Transcript for:
Insights on Unconscious Decision-Making

the power of thinking without thinking written by Malcolm Gladwell and read by the [Music] author introduction the statue that didn't look right in September of 1983 an art dealer by the name of Jan Franco bikina approached the J Paul Getty museum in California he had in his POS possession he said a marble statue dating from the 6th Century BC it was what is known as a kurus a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides there are only about 200 kurai in existence and most have been recovered badly damaged or in fragments from grave sites or archaeological digs but this one was almost perfectly preserved it stood close to 7 ft tall it had a kind of light colored glow that set it apart from other ancient works it was an extraordinary find bina's asking price was just under $10 million the Getty moved cautiously it took the Kuro Sun Loan and began a thorough investigation was the statue consistent with other known kurai the answer appeared to be yes the style of the sculpture seemed reminiscent of the anavissos kuros in the National archaeological Museum of Athens meaning that it seemed to fit with a particular time and place where and when had the statue been found no one knew precisely but bikina gave the Gettys legal department a sheath of documents relating to its more recent history the kuros the record stated had been in the private collection of a Swiss physician named lenberg since the 1930s and he in turn had acquired it from a well-known Greek art dealer named russos a geologist from the University of California named Stanley margolus came to the museum and spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a high resolution stereo microscope he then removed a core sample measuring 1 cm in diameter and 2 cm in length from just below the right knee and analyzed it using an electron microscope electron micro probe Mass spectrometry X-ray defraction and x-ray fluorescence the statue was made of dolomite marble from the ancient Cape vathy quarry on the island of thos margolus concluded and the surface of the statue was covered in a thin layer of calite which was significant margolus told the Getty because Dolomite can turn into calite only over the course of hundreds if not thousands of years in other words the statue was old old it wasn't some contemporary fake the Getty was satisfied 14 months after their investigation of the kuros began they agreed to buy the statue in the fall of 1986 it went on display for the first time the New York Times marked the occasion with a front page story a few months later the Gettys curator of Antiquities Mary and true wrote a long glowing account of the Museum's acquisition for the art Journal the Burlington magazine now standing erect without external support his closed hands fixed firmly to his thighs the kuros expresses The Confident Vitality that is characteristic of the best of his brothers true concluded triumphantly God or man he embodies all the radiant energy of the adolescence of Western Art there was a problem with the kuros however it didn't look right the first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Frederico zeri who served on the Gettys Board of Trustees when zeri was taken down to the Museum's restoration Studio to see the kuros in December of 1983 he found himself staring at the sculptur fingernails in a way he couldn't immediately articulate they seemed wrong to him Evelyn Harrison was next she was one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture and she was in Los Angeles visiting netti just before the museum finalized the deal with bikina Arthur hotton who was then the curator took us down to see it Harrison remembers he just swished a cloth off the top of it and said well it isn't ours yet but it will be in a couple of weeks and I said I'm sorry to hear that what did Harrison see she didn't know in that very first moment when hoton swished off the cloth all Harrison had was a hunch an instinctive sense that something was a miss a few months later hoton took Thomas hoving the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York down to the Gettys conservation Studio to see the statue as well hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees something knew and he'll never forget what that word was when he first saw the kurus it was fresh fresh hoving recalls and fresh was not the right reaction to have to a 2000-year-old statue later thinking back on that moment hoving realized why that thought had popped into his mind I had dug in Sicily where we found bits and pieces of these things they just don't come out looking like that the kuros looked like it had been dipped in the very best cafe latte from Starbucks Hoven turned to hoton have you paid for this hoton hoving remembers looks stunned if you have try to get your money back hoving said if you haven't don't the Getty was getting worried so they convened a special Symposium on the kuros in Greece they wrapped the statue up shipped it to Athens and invited the country's most senior sculpture experts this time the chorus of dismay was even louder Harrison at one point was standing next to a man named George despines the head of the Acropolis Museum in Athens he took one look at the kuros and blanched anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground he said to her could tell that that thing has never been in the ground joio dantas head of the archaeological Society in Athens saw the sculpture and immediately felt cold when I saw saw the kuros for the first time he said I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work dantos was followed in the simposium by angalo delorus director of the Baki Museum in Athens