Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking

Notes

Margolis published his findings in a triumphant article in Scientific American: Stanley V. Margolis, “Authenticating Ancient Marble Sculpture,” Scientific American 260, no. 6 (June 1989): 104-110.

The kouros story has been told in a number of places. The best account is by Thomas Hoving, in chapter 18 of False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996). The accounts of the art experts who saw the kouros in Athens are collected in The Getty Kouros Colloquium: Athens, 25-27 May 1992 (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum and Athens: Nicholas P. Goulandris Foundation, Museum of Cycladic Art, 1993). See also Michael Kimmelman, “Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?” New York Times, August 4, 1991; Marion True, “A Kouros at the Getty Museum,” Burlington Magazine 119, no. 1006 (January 1987): 3-11; George Ortiz, Connoisseurship and Antiquity: Small Bronze Sculpture from the Ancient World (Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1990), 275-278; and Robert Steven Bianchi, “Saga of the Getty Kouros,” Archaeology 47, no. 3 (May/June 1994): 22-25.

The gambling experiment with the red and blue decks is described in Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio, “Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy,” Science 275 (February 1997): 1293-1295. This experiment is actually a wonderful way into a variety of fascinating topics. For more, see Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 212.

The ideas behind “fast and frugal” can be found in Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

The person who has thought extensively about the adaptive unconscious and has written the most accessible account of the “computer” inside our mind is the psychologist Timothy Wilson. I am greatly indebted to his wonderful book Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Wilson also discusses, at some length, the Iowa gambling experiment.

On Ambady’s research on professors, see Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 (1993): 431-441.

John Gottman has written widely on marriage and relationships. For a summary, see www.gottman.com. For the thinnest slice, see Sybil Carrиre and John Gottman, “Predicting Divorce Among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion,” Family Process 38, no. 3 (1999): 293-301.

You can find more information on Nigel West at www.nigelwest.com.

On whether marriage counselors and psychologists can accurately judge the future of a marriage, see Rachel Ebling and Robert W. Levenson, “Who Are the Marital Experts?”Journal of Marriage and Family 65, no. 1 (February 2003): 130-142.

On the bedroom study, see Samuel D. Gosling, Sei Jin Ko, et al., “A Room with a Cue: Personality Judgments Based on Offices and Bedrooms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 3 (2002): 379-398.

On the issue of malpractice lawsuits and physicians, see an interview with Jeffrey Allen and Alice Burkin by Berkeley Rice: “How Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Pick Their Targets,” Medical Economics (April 24, 2000); Wendy Levinson et al., “Physician-Patient Communication: The Relationship with Malpractice Claims Among Primary Care Physicians and Surgeons,” Journal of the American Medical Association 277, no. 7 (1997): 553-559; and

Nalini Ambady et al., “Surgeons’ Tone of Voice: A Clue to Malpractice History,” Surgery 132, no. 1 (2002): 5-9.

For Hoving on Berenson etc., see False Impressions: The Hunt for Big Time Art Fakes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1996), 19-20.

On the scrambled-sentence test, see Thomas K. Srull and Robert S. Wyer, “The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information About Persons: Some Determinants and Implications,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979): 1660-1672.

John Bargh’s fascinating research can be found in John A. Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows, “Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230-244.

On the Trivial Pursuit study, see Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van Knippenberg, “The Relation Between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 4 (1998): 865-877.

The study on black and white test performance and race priming is presented in Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s “Stereotype Threat and Intellectual Test Performance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5 (1995): 797-811.

The gambling studies are included in Antonio Damasio’s wonderful book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 193.

The human need to explain the inexplicable was described, most famously, by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson in the 1970s. They concluded: “It is naturally preferable, from the standpoint of prediction and subjective feelings of control, to believe that we have such access. It is frightening to believe that no one has no more certain knowledge of the workings of one’s own mind than would an outsider with intimate knowledge of one’s history and of the stimuli present at the time the cognitive process occurred.” See Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson, “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84, no. 3 (1977): 231-259.

