know, someone taking advantage of us, or we may unintentionally be presenting information in a way that's not correct. And we don't want to be doing that either. Right? But, you know, I talk about the benefits of framing, right? That how we say something matters more than what we're saying. But then we look at something like this and we say, these people viewed the painting just like, who cares, right? A million people viewed it or whatever, that doesn't actually mean anything. But we, like you said, you accept, you look at the list, you kind of skim over the words. I know in reading in the book, where you had the example from, you know, your editor saying to be reading the book backwards, to be able to find typos and things that potentially don't make sense, and of course not word for word backwards, but like one sentence at a time to be able to say, does this actually make any sense? Or is it. Do I just expect it to be this way because of what came before it? And so when you can get out of your own way, you know, in some sense, it can actually help you to spot some of these really obvious things and just even slowing down and saying they viewed it. But what does that. What does that mean? Right? And when someone's throwing out a bunch of jargon that you can Go. And I actually like some in the book, right? Like, and is that impressive? Like, is that a big number? Like, what are we, what are you trying to imply by what you've said?

One way that we're efficient and it's the efficiency which is the good part. You know, we can do things quickly. And so one way we gain efficiency is by doing things we've done before, faster, the second time and the third time and the hundredth time and so on. So reading the same text in the same direction, you know, you've probably done it before and you go through it quicker and without noticing as much, which normally is okay because you've read it before. But if you're trying to actually catch the mistakes or the deceptions, you know, then that's, you know, that's not good. So if you apply your like grocery store model of due diligence to million dollar paintings, you'll pick up the bag and you'll say it says organic. I believe that it's organic. And you put it in the shopping cart, you know, and then you, he says, rothko, it must be a Rothko, and put it in your art gallery shopping cart. That's not the right model for that. That was the efficiency, like getting, you know, getting in the way of good decision making there.

And I think that's really the key, right, Is that the vast majority of the time we don't get in trouble because of these sorts of cognitive tendencies. It's pretty rare that people in gorilla suits stomp through what we're watching. And there are times when it does matter. When you're driving at 60 miles an hour, a slight delay in noticing something is catastrophic. But for most things that we're doing day to day, it just doesn't come up all that much. And the same is true for scams and deception. Very few of us are ever going to be victims of a grand con. Right? There just aren't that many of those. Very few of us are ever going to buy a fraudulent artwork by a mid century master. It's just most of us aren't in the position to ever do that.

We should be so lucky.

Yeah. So I think it's really important to keep in mind that the vast majority of the time these tendencies and habits that we have work well for us. They're what we want to have happen. We want to be able to be efficient. We want to be able to focus on what we care about. And the key is, as Chris was suggesting with the apples in the grocery store example, is most of the time we don't need to worry about the consequences of this. Most of the time the consequences aren't huge. But when you're making a decision that is bigger, that could go catastrophically wrong, you need to be aware that you're doing it because those are the times when somebody who's looking to take advantage of you is going to rely on, on your tendency to focus and your tendency to be efficient and take advantage of that. So it's really being aware of the times when there might be a gorilla there that you're not looking for that could be a real problem for sure.

So if I can jump in, you have your four categories of kind of common places that are like the rules that we're using, that you lumped these into that come in. I think it's part of either two or three. I don't know how the numbers go in the book. I think it's three. But can you share a little bit about what those are? Just to give an example of the, the categories that come, that come up for the decisions we make or how people take advantage?

Yeah. So we have, we have two groups of four, and the first four are the, what we call habits. So habits are, I mean, that's what we've been talking about mostly so far. Habits are mental habits that are very efficient and effective and those include focusing. So the first one is focusing. We've talked about that quite a bit. We're good at focusing on something. It's great when we focus, but we have to ask what's missing when we're focusing on something, especially if it's any kind of interaction with someone else who's trying to curate what we see. And then we have prediction where we're constantly predicting what's going to happen next. And that leads us to actually be sort of satisfied when our predictions come true and lowers our guard. So many scams operate by sort of giving people what they expect and counting on them not to, you know, not to cast a critical eye. I think science fraud is a great example here. Like most science frauds don't claim to have discovered something completely new that changes science as we know it, but they have discovered the next logical thing, you know, in a step by step, you know, process of research. Something that everybody was expecting to be true but nevertheless seems kind of interesting and worth publishing.

