You Are Looking, But You Are Not Observing

Few professional skills are praised as universally as skilled observation. From frontline staff to executives, attention to detail and “a keen eye” are seen as standout traits. Specifically in the realm of security, emergency response, and other professions that routinely encounter potentially escalated situations, the ability to observe clearly is largely considered a prerequisite of the job. But are we really being taught the necessary skills to do that?

 Any new-hire training program in these fields that is worth its salt will certainly contain a section regarding observation. In my experience, however, there seems to be a knowledge gap between being told to observe and being taught where observation ends and interpretation begins. Professionals are often expected to “make good observations” but much less emphasis is put on what observation actually is and the sequence that should follow it.

The bad habit we tend to slip into is confusing “looking around, taking it all in, and making a decision” with observation. So, are you observing, or are you just looking?

 As we move through this article, I want to show you the difference between the two, why we tend to mistake one for the other, and why that mistake can lead to bad decision-making. Finally, I want to offer a potential solution to the problem.

Looking vs Observing

          Take a moment to look around you. What do you see? Your laptop or phone? If you are at home, maybe a couch or a coffee table, a pet? If you are out, maybe a desk, buildings, bystanders?

 Absorb the world around you and think about what you’re doing with that information you just collected. Often, when we take in our surroundings, we have a habit of quickly assigning judgments or interpretations to what we see: “That guy must be in a hurry.” “My cat must want attention.” “That driver definitely isn’t paying attention!”

This tendency is natural and, by no means, an objectively bad thing. In our daily lives, most of the sense data we take in doesn’t require rigorous decision-making. Most of our private assessments are inconsequential.

 But what happens when our decisions really do matter? When the accuracy of our assessments could mean the difference between a safe interaction and a dangerous one, is a brief look around and quick interpretation enough?

          The practical separation between Looking and Observing lies in what each allows us to do with the information we take in. Both begin with noticing what is happening around us, but Vulcan Security Consultants intentionally narrows the scope of Observation specifically to: the passive collection of environmental information without interpretation, judgment, or action. Looking, by comparison, often includes our natural tendency to quickly interpret that information and move toward assessment or decision-making. With that distinction in place, it is important to clarify that Looking is not wrong; it is simply less restrained than Observation and therefore harder to keep within the realm of objectivity.

For example, imagine you are out on the patio of a restaurant. Suddenly, you hear loud voices behind you. You turn and see two men shouting, and one grabs the arm of the other. A quick look might have you infer: Those two men are arguing. Maybe they’re angry with one another? It looks like they’re about to fight!

But what is the actual observation being made? Objectively speaking, your observation is limited to this: two men are shouting, and one has grabbed the other’s arm. Everything else is assumption or interpretation. More information is needed before stronger conclusions—and later, decisions—can be justified.

Maybe they were arguing and were about to fight. It is also possible that they were watching a sports game and an intense moment had them shouting. They could be recalling a funny memory or joke. The man who grabbed the other’s arm could simply be intoxicated, loud, and using his friend for physical support. The initial interpretation may prove correct, but the observation itself does not yet tell us that.

Moments like these happen often in crowded group settings. During my years working as a security guard, I recall how I often needed to look closely at interactions between patrons in loud, crowded environments such as parties, nightclubs, and live sporting events.

Was physical contact friendly or hostile? Was someone shouting because they were in trouble, or simply trying to be heard over the noise? Were large groups suddenly moving together because a fight was breaking out, or because people were making space to help someone off the floor who had lost their balance? A quick look could suggest an answer to any of these questions, but that answer was not necessarily the same thing as an observation.

Quick looks followed by assumptions could have created plenty of problems. Had I inserted myself into situations where security was not needed, I could have escalated otherwise friendly patrons who felt unnecessarily accosted. On the other hand, had I assumed that two patrons standing very close together and speaking into each other’s ears were friends when they were actually on the verge of fighting, people could have gotten hurt because I failed to recognize what was developing.

Endsley’s Situation Awareness Model

The claim that Looking—a quick glimpse followed by immediate judgment or decision-making—carries more with it than Observation as VSC defines it—the passive collection of environmental information without interpretation, judgment, or action—is supported by more than my anecdotal experience. There is significant peer-reviewed literature regarding human perception and judgment that helps explain the distinction.

