Sometimes we focus so hard on something we think is
important, we become oblivious to significant events right under our noses.
This is the idea behind The Invisible Gorilla, a book based on a series of
experiments by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.
The centrepiece of their work is a short film in which two
teams of three people pass a basketball between them. Viewers are instructed to
count the number of times the team in white passes the ball. About half the
people who watch the film are concentrating so hard on the white team, they
fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit enter the scene, stop to beat their
chest in the middle of the screen, then stroll casually out of shot. Those who
spot the gorilla are usually caught-out by more subtle experiments with
similarly obvious tricks.
The experiments are among the many that begin to help us
understand how investors behave and they suggest that people are easily seduced
by glamorous investment stories that dominate the news. Right now, for example,
all eyes are on the US and how people are reacting to public sector workers
being sent home. That’s the ball-passing game people are fixed on and so pages
of analysis suggest what impact it will have on the economy, the dollar,
interest rates and Wall Street. Yet this focus on the ever-changing headlines
is often at the expense of more important slow-burning truths – the biggest
perhaps being that holding on to a well-balanced mix of investments is
generally more successful than endlessly chasing the news. This is the gorilla
that people miss.
Sometimes we are smart-witted creatures capable of great
feats of intelligence. But other times, much of our behaviour is governed by
instincts that were hard-wired into our brains tens of thousands of years ago.
This means that, sometimes, we fail to spot the gorilla.
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