Right.

And you can do that for a long time by giving people what they expect. And the third one of the habits is what we call commitment, which is basically a. Commitment is sort of like a strong Belief that you don't sort of don't even realize that is an underlying assumption that you're basing a lot of your decisions on, but might not be true or might not be true in the situation that. That. That you're applying it to. And one of my favorite kind of examples of that is when people sort of fall in with charismatic personalities that they sort of believe are, you know, more powerful, important, brilliant, you know, infallible, or something like that. And then they can wind up going down a very strange pathway where they will do ridiculous things at the end, which would never have made any sense if it weren't for the fact that they're, you know, being influenced by someone they've sort of assumed is infallible or, you know, so we have cults, you know, and all kinds of things like that. And then the fourth one is efficiency, which we've also been talking about, about the habit of, like, not asking questions. If we think we have enough information to decide. If a decision seems apparent to us, we make it, especially if it's sort of consistent with our wants, you know, and so these. These people coming to the art gallery, they may not have come that day to buy a $1 million, you know, Rothko, but they were people who were wanting to buy a $1 million something at some point. Right? They were. They were in the market. Right. So probably they're going to evaluate the information they get without asking, you know, the right questions, at least in some cases. But those are the four habits. And then part two is. Well, Dan, you should tell. You should. Yeah, you should talk about part two.

I would just say that many of the sort of grand cons that we read about in the newspaper all the time, things like the scams like Theranos, those sorts of scams, rely on most of these sorts of habits that we have. So they're giving people what they're expecting, what they're wanting them to get them focused on demos that aren't genuine and not asking, you know, how else is this actually being done. They're relying on people's commitment to the idea that the founder is somehow, you know, a miracle worker. And, you know, they. They rely on our efficiency, kind of our desire for this to work really well, really quickly, without thinking through what steps are actually necessary. So most big scams that last for years have to rely on more than one of these principles. And whether or not they're doing it deliberately, they are taking advantage of how we think. The second set of four principles that we talk about are what we call hooks. And rather than being sort of modes of thinking, these are kinds of information that we find really appealing, so appealing that we don't question them as much as we should. So those include consistency. And again, consistency is usually a great thing. If you can get the same result over and over again, that generally means you know what you're doing. But sometimes consistency is not what you'd expect, that you'd actually expect there to be more noise, more variability. So if somebody gives you a promise that they're going to get you 8% stock market returns month after month, year after year, with no big up or down swings, that's a lie. It just doesn't happen.

Run away. Is that the.

Exactly. That's a sign that there's a scam going on, because it's not possible to do that, that consistently, even though it's really desirable to have really consistent low risk returns that are much better than anything you could get from a Treasury. So that by itself is a brand new form of Ponzi scheme, the Madoff scheme, which promises excessive consistency, not outlandish returns. He kind of underperformed the S&P 500 in his fake, in his fake investments, but he gave you the same returns every single year with never a down year. And that was really appealing to a lot of people. So that appealingness of consistency means we don't ask why is it that consistent and should we really be expecting this or should we expect more noise? The other ones that other hooks that we talk about are familiarity. So we tend to be more trusting of things that come from familiar sources. And that again, makes a lot of sense. If you know somebody well, it makes sense that you're going to rely on them more because you know when you can trust them and when you can't. And presumably you're not going to be really close friends with somebody you don't trust at all. So if you have family or friends and they give you information, you're more likely to believe it to be true. But now many of us have social media friends in quotes who we've never even met. And it's very easy to take something that somebody passes along to you and say, oh yeah, they sent this to me and not do the diligence to say, okay, is this really true? Before forwarding it on to the next person. And that can lead to a lot of spread unintentionally of misinformation. The other two we talk about a bit are precision. It's really appealing to get a really precise number and we find it more appealing than we should. So even in advertisement, people will say 99 and 44% pure, whatever that means giving a really concrete number.

I loved this chapter, by the way. I love the whole book. But specifically, I was laughing a lot. I enjoyed this chapter a lot.