On the swinging rope experiment, see Norman R. F. Maier. “Reasoning in Humans: II. The Solution of a Problem and Its Appearance in Consciousness,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 12 (1931): 181-194.

There are many excellent books on Warren Harding, including the following: Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968); Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States 1900-1925, vol. 6, The Twenties (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), 16; Harry M. Daugherty, The Inside Story of the Harding Tragedy (New York: Ayer, 1960); and Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life Behind the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

For more on the IAT, see Anthony G. Greenwald, Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz, “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 6 (1998): 1464-1480.

For an excellent treatment of the height issue, see Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (New York: Random House, 1999), 172.

The height-salary study can be found in Timothy A. Judge and Daniel M. Cable, “The Effect of Physical Height on Workplace Success and Income: Preliminary Test of a Theoretical Model,” Journal of Applied Psychology 89, no. 3 (June 2004): 428-441.

A description of the Chicago car dealerships study is found in Ian Ayres, Pervasive Prejudice? Unconventional Evidence of Race and Gender Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

For proof that you can combat prejudice, see Nilanjana Dasgupta and Anthony G. Greenwald, “On the Malleability of Automatic Attitudes: Combating Automatic Prejudice with Images of Admired and Disliked Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 800-814. A number of other studies have shown similar effects. Among them: Irene V. Blair et al., “Imagining Stereotypes Away: The Moderation of Implicit Stereotypes Through Mental Imagery,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 828-841; and Brian S. Lowery and Curtis D. Hardin, “Social Influence Effects on Automatic Racial Prejudice,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 5 (2001): 842-855.

A good account of Blue Team’s philosophy toward war fighting can be found in William A. Owens, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000), 11.

Klein’s classic work on decision making is Sources of Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).

On the rules of improv, see Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1979).

On logic puzzles, see Chad S. Dodson, Marcia K. Johnson, and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Verbal Overshadowing Effect: Why Descriptions Impair Face Recognition,” Memory & Cognition 25, no. 2 (1997): 129-139.

On verbal overshadowing, see Jonathan W. Schooler, Stellan Ohlsson, and Kevin Brooks, “Thoughts Beyond Words: When Language Overshadows Insight,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 122, no. 2 (1993): 166-183.

The firefighter story and others are discussed in “The Power of Intuition,” chap. 4 in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).

For Reilly’s research, see Brendan M. Reilly, Arthur T. Evans, Jeffrey J. Schaider, and Yue Wang, “Triage of Patients with Chest Pain in the Emergency Department: A Comparative Study of Physicians’ Decisions,” American Journal of Medicine 112 (2002): 95-103; and Brendan Reilly et al., “Impact of a Clinical Decision Rule on Hospital Triage of Patients with Suspected Acute Cardiac Ischemia in the Emergency Department,” Journal of the American Medical Association 288 (2002): 342-350.

Goldman has written several papers on his algorithm. Among them are Lee Goldman et al., “A Computer-Derived Protocol to Aid in the Diagnosis of Emergency Room Patients with Acute Chest Pain,” New England Journal of Medicine 307, no. 10 (1982): 588-596; and Lee Goldman et al., “Prediction of the Need for Intensive Care in Patients Who Come to Emergency Departments with Acute Chest Pain,” New England Journal of Medicine 334, no. 23 (1996): 1498-1504.

On the consideration of gender and race, see Kevin Schulman et al., “Effect of Race and Sex on Physicians’ Recommendations for Cardiac Catheterization,” New England Journal of Medicine 340, no. 8 (1999): 618-626.

Oskamp’s famous study is described in Stuart Oskamp, “Overconfidence in Case Study Judgments,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 29, no. 3 (1965): 261-265.

A lot has been written about the changing music industry. This article was helpful: Laura M. Holson, “With By-the-Numbers Radio, Requests Are a Dying Breed,” New York Times, July 11, 2002.

Dick Morris’s memoir is Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1999).

For the best telling of the Coke story, see Thomas Oliver, The Real Coke, the Real Story (New York: Random House, 1986).

