Nudge Wiki

Person

Dan Simons

Guest; psychology professor, University of Illinois; co-author, Nobody's Fool

Psychology professor at the University of Illinois, known for research on perception, attention, and deception (including the "invisible gorilla" selective-attention work). Co-author, with Christopher Chabris, of Nobody's Fool — a book on why intelligent, careful people are still easily deceived by cons, scams, and fraud. Explains the four "hooks" fraudsters, marketers, and even scientific fraudsters exploit: consistency, familiarity, precision, and potency (see Persuasion Hooks (Consistency, Familiarity, Precision, Potency)). Covers Bernie Madoff's suspiciously smooth returns fooling professional investment managers in Simons's own study (see Madoff Ponzi Consistency Study); forensic data scientist Elizabeth Bik's discovery of widespread image-duplication fraud in published research, alongside physicist Jan Hendrik Schön's fabricated superconductivity results (see Elizabeth Bik Fraud-Detection Cases); his own illusory-truth-effect replication with Emma Henderson and Dale Barr (see Simons Henderson Barr Illusory-Truth Study); familiar candidate and brand names swaying elections and purchases (see Familiar-Name Election Studies, Familiar Brand-Naming Cases); Rand Paul's use of absurdly precise dollar figures to argue for NSF budget cuts (see Rand Paul NSF Precision Case); the fabricated-precision "positivity ratio" claim (see Positivity Ratio Fabricated-Precision Case); and his own failed high-powered replication of the "warm coffee makes people seem warmer" study (see Williams Bargh Warm-Coffee Study).

Returns in Episode 206 to explain why Nintendo's Brain Training franchise doesn't deliver on its cognitive claims — narrow skill training rarely "transfers" to unrelated abilities, confirmed by the largest brain-training trial to date (see Far Transfer Failure (Narrow Skill Training), ACTIVE Brain-Training No-Transfer Study) — and draws the parallel to the debunked "Mozart effect" (see Mozart Effect Debunking Case), while Phill Agnew separately analyzes Nintendo's own marketing techniques (see Nintendo Brain Training Marketing Case).

Returns a third time in Episode 222, on the "invisible gorilla" study itself — the foundational, IG-Nobel-Prize-winning selective-attention research he ran with Christopher Chabris in the late 1990s, extending earlier 1970s work by Ulrich Neisser (see Simons Chabris Invisible Gorilla Basketball Study). Covers audio and eye-tracking replications (see Dalton Audio Gorilla Replication Study, Memmert Eye-Tracking Gorilla Study), real-world consequences of Inattentional Blindness — hands-free-phone driving risk, the USS Greeneville submarine collision, and Joshua Bell's subway busking experiment (see Scholl Hands-Free Phone Inattentional-Blindness Study, USS Greeneville Periscope Collision Case, Joshua Bell Subway Busking Context Study) — and the related Illusion of Memory (Confident Misremembering), covering end-of-life decision recall and Challenger-explosion flashbulb memories (see Sharman End-of-Life-Decision Memory Study, Neisser Harsch Challenger Explosion Flashbulb-Memory Study).

Discussed in

  • Episode 202 — 202-the-trade-secrets-con-men-don-t-reveal
  • Episode 206 — 206-did-nintendo-brain-training-make-me-smarter
  • Episode 222 — 222-can-you-see-the-invisible-gorilla (the founding invisible gorilla study, replications, and real-world consequences)

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