Yeah. And this is actually. Precision is one of those topics that it's really interesting how compelling we find it when somebody gives us precision, Even if it's pseudo precision or just faked. The idea that you can say something with a lot of detail makes it more plausible. A lot of scams work this way. So even things like call center scams where people will call you up and tell you you're in trouble with the police, you didn't pay your taxes, or you're behind on your car payments, and they'll give you an exact amount that you're behind by. And that's really not all that relevant there. But when you say it to the penny, it somehow seems more credible. They know more. And then the last one is potency, which is a slightly different character than some of the others, but it reflects our desire for quick fixes, for sort of miracle cures. One little thing that will solve all the problems, the number of, you know, the doctors won't believe this simple trick that does, you know, solves every possible problem. Things that work either way too well relative to what normally would work or that solve a wide range of problems far beyond what they possibly could. They're like snake oil that if you give people a claim that this will cure every possible disorder with a very simple quick fix. And we've seen the appeal of this throughout the COVID pandemic with sort of medicines that really have no basis for helping, you know, people claiming that antibiotics are going to help with COVID when it's not a bacterial infection. Right. That sort of thing has tremendous power when people think there might be this quick fix, this magical solution, and tend not to question enough in those contexts.

And I said I liked the precision one also. Really, the snake oil stuff was fun, too. Right. And saying it's like the problem's not necessarily with the snake oil sometimes, but with the snake oil salesman is the. The. The problem there. And overstating, you know, what's. What's happening. And so for everyone, of course, you got to read the book. There's so much great stuff in there. And being able to see even just like, difference between accuracy and precision of the. The ways to help us to see numbers for those of us that are not like, way in Numbers and stats all of our life. Like some other people may be. Right. That you're able to, to get in there and go, oh, I guess, yeah, that of course doesn't make sense to say that 99% of the time that would have been a home run or wouldn't have been a home run. But there are only 30 stadiums, so that makes no sense. Right.

Like.

You go, okay, okay, I get that. Right. And the like, when you actually do the math, it's legitimately impossible for this to be something that someone would say.

So yeah, and it's important to think you don't often even need to do the math. You just need to question whether there's any way the number could be that precise.

Yes.

And often it can't.

Right, right.

And it's not, it's not sort of a matter of like nitpickiness or something like that. Because I think what, what happens is like people who say things like this, they're not just getting their numbers slightly wrong. The, the baseball park one was sort of a little bit of an exception because, you know, okay, the real number was like 96% if he actually, you know, 96 point something percent. But people who are habitually saying this, I think, you know, we should probably tend to trust them less or question them more than people who don't. But that's the opposite of our tendency. Right. So it's not whether they got it off by 2 or 3%, it's what are they trying to do right with, with these numbers. Right. The numbers are slightly wrong. They didn't pay attention to them though. They, you know, they were more willing and you see this all the time in like these ubiquitous sort of social media influencer types. Like I, I 10x'd my productivity with like this 15 minute ritual that I do every day at 6:30am or something like that. It's very precise and specific. The other important thing about some of these hooks that we were talking about also is that a lot of, what a lot of them have in common is the fundamental thing you could think of if you don't think you know anything about statistics and so on is that in general you need more information than you think you do. So you need more information to evaluate whether you should really trust someone. Like it seems like you know them from social media or because they're a celebrity. But how long you need a really long track record, I think with someone before you, before you give them your money, especially a large amount of your money, or you need, you know, a lot of evidence that they are, you know, legitimate. Not to say that like, we should stick it all in the mattress forever because we'll never be satisfied. That would be, that would be the wrong decision also. But I've talked to friends who have said, oh yeah, I have. This guy manages some of my money. And I said, how do you know him? And he's like, well, I met him through someone else and he seemed good, you know, And I always wonder a little bit like, is that the right way to give someone your money? And you know, in this case, he said, well, it's not all of it. It's only a little bit, you know, and so on. I'm like, okay, like, at least he's limiting his downside, right? Like he hasn't given all his money. But in the case of Bernie Madoff, people only knew him because he was like, you know, one of their cousins, like, had some money with him, you know, and, and they were desperate to get in and then they lost everything.

They want to get in on the deal. Just like the crypto advertising is pitching this get in on the deal and pitching it through acquaintances who will say, hey, I did well on this. You should do this. And that's a really appealing form of marketing because it's relying on familiarity and urgency, fomo, loss aversion and the quick fix, right? The potency that, hey, you can invest now and make 50% by next year. That's a quick fix sort of miracle that we find really appealing. And kind of as a general rule, giant effects are rare. Things that have giant benefits are pretty rare. And things that have giant benefits from tiny little risks are non existent for the most part. So you'd be better off assuming that it's problematic rather than assuming that it's true.

