People Will Give Directions to a Stranger and Not Notice You Swapped Them
Two researchers carried a door between an experimenter and a passerby, swapped the experimenter mid-sentence, and most people kept right on talking.
Daniel Simons and Daniel Levin ran the experiment at Cornell in 1998. A confederate would stop a pedestrian on campus and ask for directions. While the pedestrian was answering, two other confederates would walk between them carrying a wooden door. Behind the cover of the door, the original experimenter would step out and a different person — different height, different build, different shirt — would take their place and pick up the conversation as if nothing had happened.
About half of the people kept giving directions. They had not noticed that the human in front of them had been replaced.
The study sits next to Simons and Christopher Chabris's better-known 1999 "invisible gorilla" experiment, where viewers told to count basketball passes failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walk through the scene. Same lesson, different angle. The gorilla study showed that attention narrows what we see; the door study showed that we don't store the visual details of the world the way we feel like we do — we store enough to handle the task at hand, and refresh from the scene when we need more.
The people who did notice the swap were almost all from the same demographic as the experimenter. Pedestrians who saw a stranger as "a college student" rather than as a particular individual didn't have a specific person in memory to compare against; they had a category, and either swap fit. The finding has been awkward for eyewitness testimony ever since: you can talk to someone for a minute and not actually see them.
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