Carleton Virtual Breakfast Club
Why all of us can be fooled…some of the time
with Professor Dan Simons ’91
Thursday, January 11, 2024
9 a.m. Central Time
via Zoom
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Almost everyone knows to ignore emails promising vast fortunes and to hide from people who have been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty. The obviousness of scams like those leads to the mistaken belief that only extremely gullible, dim-witted, or exceptionally naive people get scammed. In reality, though, all of us can be taken in when we’re the target. In this presentation, Professor Dan Simons ’91 will describe how and why scams work and what you can do to avoid fooling yourself or others.
Dr. Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. His research explores the limits of awareness and memory, the reasons why we often are unaware of those limits, and the implications of such limits for our personal and professional lives.
He received his BA from Carleton (’91) and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Cornell University. He is the co-author, with Christopher Chabris, of the 2023 book Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It as well as the 2010 New York Times bestseller, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.