One useful example is Mica Endsley’s influential model of situation awareness. Endsley separates situation awareness into three major levels (Endsley, 1995):

1.     The perception of relevant elements in the environment.

2.     Comprehension of what that information means.

3.     Projection of what may happen next.

At minimum, this model makes an important distinction between perceiving environmental information and understanding what that information means. That distinction aligns well with VSC’s narrower definition of Observation as the collection of environmental information before interpretation or judgment is applied.

In other words, noticing that two people are shouting is not the same thing as determining why they are shouting or what may happen next. The more accurately the relevant environmental information is perceived at the beginning, the stronger the foundation available for later assessment: figuring out what is actually going on.

Why Looking Can Mislead Us

With the separation of perception (noticing your surroundings) and comprehension (understanding your surroundings) established, I’d like to shift to my claim that Looking often comes with quick assessments based on the limited information available from a fleeting glance—and that those assessments can be inaccurate. Again, the argument is not that “all quick assessments are wrong.” Professionals must often make quick calls with limited information. The issue stems from a lack of conscious separation between the observation process and the assessment process. Moving automatically from one to the next can leave us forming an assessment before relevant details have been noticed. It can lead us to filter later information through our initial interpretations, and while experience can help calibrate our assessments, it doesn’t make these problems disappear. These are not just assertions I’m making. Let me take you through the research.

Willis & Todorov on Forming Quick Impressions

In their 2006 study, Willis and Todorov showed participants unfamiliar faces for extremely short periods of time and then asked them to make trait judgments such as trustworthiness, aggressiveness, likeability, competence, and attractiveness. Those judgments were then compared with judgments made when participants could view the same faces without time constraints. Their research found that judgments made after exposures of only 100 milliseconds were already highly correlated with judgments made when viewing time was unlimited (Willis & Todorov, 2006).

This study doesn’t have anything to say about the accuracy of these judgments. However, what it does show is that people can begin assigning meaning and characteristics to very limited visual information almost immediately.

There may be no way to completely prevent ourselves from forming these rapid impressions. However, there may be ways to keep them from automatically becoming the basis of our assessments. More on that later.

So, when we take a quick look around, we may begin forming assessments almost immediately. Quick assessments can, in fact, be useful when a situation requires a fast reaction.

But what happens when those assessments begin to form before we have noticed all the relevant information?

Simons & Chabris on Inattentional Blindness

The famous “invisible gorilla” research. In their 1999 study, Simons and Chabris had participants watch dynamic scenes while concentrating on a specific task. In the most well-known version, participants watched two groups of people passing basketballs and were instructed to keep track of the passes made by one of the teams.

While the action unfolded, a person in a gorilla costume entered the scene, moved through the group, stopped in the middle, and then exited. Despite how conspicuous this seems in hindsight, roughly half of the observers failed to notice it (Simons & Chabris, 1999).

Funny enough, I remember being shown that video as a child. I missed the gorilla on my first viewing too.

What does this tell us? When our attention is occupied by particular elements of a dynamic environment, other noticeable information can escape our awareness—even while it is directly in front of us.

Let’s return to my example of the two men shouting, with one grabbing the other’s arm. You hear shouting, turn around, and take a look. Willis and Todorov showed us that we can begin forming impressions almost immediately from very limited information. What are some of the things likely to strike you first? The noise. The physical contact. The close proximity. All three could reasonably contribute to an initial assessment that a fight may be developing.

But what about the “gorilla” in the room?

Are they sitting in front of a television with a game on? Is there a group around them laughing? Is one man visibly unsteady and holding onto the other for support? Were there details immediately before you turned around that would change the meaning of what you are now seeing?

If something as conspicuous as a person in a gorilla costume can go unnoticed when our attention is directed elsewhere, contextual details like these can be missed as well. When escalated situations arise, your initial impression may not be enough. To complicate matters further, once you begin forming an explanation for what you see, that explanation can start to color how you interpret what comes next.

Nickerson on Confirmation Bias

          In his 1998 review, Raymond Nickerson pored over a large body of research regarding confirmation bias, which he described broadly as the tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that favor an existing belief, expectation, or hypothesis. His review identified several recurring patterns in how we analyze and interpret new information once a hypothesis has already begun to form.