he spoke at length on the contradiction between the style of the sculpture and the fact that the marble from which it was carved came from thos then he got to the point why did he think it was a fake because when he first laid eyes on it he said he felt a wave of intuitive repulsion by the time the Symposium was over the consensus among many of the attendees appeared to be that the kuros was not at all what it was supposed to be the Getty with its lawyers and scientists and months of painstaking investigation had come to one conclusion and some of the world's foremost experts in Greek sculpture just by looking at the Statue and sensing their own intuitive repulsion had come to another who was right for a time it wasn't clear the kuros was the kind of thing that art experts argued about at conferences but then bit by bit the Gettys case began to fall apart the letters the Gettys lawyers used to carefully trace the kuros back to the Swiss physician lenberg for instance turned out to be fakes one of the letters dated 1952 had a postal code on it that didn't exist until 20 years later another letter dated 1955 referred to a bank account that wasn't opened until 1963 originally the conclusion of long months of research was that the Getty kuros was in the style of the anavissos kuros but that too fell into doubt the closer experts in Greek sculpture looked at it the more they began to see it as a puzzling Pastiche of several different styles from several different places and time periods the young man's slender proportions looked a lot like the Tania curus which is in a museum in Munich and his stylized beaded hair was a lot like that of the kuros in the Metropolitan Museum in New York his feet meanwhile were if anything modern the kuros it most resembled it turned out was a smaller fragmentary statue that was found by a British art historian in Switzerland in 1990 the two statues were cut from similar marble and sculpted in quite similar way ways but the Swiss kurus didn't come from ancient Greece it came from a forgers workshop in Rome in the early 1980s and what of the scientific analysis that said that the surface of the gy kuros could only have aged over many hundreds or thousands of years well it turns out things weren't that cut and dried upon further analysis another geologist concluded that it might be possible to age the surface of a Dolomite marble statue in a couple of months using potato mold when Frederico zeri and Evelyn Harrison and Thomas hoving and giorio dantos and all the others looked at the kuros and felt an intuitive repulsion they were absolutely right in the first two seconds of looking in a single glance they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after 14 months blink is an Audi book about those first two seconds section one fast and Frugal imagine that I would ask you to play a very simple gambling game in front of you are four decks of cards two of them red and the other two blue each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks one at a time in such a way that maximizes your winnings what you don't know at the beginning however is that the red decks are a Minefield the rewards are high but when you lose on the red cards you lose a lot actually you can win only by taking cards from the blue decks which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties the question is how long will it take you to figure this out a group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago and what they found is that after we've turned over about 50 cards most of us start to develop a hunch about what's going on we don't know why we prefer the blue decks but we're pretty sure at that point that they are a better bet after turning over about 80 cards most of us have figured out the game and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea that much is straightforward we have some experience experiences we think them through we develop a theory and then finally we put two and two together that's the way learning works but the Iowa scientists did something else and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins they hooked each Gambler up to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands in their palms these are glands that respond to stress as well as temperature which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous what the Iowa scientists found is the gamblers started generating stress responses to the red decks by the 10th card 40 cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks more important right around the time their palms started sweating their behavior began to change as well they started favoring the blue cards and taking fewer and fewer cards from the red decks in other words the gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured the game out they began making necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making the Iowa experiment is just that of course a simple card game involving a handful of subjects and a stress detector but it's a very powerful illustration of the way our minds work here is a situation where the stakes were high where things were moving quickly and where the participants had to make sense of a lot of new and confusing information in a very short time what does the Iowa experiment tell us that in those moments our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation the first is the one we're most familiar with it's the conscious strategy we think about what we've learned and eventually we come up with an answer this strategy is logical and definitive but it takes us 80 cards to get there it's slow and it needs a lot of information there's a second strategy there it operates a lot more quickly it starts to kick