Dan Simons and Chris Chabris are psychological scientists who care about attention and reasoning. They’re probably best known for their groundbreaking experiments on “inattentional blindness” where they built a scenario in which people would look straight at someone in a gorilla costume and not even know it. The point is: for as smart as we are, we miss a lot of stuff. And it’s not just gorillas.
Dan and Chris have a new book out on the psychology behind why people fall prey to scams and cons. It’s called: Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do about It. It’s a fun read, full of stories of swindlers and cheats and the science behind how we get taken in by them. We talk about how Dan and Chris became partners in science and what they’ve learned about the psychology of attention and reasoning.
Transcript
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[New transcripts on hold for now.]