In Safal Niveshak’s Art of Value Investing workshops, when we discuss the mental biases, we show the following video to our participants (click on the image to watch). If you haven’t attended our workshop, then I would suggest that you pause here and watch this video before reading further. It’s a test of your awareness so don’t cheat 🙂
I hope you watched it. How did you do? By now you know that I am not interested if you got the count right. Did you spot the Gorilla in your first attempt? Yes? You have seen this video before, haven’t you?
The intention of the Gorilla experiment, as you must have learned in the video, wasn’t to test your observation skills. It was to demonstrate a critical behavioural bias called Inattentional Blindness. It’s one of the big ideas from the field of psychology. If you want to know more about it, you can read this post on our blog.
The learning here is that when we’re focussing intently on one thing, we may miss something else which is there in plain sight. Watching a video about invisible dancing gorilla isn’t going to make you immune to inattentional bias. I am going to prove this in a minute. Here’s another version of the gorilla experiment. Let’s see if you can win
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