in after 10 cards and it's really smart because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately it has the drawback however that it operates at least at first entirely below the surface of Consciousness it sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels such as the sweat glands in the palms of our hands it's a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it's reaching conclusions the second strategy was the path taken by Evelyn Harrison and Thomas hoving and the Greek Scholars they didn't weigh every conceivable strand of evidence they considered only what could be gathered in a glance their thinking was what the cognitive psychologist gir gigerenzer likes to call fast and Frugal they simply took a look at that statue and some part of their brain did a series of instant calculations and before any any kind of conscious thought took place they felt something just like the sudden prickling of sweat on the palms of the gamblers for Thomas hoving it was the completely inappropriate word fresh that suddenly popped into his head in the case of Angelos delorus it was a wave of intuitive repulsion for joio Dantes it was the feeling that there was a glass between him in the work did they know why they knew not at all but they knew section two the internal computer the part of our brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the Adaptive unconscious and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in Psychology the Adaptive unconscious is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigman Freud which was a dark and murky Place filled with desires and memories and Fantasies that were too dis disturbing for us to think about consciously this new notion of the Adaptive unconscious is thought of instead as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings when you walk out into the street and suddenly realize that a truck is bearing down on you do you have time to think through all of your options of course not the only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that's capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information as the psychologist Timothy D Wilson writes in his book strangers to ourselves the Mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of highlevel sophisticated thinking to the unconscious just as a modern jetliner is able to fly an automatic pilot with little or no input from the human conscious pilot the Adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world warning people of danger setting goals and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner Wilson says that we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking depending on the situation a decision to invite a coworker over for dinner is conscious you think it over you decide it will be fun you ask him or her the spontaneous decision to argue with that same coworker is made consciously by a different part of the brain and motivated by a different part of your personality whenever we meet someone for the first time whenever we interview someone for a job whenever we react to a new idea whenever we're faced with making a decision quickly and under stress we use that second part of our brain how long for example did it take you when you were in college to decide how good a teacher your professor was a class two classes a semester the psychologist nelini IDI once gave students three 10c videotapes of a teacher with a sound turned off and found they had no difficulty at all coming up with a rating of the teacher's Effectiveness then ody cut the clips back to 5 seconds and the ratings were the same they were remarkably consistent even when she showed the students just two seconds of videotape then ID compared those snap judgments of teacher Effectiveness with a evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes and she found that they were also essentially the same a person watching a silent 2cond video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher's class for an entire semester That's The Power of our adaptive unconscious you may have done the same thing with whether you realized it or not when you first picked up this Audi book how long did you first hold it in your hands 2 seconds and yet in that short space of time the design of the cover whatever associations you may have had with my name all generated an impression a flurry of thoughts and images and preconceptions that has fundamentally shaped the way you have listened to this introduction so far aren't you curious about what happened in those two seconds I I think we are innately suspicious of this kind of Rapid cognition we live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it when doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis they order more tests and when we are uncertain about what we hear we ask for a second opinion and what do we tell our children haste makes waste look before you leap stop and think don't judge a book by its C we believe that we are always better off Gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation we really only trust conscious decision making but there are moments particularly in times of stress when haste does not make waste when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world the first task of blink is to convince you of a simple fact decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately blink is not just a celebration of the power of the glance however I'm also interested in those moments when our instincts betray us why for instance if the Gettys kurus was so obviously fake or at least problematic did the museum buy it in the first place why didn't the experts at the gy also have a feeling of intuitive repulsion during the 14 months