Blink: Chapters 2–3

He is a small and irrepressible man with the energy of someone half his age, and if you were to talk to people in the tennis world, they’d tell you that Vic Braden knows as much about the nuances and subtleties of the game as any man alive.

The evidence he used to draw his conclusions seemed to be buried somewhere in his unconscious, and he could not dredge it up.

The first was sprinkled with words like “aggressively,” “bold,” “rude,” “bother,” “disturb,” “intrude,” and “infringe.” The second was sprinkled with words like “respect,” “considerate,” “appreciate,” “patiently,” “yield,” “polite,” and “courteous.”

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.

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.

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.

In high-stakes, fast-moving situations, we don’t want to be as dispassionate and purely rational as the Iowa ventromedial patients.

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.

It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier’s subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one.

He was the Machiavelli of Ohio politics, the classic behind-the-scenes fixer, a shrewd and insightful judge of character or, at least, political opportunity.

As he stepped down from the stand, his legs bore out the striking and agreeable proportions of his body; and his lightness on his feet, his erectness, his easy bearing, added to the impression of physical grace and virility.

His suppleness, combined with his bigness of frame, and his large, wide-set rather glowing eyes, heavy black hair, and markedly bronze complexion gave him some of the handsomeness of an Indian.

His voice was noticeably resonant, masculine, warm.

His manner as he bestowed a tip suggested generous good-nature, a wish to give pleasure, based on physical well-being and sincere kindliness of heart.

As he rose from one political office to another, he never once distinguished himself.

He was vague and ambivalent on matters of policy.

In 1920, Daugherty convinced Harding, against Harding’s better judgment, to run for the White House. Daugherty wasn’t being facetious. He was serious.

Thomas Hoving and Evelyn Harrison and the art experts were instantly able to see behind the forger’s artifice.

Many people who looked at Warren Harding saw how extraordinarily handsome and distinguished-looking he was and jumped to the immediate—and entirely unwarranted—conclusion that he was a man of courage and intelligence and integrity.

The way he looked carried so many powerful connotations that it stopped the normal process of thinking dead in its tracks.

Over the past few years, a number of psychologists have begun to look more closely at the role these kinds of unconscious—or, as they like to call them, implicit—associations play in our beliefs and behavior, and much of their work has focused on a very fascinating tool called the Implicit Association Test (IAT).

I was trying as hard as I could, and in the back of my mind was a growing sense of mortification.

The apartheid policies of South Africa or the laws in the American South that made it difficult for African Americans to vote are manifestations of conscious discrimination, and when we talk about racism or the fight for civil rights, this is the kind of discrimination that we usually refer to.

The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

You may well get a gut feeling that the applicant doesn’t really have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe that he doesn’t really want the job.

Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature.

In the world of car salesmen, Golomb is a virtuoso.

“Prejudging is the kiss of death. You have to give everyone your best shot. A green salesperson looks at a customer and says, ‘This person looks like he can’t afford a car,’ which is the worst thing you can do, because sometimes the most unlikely person is flush,” Golomb says.

If Ayres’s study is evidence of conscious discrimination, then the car salesmen of Chicago are either the most outrageous of bigots (which seems unlikely) or so dense that they were oblivious to every one of those clues (equally unlikely).

Sometimes the unprepossessing farmer with his filthy coveralls is actually an enormously rich man with a four-thousand-acre spread, and sometimes the teenager is coming back later with Mom and Dad.

The voters in 1920 didn’t think they were being suckered by Warren Harding’s good looks any more than Ayres’s Chicago car dealers realized how egregiously they were cheating women and minorities or boards of directors realize how absurdly biased they are in favor of the tall.

It is true, for instance, that you can take the Race IAT or the Career IAT as many times as you want and try as hard as you can to respond faster to the more problematic categories, and it won’t make a whit of difference.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions—we can alter the way we thin-slice—by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.