How may we sense what is relevant for the future? How could we use our full potential? Rational and intuitive, analytical and contemplative, conscious and unconscious, ...

1. What Numbers Don´t Tell You
(Correctly)
Richard Pircher
University of Applied Sciences bfi Vienna
richard-pircher.net

2. A Quiz …
Count
how many times
the players wearing
white
pass the ball
please don´t talk to your neighbour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY (second Video)

3. Focus
• To be able to focus on something is a
valuable ability
• To perceive all stimuli around us would
be far too much
• To focus on something means
missing everything else
• Numbers only may quantify what
is noticed as important
(Most, Scholl, Cliffort & Simons, 2001 )

4. Invisible Gorilla
• Some people may know the
first video with an invisible
gorilla already
• Do they realize the other
surprising details which are
new in the second video?

5. The Monkey Business Illusion
• Among those people who already knew
the first video with the Gorilla only
17 % took notice of the other two
events
=> they probably thought they knew
the video already
• Among those who didn´t know the first
video 29 % realized the curtain
changing colour and the leaving player.

6. The Monkey Business Illusion
When you´re looking
for a gorilla,
you often miss other
unexpected events

7. The Monkey Business Illusion
Prior experiences and
knowledge
may be
misleading

8. Sensing the Future?
• ¼ of our brains capacity is occupied with differentiating
valuable from irrelevant information
• For this task the brain uses
expectations based
on experiences from
the past
• May we be sure that
nothing is missed
which could be
important for
the future?

9. Change Blindness Blindness
• The change blindness study
• Most people firmly believe that they
would notice such large changes
• We tend to be blind to our own
blindness
• That’s a kind of
change blindness blindness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb-gT6vDrmU&index=56&list=PL944828D6EF3E7530
(Levin et al. 2000, Simons / Rensink 2005)

10. Change Blindness Blindness
• We don´t want to believe that
we can be that easily
manipulated
• We want to believe in
everything which confirms our
current beliefs and which
• flatters our ego

11. Planning fallacy
People tend to
• underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future
actions and to overestimate the benefits of their
own tasks (optimistic bias)
• overestimate the time needed as outside
observers of somebody elses task (pessimistic
bias)
• This phenomenon occurs regardless of the
individual's knowledge that past tasks of a similar
nature have taken longer to complete than
generally planned.
(Kahneman / Tversky 1979, Lovallo / Kahneman 2003)

12. Loneliness feels cold
• One group of test persons is asked to recall an
experience of social exclusion within a larger test
context
• The other group is asked to recall an experience of
social inclusion
• With the pretext of a heating problem both groups
were asked to estimate the room temperature
• Those who recalled the social exclusion experienced
a significantly lower room temperature than those
who recalled an inclusion experience
(Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008, Bargh / Shalev, 2012)

13. Emotional
and social
contexts influence our
perception and
judgment

14. The Unconscious Rules
• “Everyday intuitions suggest full conscious
control of behavior, but conscious thought
has little or no impact on behavior.”
• In fact the unconscious strongly influences
our behaviour
• It is plausible that almost every human
behavior comes from a mixture of
conscious and unconscious processing
(Baumeister, Masicampo, & Vohs, 2011)

15. Thinking Too Little –
Thinking Too Much
• Thinking too little causes
– mistakes, errors and
– actions which contradict other decisions and actions
– Thinking is a kind of mental test run.
• Thinking too much leads to
– a tunnel vision and narrow minded decisions
– decisions which are easy to explain to others but are
not consistent with our own feelings and preferences
any more
(Ariely / Norton, 2011, Nordgren et al., 2011)

16. Using the Best of Both Worlds
System 1 – old and powerful
(unconscious, intuitive)
System 2 – new and controllable
(conscious, reflective)
Automatic, affective Controlled
Effortless Effortful
Associative Deductive
Rapid, parallel Slow, serial
Process opaque Self-aware
Skilled action Rule application
Concrete, specific Neutral, abstract
Causal propensities Statistics
Prototypes Sets
e.g.: DRIVING A CAR ON A
WELL-KNOWN ROUTE
e.g.: FINDING THE BEST WAY TO
DRIVE ROUND ROAD WORKS
Adapted from Kahneman / Frederick 2002

17. Using the Best of Both Worlds
Unconscious ressources may be integrated:
• Sleep on decisions: during sleep the brain
consolidates information and connects it with prior
knowledge
• Stop thinking about something and switch to non-
cognitive activities: sports, nature, meditation, etc.
• Invite contradictive and diverse perspectives to
identify blind spots instead of favoring mainly
affirmative oppinions, e.g. through critical people,
customers, etc.

18. The strengths of our
unconscious resources
may be consciously
integrated in
everyday life

19. Take-away Guidelines
1. Be aware that we usually focus on what we already
know. We overlook a lot which could be important
for the future. Numbers only quantify what we
already notice as being important.
2. Question current beliefs and the misleading power
of your own ego. Knowledge may be distortive.
3. Use the best of both worlds:
Consciousness and unconsciousness
4. Ask yourself the question:
Am I thinking too little or
am I thinking too much?
5. Use diverse and non-cognitive activities to
enlarge perspectives and to identify blind spots

20. Richard Pircher
University of Applied Sciences bfi Vienna, Austria
richard.pircher@fh-vie.ac.at
richard-pircher.net
Slides are available at de.slideshare.net/pircher
I would be glad to
answer your questions and to
discuss the topic
Feel free to contact me!