Yes. Perfect. Well, again, thank you so much for just all your amazing work and for sharing about it in your books and for coming on the show. I do have one final question for you before we get into the, like, how do people get to connect with you and whatnot? Which is. I may have missed it. I did read the whole book, but there's a Trojan horse on the COVID and I don't remember you talking about one or talking about the Trojan horse in the book. So did I miss it? Was this my inattentional blindness? Was this just a, like, publisher put the Trojan horse on the COVID Like, I have to. I feel like I have to know the.

I don't think we can answer that question.

Offline. You'll tell me about it.

I Mean, the, the reference obviously is that these sorts of scams have been around forever.

Right.

And yeah, there are new scams coming out, but all of the scams that we ran across, across all of these domains, and that was one of our goals, was to look across the whole spectrum of possible ways you can be deceived and look to see what was common about them. And looking at these sorts of cognitive habits we use and the hooks that they draw on, they all tend to use the same sorts of things. So there are new variants, they evolve, they get better and better or more sophisticated, but they're still relying on the same sort of underpinnings to kind of pull you in. And that goes back to things like the Trojan horse, which was pretty prominent scam.

Yes, well, well known. Well, I mean, one thing I learned working on this book is that the, the phrase don't look a gift horse in the mouth is not related to the Trojan horse at all. But I think part of the message is you should look a gift horse in the mouth as just as well as you should not like bring the horse into your foyer, you know, and go to sleep at night or something like that and wait to see what happens. But there are, there is an Easter egg in the book, I think somewhere that I'm not sure anyone has actually like pointed out yet.

Okay.

There might be something to find.

Okay, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna find it. This is the like with. So I will, I will find it and then we'll see where, where it came up, if I can, and then I'll get back to you. And, and of course for our listeners too, look for the Easter egg, the Trojan horse shaped east Easter egg. That's definitely let us know. And when they find it, what is the right way for them to follow up with, with you to connect to share about it?

Well, they'll definitely know, but we're, we're both on social media and you can get more information about the book itself if you just go to my website, dansimons.com there's a link for the book there that has other information, links to other resources, other, you know, writing that we've done on this and so on.

Yeah, I'm pretty much on all the social media things, so people can tag me or if they have something nice to say.

Trolls need not apply.

Yeah, a lot of the times I get tagged, it's with like a crypto scam, you know, then that I have to block those. So don't do that, you know, But Any, any, any interest, you know, any other things. I'm happy to, happy to be tagged.

Perfect. Well, we will of course put links in the show notes for everyone, definitely for both of these amazing books, the Invisible Gorilla and Nobody's fool for and check out and to find you on the socials and everything else. And just Dan Criss, thank you again so much for joining me today to kick off this new century of episodes.

It's been fun. Thank you.

Yeah, it's been great.

Thank you again to Dan Simons and Chris Chabri for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I always love to hear a backstory and a career journey, especially when it comes to people who serendipitously found each other and wound up doing decades of work together. It's so fascinating and I love how when we look at the road from the Invisible Gorilla to Nobody's fool, on the surface it might feel like they don't go together, but when you dig in a little deeper, it's so clear how they got from one to the next. While I truly believe that most people aren't out to get us, there are some who are trying to take advantage. And the insights in Nobody's Favorite fool can help you to understand how your own brain's wiring could leave you open to being the fool and what to be on the lookout for. So you and those you love are less likely to be a victim. From phishing scams to Ponzi schemes, fraudulent science to fake art, chess cheaters to crypto hucksters and marketers to magicians, our world brims with deception. And in Nobody's Fool, Dan and Chris describe those key habits that make us vulnerable, like our tendencies to accept what we see, stick to our commitments, and overvalue precision and consistency. Their stories are fascinating. Some you're going to recognize, others are going to be new. They all have great lessons that are going to stick with you long after you finished reading. I highly recommend this book and of course the Invisible Gorilla. Check them both out, as well as related past episodes and that Invisible Gorilla video using the links in the show notes, which can be found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 401 and thank you again to Dr. Dan Simons and Dr. Chris Chabri for joining me on the show today to kick off this century of episodes. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast it's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.