Situation Blindness

“A man is sitting on a crowded bus with his two young sons. The boys are running around, crying, yelling, and fighting. It is obvious that the other passengers on the bus are being bothered by this behavior and almost everyone is looking at them, but the man just sits there staring out the window and does nothing to quiet his children.” Take a moment to visualize the scene, what it would be like to be there on that bus.”

Imagine how the above story would change for you if, at the end, a passenger turned to the man and said: “Why can’t you control you kids? Can’t you see they are bothering everyone on the bus?” The man turns to him and replies “Oh, I am so sorry, but my wife died last night, I guess none of us really know how to deal with it yet.”

The exercise above illustrates a basic human tendency known as situation blindness. In this example, learning just one thing you didn’t know already is enough to completely change your explanation of what happened, and also how you feel towards the people involved in the story. The dangerous thing is that we act without taking into account such important aspects of a situation all the time, usually without realizing it, and this tendency can be extremely difficult to spot.