One of the most audacious and famous experiments is known informally as “the door study”: an experimenter asks a passerby for directions, but is interrupted by a pair of construction workers carrying an unhinged door, concealing another person whom replaces the experimenter as the door passes. Incredibly, the person giving directions rarely notices they are now talking to a completely different person. This effect was reproduced by Derren Brown on British TV (here’s an amateur re-enactment).
I think the response of the passerby is quite reasonable, actually. Confronted with a choice between (a) “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions,” and (b) “I just had a brain fart,” I’ll consciously go for (b) every time, especially considering that I make similar mistakes all the time (confusing people with each other immediately after having encountered them). I know that this is probably not a phenomenon that occurs at the conscious level, but we should expect the unconscious level to be even more automatic.
...Confronted with a choice between (a) “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions,” and (b) “I just had a brain fart,” I’ll consciously go for (a) every time, especially considering that I observe similar phenomena all the time (people spontaneously replacing each other immediately after having encountered them). …
I didn’t notice until I read Swimmer963′s comment. I did remember reading its parent and did remember that it said something sensible, so when I read the altered quotation I thought I had understood it to be ironic.
A rational prior for “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions” would be very small indeed (that naturally doesn’t happen, and psych experiments are rare). A rational prior for “I just had a brain fart” would be much bigger, since that sort of thing happens much more often. So at the end, a good Bayesian would assign a high probability to “I just had a brain fart”, and also a high probability to “This is the same person” (though not as high as it would be without the brain fart).
The problem is that the conscious mind never gets the “I just had a brain fart” belief. The error is unconsciously detected and corrected but not reported at all, so the person doesn’t even get the “huh, that feels a little off” feeling which is in many cases the screaming alarm bell of unconscious error detection. Rationalists can learn to catch that feeling and examine their beliefs or gather more data, but without it I can’t think of a way to beat this effect at all, short of paying close attention to all details at all times.
If you watch the video closely, the camera actually prints out a picture of the old guys, so the old guys are clearly at least involved with the camera in some way.
Confronted with a choice between (a) “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions,” and (b) “I just had a brain fart,”
A man who’d spent some time institutionalized said that the hell of it was that half of what you were seeing was hallucinations and the other half was true things that people won’t admit to. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask him for examples of the latter.
I think the response of the passerby is quite reasonable, actually. Confronted with a choice between (a) “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions,” and (b) “I just had a brain fart,” I’ll consciously go for (b) every time, especially considering that I make similar mistakes all the time (confusing people with each other immediately after having encountered them). I know that this is probably not a phenomenon that occurs at the conscious level, but we should expect the unconscious level to be even more automatic.
I’m curious, why do you take that view?
Missed it on the first read-through, heh. Excellent try.
I didn’t notice until I read Swimmer963′s comment. I did remember reading its parent and did remember that it said something sensible, so when I read the altered quotation I thought I had understood it to be ironic.
Am I the only one who’s really confused that this comment is quoting text that is different than the excerpt in the above comment?
Shhhhh! You’re ruining the attempt at replication!
No. Maybe Mao is joking?
I didn’t notice at first, but only because I did notice that you were quoting the comment above which I had just read and skipped over the quote.
What a coincidence, this happened to me with your comment! I originally read your name as “shminux” and was quite surprised when I reread it.
If there’s some coding magic going on behind the scenes, you’ve got me good. But I’m sticking with (b) - final answer.
For the record, I fully endorse simplicio’s analysis :)
A rational prior for “the person asking me directions was just spontaneously replaced by somebody different, also asking me directions” would be very small indeed (that naturally doesn’t happen, and psych experiments are rare). A rational prior for “I just had a brain fart” would be much bigger, since that sort of thing happens much more often. So at the end, a good Bayesian would assign a high probability to “I just had a brain fart”, and also a high probability to “This is the same person” (though not as high as it would be without the brain fart).
The problem is that the conscious mind never gets the “I just had a brain fart” belief. The error is unconsciously detected and corrected but not reported at all, so the person doesn’t even get the “huh, that feels a little off” feeling which is in many cases the screaming alarm bell of unconscious error detection. Rationalists can learn to catch that feeling and examine their beliefs or gather more data, but without it I can’t think of a way to beat this effect at all, short of paying close attention to all details at all times.
And a sufficiently large change gets noticed...
Really? Did any of them refuse to give the camera to the new people, because they weren’t the owners of the camera?
If you watch the video closely, the camera actually prints out a picture of the old guys, so the old guys are clearly at least involved with the camera in some way.
Schizophrenia. Capgras Delusion.
I wonder how schizophrenics would comparatively perform on the study.
A man who’d spent some time institutionalized said that the hell of it was that half of what you were seeing was hallucinations and the other half was true things that people won’t admit to. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask him for examples of the latter.
Or perhaps fortunately!