Seeing Without Seeing: The Perplexing Reality of Inattentional Blindness

Why do we sometimes miss what’s right in front of us?

You’d think a gorilla would be hard to miss. You’d be wrong. (Mira Meijer for Creative Commons)

This is a post about a neurocognitive bias that I regularly fall prey to but don’t fully understand how to remedy. There are different labels for it, but I think it’ll be more useful for me to just describe it. In any case, one example of what I’m talking about happens when I am filling out a payment form online for a storage space I have. The payment form has all the usual lines — address, credit card number, credit card expiration date and security code. But it also has one unusual, and unexpected line, namely a line (technically, a drop-down menu) for “Country.”

Now, I have no idea why this line is there. After all, if you know I live in Connecticut, and you have my zip code, don’t you therefore automatically know that I live in the United States? But regardless, it is there, and if you hit “Enter” without selecting a country from the drop-down menu, you will be sent back to the same screen to do so. And that’s the interesting thing: I’d guess that 5 of the last 6 times I’ve filled out that form (which I do once a month), I’ve failed to select a country from the drop-down menu. The word “Country” is there. It even has an asterisk next to it to let me know that it has to be filled out. And yet somehow I…