for this possibility, though: Do an experiment! To explore the effects of cell phone conversations on inattention directly, Brian Scholl and his students at Yale used a variant of the “red gorilla” computerized task described earlier and compared a group who performed the task as usual with one that performed it while simultaneously carrying on a cell phone conversation.39 In their particular variant of the task, about 30 percent of the participants missed the unexpected object when they were just doing the tracking task. However, participants who performed the task while talking on a phone missed the unexpected object 90 percent of the time! Simply having a conversation on a phone tripled the chances that they would fail to see something unexpected.
This sobering finding shows that cell phone conversations dramatically impair visual perception and awareness. These impairments are due to the limits of attention and not due to the nature of the phone; even though both tasks seem effortless, both demand our attention. Intriguingly, the cell phone conversation didn’t impair the subjects’ ability to do the tracking task—it just decreased their chances of noticing something unexpected. This finding may explain why people falsely think that cell phones have no effect on their driving: People are lulled into thinking that they drive just fine because they can still perform the primary task (staying on the road) properly. The problem is that they’re much less likely to notice rare, unexpected, potentially catastrophic events, and our daily experience gives us little feedback about such events.
If you’re like many people who have heard us speak about inattention, cell phones, and driving, you may wonder why talking to someone on a phone should be any more dangerous than talking to the person in the passenger seat, which doesn’t seem objectionable. (Or, if you have responded enthusiastically to our arguments—and thank you for doing so—you may be getting ready for a campaign to make “driving while talking” illegal, no matter whom you are talking to.) It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that talking to a passenger in your car is not nearly as disruptive as talking on a cell phone. In fact, most of the evidence suggests that talking to a passenger has little or no effect on driving ability.40
Talking to a passenger could be less problematic for several reasons. First, it’s simply easier to hear and understand someone right next to you than someone on a phone, so you don’t need to exert as much effort just to keep up with the conversation. Second, the person sitting next to you provides another set of eyes—a passenger might notice something unexpected on the road and alert you, a service your cell-phone conversation partner can’t provide. The most interesting reason for this difference between cell-phone conversation partners and passengers has to do with the social demands of conversations. When you converse with the other people in your car, they are aware of the environment you are in. Consequently, if you enter a challenging driving situation and stop speaking, your passengers will quickly deduce the reason for your silence. There’s no social demand for you to keep speaking because the driving context adjusts the expectations of everyone in the car about social interaction. When talking on a cell phone, though, you feel a strong social demand to continue the conversation despite difficult driving conditions because your conversation partner has no reason to expect you to suddenly stop and start speaking. These three factors, in combination, help to explain why talking on a cell phone is particularly dangerous when driving, more so than many other forms of distraction.
For Whom Does Bell Toil?
All of the examples we have discussed so far show how we can fail to see what is right in front of us: A submarine captain fails to see a fishing vessel, a driver fails to notice a motorcyclist, a pilot fails to see a runway obstruction, and a Boston cop fails to see a beating. Such failures of awareness and the illusion of attention aren’t limited to the visual sense, though. People can experience inattentional deafness as well.41
In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing went to Gene Weingarten for his Washington Post cover story describing a social “experiment” he conducted with the help of virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell.42 As a four-year-old in Indiana, Bell impressed his parents, both psychologists, by using rubber bands to pluck out songs he had heard. They engaged a series of music teachers and by age seventeen Bell had played Carnegie Hall. He was on his way to repeatedly topping the classical music charts, receiving numerous awards for his performances, and appearing on Sesame Street. The official biography on his website begins with these words: “Joshua Bell has captured the public’s attention like no other classical violinist of his time.”
On a Friday morning at rush hour, Bell took his Stradivarius violin, for which he’d paid more than $3 million, to the L’Enfant Plaza subway stop in Washington, D.C. He set up shop between an entrance and an escalator, opened his violin case to take donations, seeded it with some cash of his own, and began to perform several complex classical pieces. Over the course of his forty-three-minute performance, more than one thousand people passed within a few feet of him, but only seven stopped to listen. And not counting a donation of $20 from a passerby who recognized him, Bell made only $32.17 for his work.
Weingarten’s article bemoaned the lack of appreciation for beauty and art in modern society. Reading it, you can sense the pain and disappointment he must have felt while watching the people go past Bell:
It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.
Fellow staffers at the Washington Post magazine apparently expected a different result. According to Weingarten’s story, they had been worried that the performance might cause a riot:
In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous “what-if” scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.
After the stunt was over, Weingarten asked famous conductor Leonard Slatkin, who directs the National Symphony Orchestra, to predict how a professional performer would do as a subway artist. Slatkin was convinced a crowd would gather: “Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.” During the actual performance, less than one-tenth that number stopped, and the National Guard did not mobilize.
Weingarten, his editors, Slatkin, and perhaps the Pulitzer committee members fell prey to the illusion of attention. Even Bell, when he saw the video of his performance, was “surprised at the number of people who don’t pay attention at all, as if I’m invisible. Because, you know what? I’m makin’ a lot of noise!”43 Now that you’ve read about invisible gorillas, neglected fishing vessels, and unseen motorcycles, you can likely guess one reason why Bell went unrecognized for the great musician he is. People weren’t looking (or listening) for a virtuoso violinist. They were trying to get to work. The one person interviewed for the story who correctly understood the minimal response to Bell was Edna Souza, who shines shoes in the area and finds buskers distracting. She wasn’t surprised that people would rush by without listening: “People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward.”
Under the conditions Weingarten established, commuters were already engaged in the distracting task of rushing to get to work, making them unlikely to notice Bell at all, let alone focus enough attention on his playing to distinguish him from a run-of-the-mill street musician. And that is the key. Weingarten’s choice of time and location for the stunt nearly guaranteed that nobody would devote much attention to the quality of Bell’s music. Weingarten is concerned that “if we can’t take the time