they were studying the piece that's the great puzzle of what happened at the gy and the answer is that those feelings for one reason or another were thwarted that is partly because the scientific data seem so compelling Stanley margolus was so convinced by his own analysis that he published a long account of his method in Scientific American but mostly it's because the Getty desperately wanted the statue to be real it was a Young Museum eager to build a worldclass collection and and the kuros was such an extraordinary find that its experts were blinded to their instincts the art historian George Ortiz was once asked by Ernst long glotz one of the world's foremost experts on archaic sculpture whether he wanted to purchase a bronze statuette Ortiz went to see the piece and was taken aback it was to his mind clearly a fake full of contradictory and slip shot elements so I was long Lots who knew as much as anyone in the world about Greek statues fooled Ortiz's explanation is that long glotz had bought the sculpture as a very young man before he acquired much of his formidable expertise I suppose Ortiz said the long Lots fell in love with this piece when you were a young man you do fall in love with your first purchase and perhaps this was his first love notwithstanding his unbelievable knowledge he was obviously unable to question his first assessment that is not a a fanciful explanation it gets at something fundamental about the way we think our unconscious is a powerful force but it's fallible it's not the case that our internal computer always shines through instantly decoding the truth of a situation it can be thrown off distracted and disabled our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments so when should we trust our instincts and when should we be wary of them answering that question is a second task of blink when our powers of Rapid cognition go arai they go arai for a very specific and consistent set of reasons and those reasons can be identified and understood it is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it the third and most important task of this Audi book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled I know that's hard to believe Harrison and hoving and the other art experts who looked the Getty kuros had powerful and sophisticated reactions to the Statue but didn't they Bubble Up unbidden from their unconscious can that kind of mysterious reaction be controlled the truth is that it can just as we can teach ourselves to think logically and deliberately we can also teach ourselves to make better snap judgments in blink you'll meet doctors and Generals and coaches and furniture designers and musicians and actors and car salesmen and countless others all of whom are very good at what they do and all of whom owe their success at least in part to the steps they have taken to shape and manage and educate their unconscious reactions the power of knowing in that first two seconds is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few it is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves section three a different and better World there are lots of audiobooks that tackle broad themes that analyze the world from great remove this is not one of them blink is concerned with the very smallest components of our everyday lives the content and origin of those instantaneous Impressions and conclus illusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress when it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and our world I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments but what would happen if we took our instincts seriously what if we stopped scanning The Horizon with our binoculars and began instead examining our own decision-making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes I think that would change the way Wars are fought the kinds of products we see on the shelves the kinds of movies that get made the way police officers are trained the way couples are counseled the way job interviews are conducted and on and on and if we were to combine all of those little changes we would end up with a different and better world I believe and I hope that by the end of this audio book you will believe it as well that the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as there is in months of rational analysis I always considered scientific opinion more objective than aesthetic judgments the Gettys curator of Antiquities Maran true said when the truth about the kuros finally emerged now I realize I was wrong chapter 1 the theory of thin slices how a little bit of knowledge goes a long way some years ago a young couple came to the University of Washington to visit the nearby laboratory of a psychologist named John Gman they were in their 20s blonde and blue-eyed with stylishly tousled haircuts and funky glasses later later some of the people who worked in the lab would say they were the kind of couple that's easy to like intelligent and attractive and funny in a draw ironic kind of way and that much is immediately obvious from the videotape gotman made of their visit the husband whom I'll call Bill had an endearingly playful manner his wife Susan had a sharp dead pan wit they were led into a small room on the second floor of the nondescript two-story building that housed gottman's operations and they sat down about 5 ft apart on two office chairs mounted on raised platforms they both had electrodes and sensors clipped to their fingers and ears which measured things like their heart rate how much they were sweating and the temperature of their skin under their chairs a jigle ometer on the platform measured how much each of them moved around two video cameras one aimed at each person