Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

I thought that people could at least have consulted their memories. But they couldn’t.”

Aronson and Steele found the same thing with the black students who did so poorly after they were reminded of their race. “I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked them, ‘Did anything lower your performance?’” Aronson said. “I would ask, ‘Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?’ Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like ‘You know, I just don’t think I’m smart enough to be here.’”

The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But there is also, I think, a significant advantage to how secretly the unconscious does its work. In the example of the sentence-completion task I gave you with all the words about old age, how long did it take you to make sentences out of those words? My guess is that it took you no more than a few seconds per sentence. That’s fast, and you were able to perform that experiment quickly because you were able to concentrate on the task and block out distractions. If you had been on the lookout for possible patterns in the lists of words, there is no way you would have completed the task that quickly. You would have been distracted. Yes, the references to old people changed the speed at which you walked out of the room, but was that bad? Your unconscious was simply telling your body: I’ve picked up some clues that we’re in an environment that is really concerned about old age—and let’s behave accordingly. Your unconscious, in this sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.

The team that created the Iowa gambling experiments was headed by the neurologist Antonio Damasio, and Damasio’s group has done some fascinating research on just what happens when too much of our thinking takes place outside the locked door. Damasio studied patients with damage to a small but critical part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which lies behind the nose. The ventromedial area plays a critical role in decision making. It works out contingencies and relationships and sorts through the mountain of information we get from the outside world, prioritizing it and putting flags on things that demand our immediate attention. People with damage to their ventromedial area are perfectly rational. They can be highly intelligent and functional, but they lack judgment. More precisely, they don’t have that mental valet in their unconscious that frees them up to concentrate on what really matters. In his book Descartes’ Error, Damasio describes trying to set up an appointment with a patient with this kind of brain damage:

I suggested two alternative dates, both in the coming month and just a few days apart from each other. The patient pulled out his appointment book and began consulting the calendar. The behavior that ensued, which was witnessed by several investigators, was remarkable. For the better part of a half hour, the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions, virtually anything that one could think about concerning a simple date. [He was] walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences. It took enormous discipline to listen to all of this without pounding on the table and telling him to stop.

Damasio and his team also gave the gambler’s test to their ventromedial patients. Most of the patients, just like the rest of us, eventually figured out that the red decks were a problem. But at no time did the ventromedial patients ever get a prickling of sweat on their palms; at no time did they get a hunch that the blue decks were preferable to the red cards, and at no time—not even after they had figured the game out—did the patients adjust their strategy to stay away from the problem cards. They knew intellectually what was right, but that knowledge wasn’t enough to change the way they played the game. “It’s like drug addiction,” says Antoine Bechara, one of the researchers on the Iowa team. “Addicts can articulate very well the consequences of their behavior. But they fail to act accordingly. That’s because of a brain problem. That’s what we were putting our finger on. Damage in the ventromedial area causes a disconnect between what you know and what you do.” What the patients lacked was the valet silently pushing them in the right direction, adding that little emotional extra—the prickling of the palms— to make sure they did the right thing. In high-stakes, fast-moving situations, we don’t want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients. We don’t want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we’re better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us.

2. The Storytelling Problem

On a brisk spring evening not long ago, two dozen men and women gathered in the back room of a Manhattan bar to engage in a peculiar ritual known as speed-dating. They were all young professionals in their twenties, a smattering of Wall Street types and medical students and schoolteachers, as well as four women who came in a group from the nearby headquarters of Anne Klein Jewelry. The women were all in red or black sweaters, and jeans or dark-colored pants. The men, with one or two exceptions, were all wearing the Manhattan work uniform of a dark blue shirt and black slacks. At the beginning they mingled awkwardly, clutching their drinks, and then the coordinator of the evening, a tall, striking woman named Kailynn, called the group to order.

Each man would have, she said, six minutes of conversation with each woman. The women would sit for the duration of the evening against the wall on the long, low couches that ringed the room, and the men would rotate from woman to woman, moving to the next woman whenever Kailynn rang a bell, signaling that the six minutes were over. The daters were all given a badge, a number, and a short form to complete, with the instruction that if they liked someone after six minutes, they should check the box next to his or her number. If the person whose box they checked also checked their box, both daters would be notified of the other’s e-mail address within twenty-four hours. There was a murmur of anticipation. Several people made a last-minute dash to the bathroom. Kailynn rang her bell.

The men and women took their places, and immediately a surge of conversation filled the room. The men’s chairs were far enough away from the women’s couches that the two parties had to lean forward, their elbows on their knees. One or two of the women were actually bouncing up and down on the sofa cushions. The man talking to the woman at table number three spilled his beer on her lap. At table one, a brunette named Melissa, desperate to get her date to talk, asked him in quick succession, “If you had three wishes, what would they be? Do you have siblings? Do you live alone?” At another table, a very young and blond man named David asked his date why she signed up for the evening. “I’m twenty-six,” she replied. “A lot of my friends have boyfriends that they have known since high school, and they are engaged or already married, and I’m still single and I’m like— ahhhh.”

Kailynn stood to the side, by the bar that ran across one wall of the room. “If you are enjoying the connection, time goes quickly. If you aren’t, it’s the longest six minutes of your life,” she said as she watched the couples nervously chatter. “Sometimes strange things happen. I’ll never forget, back in November, there was a guy from Queens who showed up with a dozen red roses, and he gave one to every girl he spoke to. He had a suit on.” She gave a half smile. “He was ready to go.”

Speed-dating has become enormously popular around the world over the last few years, and it’s not hard to understand why. It’s the distillation of dating to a simple snap judgment. Everyone who sat down at one of those tables was trying to answer a very simple question: Do I want to see this person again? And to answer that, we don’t need an entire evening. We really need only a few minutes. Velma, for instance, one of the four Anne Klein women, said that she picked none of the men and that she made up her mind about each of them right away. “They lost me at hello,” she said, rolling her eyes. Ron, who worked as a financial analyst at an investment bank, picked two of the women, one of whom he settled on after about a minute and a half of conversation and one of whom, Lillian at table two, he decided on the instant he sat down across from her. “Her tongue was pierced,” he said, admiringly. “You come to a place like this and you expect a bunch of lawyers. But she was a whole different story.” Lillian liked Ron, too. “You know why?” she asked. “He’s from Louisiana. I loved the accent. And I dropped my pen, just to see what he would do, and he picked it up right away.” As it turned out, lots of the women there liked Ron the instant they met him, and lots of the men liked Lillian the instant they met her. Both of them had a kind of contagious, winning spark. “You know, girls are really smart,” Jon, a medical student in a blue suit, said at the end of the evening. “They know in the first minute, Do I like this guy, can I take him home to my parents, or is he just a wham-bam kind of jerk?” Jon is quite right, except it isn’t just girls who are smart. When it comes to thin-slicing potential dates, pretty much everyone is smart.

But suppose I were to alter the rules of speed-dating just slightly. What if I tried to look behind the locked door