Two teams are passing a basketball to one another. One team is wearing white. The other team is wearing black. The teams have been instructed to count the number of passes they make.

Suddenly, a person wearing a gorilla suit walks between the teams, pounds his/her chest and walks away.

What has just been observed? Obviously, two teams passing a ball between them when a person in a gorilla suit walks in.

However, when the members of the teams are asked what happened, about half ask, “What gorilla?”

This experiment is recounted in the book, “The Invisible Gorilla And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us” by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.

In other words, the experiment suggests that what we see isn’t what we get because we don’t see very well. As Chabris and Simons note, we think we see the world as it really is but “our vivid visual experience belies a striking mental blindness.”

Even our memories are unreliable which is why even eyewitness testimony often turns out to be false (remember that horrible third grade teacher you had? Are you sure?). Moreover, in a surprising number of cases, the more confident a person is of what he/she has seen, the more likely it is that he/she hasn’t remembered it as it actually happened.

And our estimates of our own abilities are questionable since, as the authors note from a survey they did, 63% of Americans consider themselves more intelligent than the average American.

What seems to happen is that we can’t possibly pay attention to everything coming at us so we subconsciously filter out what we think is irrelevant which leads to errors in judgment and perception.

This has enormous implications for our relationships. Think about a person you would describe as “difficult.” Are you sure he/she is difficult? Or have you been paying so much attention to the difficulty that you missed the times the person was cooperative and friendly?

Or consider your relationship with yourself. How would you describe yourself? Are you sure? Or have you been paying so much attention to this way of describing yourself that you miss the “gorilla” of other possibilities?

The more we are aware of this dilemma, the greater the possibility of counteracting it. For example, when we are in a difficult relationship, we might consciously look for examples of the person being cooperative and reward the person for being so.

When we find fault with ourselves, we might consciously look for examples of when we live our values and ideals and give ourselves credit for doing so.

Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the spirit of this in his aphorism, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.”

Chabris and Simons might have amended Emerson slightly by noting that a man is what he thinks he sees all day long.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? LJBARKAN@THEPIVOTALFACTOR.COM

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Reprinted by permission of the author, Larry Barkan: http:/www.conflictresolutiontraining.net