For more on Cheskin, see Thomas Hine, The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Other Persuasive Containers (New York: Little, Brown, 1995); and Louis Cheskin and L. B. Ward, “Indirect Approach to Market Reactions,” Harvard Business Review (September 1948).

Sally Bedell [Smith]’s biography of Silverman is Up the Tube: Prime-Time TV in the Silverman Years (New York: Viking, 1981).

Civille and Heylmun’s ways of tasting are further explained in Gail Vance Civille and Brenda G. Lyon, Aroma and Flavor Lexicon for Sensory Evaluation (West Conshohocken, Pa.: American Society for Testing and Materials, 1996); and Morten Meilgaard, Gail Vance Civille, and B. Thomas Carr, Sensory Evaluation Techniques, 3rd ed. (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 1999).

For more on jam tasting, see Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler, “Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 2 (1991): 181-192; and “Strawberry Jams and Preserves,” Consumer Reports, August 1985, 487-489.

For more on the mind readers, see Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (New York: Norton, 1995); Fritz Strack, “Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile:

A Nonobtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54, no. 5 (1988): 768-777; and Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Facial Action Coding System, parts 1 and 2 (San Francisco: Human Interaction Laboratory, Dept. of Psychiatry, University of California, 1978).

Klin has written a number of accounts of his research using Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The most comprehensive is probably Ami Klin, Warren Jones, Robert Schultz, Fred Volkmar, and Donald Cohen, “Defining and Quantifying the Social Phenotype in Autism,” American Journal of Psychiatry 159 (2002): 895-908.

On mind reading, see also Robert T. Schultz et al., “Abnormal Ventral Temporal Cortical Activity During Face Discrimination Among Individuals with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome,” Archives of General Psychiatry 57 (April 2000).

Dave Grossman’s wonderful video series is called The Bulletproof Mind: Prevailing in Violent Encounters . . . and After.

The stories of police officers firing their guns are taken from David Klinger’s extraordinary book Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

A number of studies have explored racial bias and guns, including the following: B. Keith Payne, Alan J. Lambert, and Larry L. Jacoby, “Best-Laid Plans: Effects of Goals on Accessibility Bias and Cognitive Control in Race-Based Misperceptions of Weapons,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2002): 384-396; Alan J. Lambert, B. Keith Payne, Larry L. Jacoby, Lara M. Shaffer, et al., “Stereotypes as Dominant Responses: On the ‘Social Facilitation’ of Prejudice in Anticipated Public Contexts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 2 (2003): 277-295; Keith Payne, “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 2 (2001): 181-192; Anthony Greenwald, “Targets of Discrimination: Effects of Race on Responses to Weapons Holders,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39 (2003): 399-405; and Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park, Charles Judd, and Bernd Wittenbrink, “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Hostile Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1314-1329. This study is a videogame in which whites and blacks are presented in ambiguous positions and the player has to decide whether to shoot or not. Go to http://psych.colorado.edu/%7ejcorrell/tpod.html and try it. It’s quite sobering.

On learning how to mind-read, see Nancy L. Etcoff, Paul Ekman, et al., “Lie Detection and Language Comprehension,” Nature 405 (May 11, 2000).

On two-person patrols, see Carlene Wilson, Research on One- and Two-Person Patrols: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction (South Australia: Australasian Centre for Policing Research, 1991); and Scott H. Decker and Allen E. Wagner, “The Impact of Patrol Staffing on Police-Citizen Injuries and Dispositions,” Journal of Criminal Justice 10 (1982): 375-382.

The best account of the Conant story is by Conant’s husband, William Osborne, “You Sound like a Ladies Orchestra.” It is available on their Website, www.osborne-conant.org/ladies.htm.

The following articles were particularly helpful on changes in the world of classical music: Evelyn Chadwick, “Of Music and Men,” The Strad (December 1997): 1324-1329; Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (September 2000): 715-741; and Bernard Holland, “The Fair, New World of Orchestra Auditions,” New York Times, January 11, 1981.