Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Notes

INTRODUCTION. THE STATUE THAT DIDN’T LOOK RIGHT

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.

CHAPTER ONE. THE THEORY OF THIN SLICES: HOW A LITTLE BIT OF KNOWLEDGE GOES A LONG WAY

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.

CHAPTER TWO. THE LOCKED DOOR: THE SECRET LIFE OF SNAP DECISIONS

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.

CHAPTER THREE. THE WARREN HARDING ERROR: WHY WE FALL FOR TALL, DARK, AND HANDSOME MEN

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