Most relevant to this article, Nickerson reviewed evidence suggesting that we tend to focus on one hypothesis at a time, give favorable treatment to information that supports it, and allow early conclusions to influence how subsequent evidence is understood (Nickerson, 1998).

How does that map onto the patio example?

We’ve already established that we can form quick impressions from limited information: Those two guys are yelling, and one is grabbing the other. They must be about to fight! We’ve also seen that focusing on particular details can leave other relevant information unnoticed: They’re watching a game. People around them are laughing. One of the men is visibly unsteady.

Nickerson adds another layer. Once we form an initial hypothesis about what is happening, that hypothesis can begin influencing how we interpret the information that follows.

So, when we take in the scene on the patio and make an initial judgment, “They’re about to fight,” louder shouting may appear to confirm aggression. Another arm grab may look like further escalation. Moving closer together may seem like preparation for violence. Each new detail can begin to fit neatly inside the explanation we already have.

At its best, our initial impressions and judgments may be accurate despite the limited information, and we respond appropriately. At its worst, we take a quick look, form an inaccurate assessment, overlook or discount information that challenges it, and make a bad call.

But what about a veteran employee who knows the setting and has seen these behaviors hundreds of times? Does experience make them less vulnerable to these perceptual pitfalls?

Dror et al. on Expertise & Contextual Bias

          In 2006, Itiel E. Dror, David Charlton, and Ailsa E. Péron conducted a study involving five expert fingerprint examiners with an average of 17 years of experience. The experts were presented with pairs of fingerprints. Unknown to the participants, these were prints that the same examiners had previously identified as matches. This time, however, the experts were given irrelevant and intentionally misleading contextual information suggesting that the prints should not match. Upon examination, three of the five experts reversed their previous conclusions and said that the fingerprints did not match. A fourth concluded that there was insufficient information to make a determination. Only one maintained the original match decision (Dror et al., 2006).

It is important to frame this study appropriately. It was very small—only five participants—and four of the five experts changing their previous judgments does not establish a universal principle. What we can say is that Dror et al.’s study provides evidence that even highly trained and experienced professionals can have their judgments influenced by contextual information. The finding also sits within a broader literature. A 2019 systematic review found evidence of confirmation-bias effects among forensic practitioners across multiple study designs, while a 2017 international survey of 403 experienced forensic examiners found that many believed themselves relatively immune to cognitive bias or able to reduce it through willpower despite research suggesting otherwise (Cooper & Meterko, 2019; Kukucka et al., 2017).

So, does experience make a professional immune to the cognitive and perceptual pitfalls we have discussed? The literature suggests that it does not. Expertise can sharpen pattern recognition and improve professional judgment, but it does not erase the human cognitive machinery doing the interpreting. As we have seen, that machinery can form impressions rapidly, miss relevant information, and allow existing interpretations to shape what comes next.

So, if Looking can mislead us, and experience doesn’t make these perceptual problems disappear… what can we do? Let’s step away from the science for a moment and bring the problem back down to the ground floor.

Why Separation Matters

          I’d like to return to the VSC distinction between Looking and Observing. As stated previously, VSC defines Observation as the passive collection of environmental information without interpretation, judgment, or action, while Looking describes a broader perception—assessment—decision sequence that can become bundled together, often after little more than a glance.

The research we’ve examined helps illustrate the problems that can arise when we trust that bundled sequence at face value. Rapid impression formation, inattentional blindness, and confirmation bias can all influence our assessments and decisions—even when we are experienced professionals.

I don’t believe the solution lies in trying to rewire our instincts or fight the natural urge to understand and solve a problem as quickly as possible. Instead, the key is to introduce a system that intentionally separates perception, assessment, and decision-making so that each process can build on the one before it rather than cannibalize it.

VSC places great emphasis on cultivating a systems-led approach to professional response. Our framework is designed to encourage deliberate, methodical observation and assessment before action is taken.

At the center of that approach is a simple principle:

Your assessment of a situation is limited by the quality of your observation.

