Why We Miss the Obvious

For two years, Tom Garvey lived in a “secret apartment” in Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. Almost no one noticed.

Source: Wikipedia/PhillyPartTwo

In our last post, we talked about the phenomenon of thinking we saw something that isn’t really there, like Bigfoot or an extinct species of tiger. Now we’re addressing the opposite – when we fail to see something that is there – which is a sort of misinformation by omission.

The Secret Apartment

In 1979, Vietnam veteran Tom Garvey was trying to get back on his feet after his military service. He landed a concession stand job at the now-demolished Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, former home of the Phillies (MLB) and the Eagles (NFL). As part of his job, Garvey had keys to a door inside the stadium that led to an unused concession stand, which he soon rearranged into an apartment. Garvey moved in and made it his home, but people didn’t seem to notice. It helped that he had installed a wall of cardboard boxes and that was what people saw when they opened that door to the unused concession stand. Behind that wall of boxes, there was a bed, a living-room area, basic appliances, and an AstroTurf carpet. He used the bathrooms in the stadium concourse and the employee showers in the basement. It was, Garvey said, “everything a guy would want.” He lived there through 1981 and never got caught, even though he was in the stadium almost all the time – and far beyond his working hours. “It was right in front of their eyes, they just couldn’t believe it,” Garvey said. “I wouldn’t believe it myself. The disbelief is the key to how I got away with it.”

Inattentional Blindness

The disbelief to which Garvey refers is part of inattentional blindness, which is when we fail to perceive something we didn’t expect to see (because of a lack of attention). This might be particularly true for things that are truly unusual. If you saw a unicorn in a field, for example, you may be more likely to think you saw a white horse and believe that the horn was a trick of the light. The classic demonstrations of inattentional blindness involve videos of some people playing basketball.

If you want to see how it works, click on this link and follow the instructions in the video before reading further. That video above was put out by the City of London to encourage people to watch out for cyclists who can be struck by drivers not expecting a bicycle on the road. There was a bear in their version, but the demonstration is typically called the Invisible Gorilla, after the gorilla in the original version, at this link. In both videos, the viewer is instructed to count how many passes the basketball players wearing white make, while a person in an animal costume crosses through the middle of them. Research has shown that about half of viewers fail to see the very obvious gorilla (in retrospect, of course). The bear in the London version was even moonwalking, a pretty surprising sight to miss.

The Perils of Failing to See

The story of Tom Garvey’s secret stadium apartment captures the imagination. And the invisible gorilla video draws gasps and laughter among people who didn’t see it stroll through the first time around. But inattentional blindness is serious stuff. A meta-analysis by Sarah Simmons and her colleagues (2020) combined results from 17 different experiments that included a total of almost 900 pedestrians. They found that people who walked while texting or browsing on their smartphones were more likely to get hit by a car (or to have a close call) than those who walked while not using their phones. Even just talking on the phone led to a small increase in almost or actually getting hit by a car. And there’s a ton of evidence for similarly detrimental effects for using a smartphone while driving (see Dingus et al., 2016). It may seem obvious that texting while driving is dangerous, but research has also documented that even talking on a smartphone while driving increases the rate of accidents. That’s true even if your phone is hands-free.

Does walking without using your phone sound boring to you? We have some good news: The researchers did not find evidence that listening to music was dangerous. So, turn off the phone, tune in to your music, and continue to pay attention when you walk or drive. Maybe you’ll spot a gorilla on the side of the road. Or someone living in a secret apartment in a mall or sports stadium. As for Veterans Stadium, Tom Garvey cried when it was demolished in 2004. “It was more than a home,” Garvey told a reporter. “It was my Taj Mahal.” It’s pretty amazing that, for two years, nobody discovered it.