Watch the Water Before Climbing the Ladder

In a previous article titled: Why De-Escalation Fails Before It Begins, I introduced a few cornerstone concepts within the VSC Professional Response philosophy—namely, the Emotional Escalation Ladder (EEL) and the Professional Response Ladder (PRL).

Without retreading too much ground, the EEL serves as both an internal tool for monitoring your own escalation and an external assessment tool for estimating the level of escalation being expressed by another person through observable behavior. The PRL is a resource-identification and deployment tool designed to help you take inventory of the resources available to you—peers, manuals, experienced staff, supervisors, security, law enforcement, and others—and identify the most appropriate resource for the situation in front of you.

Both tools depend on the quality of the observations feeding them.

Now that we have distinguished Looking from Observing and examined some of the obstacles that can interfere with accurate assessment, let me show you how VSC bridges the gap.

The concept VSC has designed specifically to create a conscious separation between observation and assessment is called Watch the Water. One of its core tenets is: Observations of behavior are objective. Interpretations of those behaviors are subjective. This creates a practical distinction between what you see and what you think about what you see.

Return to the patio. You may still instinctively form a quick interpretation the moment you turn around: Those two are shouting. One is grabbing the other’s arm. They must be about to fight!

But if you have been trained to Watch the Water, you may be better prepared to recognize that automatic interpretation, understand that it may not yet account for the relevant information, and deliberately return your attention to observable behavior.

What do you actually observe?

Two men are shouting. One man is grabbing the other’s arm.

Now continue observing. They appear to be alone at the table. Both are looking at one another rather than the television. Several nearby patrons have turned toward them and stopped their own conversations. The man whose arm was grabbed quickly pulls it away and creates distance.

Those observations provide considerably more support for the assessment that a fight may be developing. But notice what changed: the initial observation was not conclusive. Additional information strengthened one possible interpretation. Different information—the laughter, celebration, or physical instability we discussed earlier—could have supported a very different assessment.

In this case, your initial assumption happened to be correct. But there is an important difference between being right about a quick assumption and arriving at a well-supported assessment. That difference lies in your ability to consciously separate what you observed from what you concluded.

Watching the Water then becomes the beginning of a fluid process (pun intended): observed behavior provides the foundation for the EEL and PRL, which carry the professional into assessment and decision-making.

You Can’t Use What You Don’t Train

At the end of the day, the tools VSC has crafted to support better observation, assessment, and decision-making are only useful if professionals are trained to wield them.

The goal is not to turn every interaction into a lengthy analytical exercise. If you spend thirty seconds trying to observe every detail while a situation develops in front of you, it doesn’t matter how thorough your observations were. With proper training, moving from observation to assessment and then to decision-making can still happen quickly. The difference is that the professional understands which part of that process is fact and which part is interpretation.

That distinction creates space for professional judgment rather than simple reaction.

Instincts are not bad. Experience and intuition can be valuable, especially when decisions have to be made quickly. But when instinct becomes the only foundation for assessment, we leave ourselves vulnerable to the very problems we have discussed throughout this article.

We form quick impressions. We miss details. We can be biased. And expertise does not grant immunity.

So, the next time you are told to “make good observations,” ask yourself:

Am I observing… or am I just looking?

To learn more about VSC’s approach to observation, assessment, and professional response—and how we teach professionals to Watch the Water—visit Vulcan Security Consultants and learn more about our cornerstone workshop, Vulcan’s Forge.

Relevant Literature

The following peer-reviewed sources support the research and concepts discussed in this article.

Cooper, G. S., & Meterko, V. (2019). Cognitive bias research in forensic science: A systematic review. Forensic Science International, 297, 35–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2019.01.016

Dror, I. E., Charlton, D., & Péron, A. E. (2006). Contextual information renders experts vulnerable to making erroneous identifications. Forensic Science International, 156(1), 74–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2005.10.017

Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32–64. https://doi.org/10.1518/001872095779049543

Kukucka, J., Kassin, S. M., Zapf, P. A., & Dror, I. E. (2017). Cognitive bias and blindness: A global survey of forensic science examiners. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 452–459. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.09.001

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28(9), 1059–1074. https://doi.org/10.1068/p281059

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First impressions: Making up your mind after a 100-ms exposure to a face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x