recorded everything they said and did for 15 minutes they were left alone with the cameras rolling with instructions to discuss any topic from their marriage that had become a point of contention for Bill and Sue it was their dog they lived in a small apartment and had just gotten a very large puppy Bill didn't like the dog Sue did for 15 minutes they discussed what they ought to do about it the videotape of Bill and Sue's discussion seems at least at first to be a random sample of a very Ord orary kind of conversation that couples have all the time no one gets angry there are no scenes No breakdowns no epiphanies I'm just not a dog person is how Bill starts things off in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice he complains a little bit but about the dog not about Susan she complains too but there are also moments when they simply forget that they're supposed to be arguing when the subject of whether the dog smells comes up for example Bill and Sue ban her back and forth happily both with a half smile on their lips Sue sweetie she's not smelly Bill did you smell her today Sue I smelled her she smelled good I petted her and my hands didn't stink or feel oily your hands have never smelled oily Bill yes sir Sue I've never let my dog get oily Bill yes sir she's a dog sue my dog is never gotten oily you'd better be careful Bill no you'd better be careful Sue no you'd better be careful don't call my dog oily boy section one the love lab how much do you think can be learned about Sue and Bill's marriage by watching that 15minute videotape can we tell if their relationship is healthy or unhealthy I suspect that most of us would say that bill and Sue's dog talk doesn't tell us much it's Much Too Short marriages are buffeted by more important things like money and sex and children and jobs and In-laws in constantly changing combinations sometimes couples are very happy together some days they fight sometimes they feel as though they could almost kill each other but then they go on vacation and come back sounding like newlyweds in order to know a couple we feel as though we have to to observe them over many weeks and months and see them in every state happy tired angry irritated delighted having a nervous breakdown and so on and not just in the relaxed and chatty mode that Bill and Sue seem to be in to make an accurate prediction about something as serious as the future of a marriage indeed to make a prediction of any sort it seems that we would have to gather a lot of information and in as many different contexts as possible but John gotman has proved proven that we don't have to do that at all since the 1980s gotman has brought more than 3,000 married couples just like Bill and Sue into that small room in his love lab near the University of Washington campus each couple has been videotaped and the results have been analyzed according to something gotman dub spaff for specific affect a coding system that has 20 separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might EXP Express during a conversation disgust for example is one contempt is two anger is seven defensiveness is 10 whining is 11 sadness is 12 stonewalling is 13 neutral is 14 and so on gotman has taught his staff how to read every emotional Nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue when they watch a marriage videotape they assign a spaff code to every second of the couple's interaction so that a 15minute conflict discussion ends up being translated into a row of 1,800 numbers 900 for the husband and 900 for the wife the notation 77 14 10 11 11 for instance means that in one sixc stretch one member of the couple was briefly angry then neutral had a moment of defensiveness and then began whining then the data from the electrodes and sensors is factored in so that the coders know for example when the husband's or the wife's heart was pounding or when his or her temperature was rising or when either of them was jiggling in his or her seat and all of that information is fed into a complex equation on the basis of those calculations Gman has proven something remarkable if he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking he can predict with night 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later if he watches a couple for 15 minutes his success rate is around 90% recently a professor who works with Gman named cibil carrer who was playing around with some of the videotapes trying to design a new study discovered that if they looked at only three minutes of a couple talking they could still predict with fairly impressive accuracy who is going to get divorced and who was going to make it the truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined John gotman is a middle-aged man with owl-like eyes silvery hair and a neatly trimmed beard he is short and very charming and when he talks about something that excites him which is nearly a tough time his eyes section five listening to Dr let's take the concept of thin slicing one step further imagine you work for an insurance company that sells doctor medical malpractice protection your boss asks you to figure out for accounting reasons who among all the Physicians covered by the company is most likely to be sued once again you're given two choices the first is to examine the Physicians training and credentials and then analyze their records to see how many error they've made over the past few years the other option is to listen in on very brief Snippets of conversation between each doctor and his or her patients by now you are expecting me to say the second option is the best one you're right and here's why believe it or not the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes analyses of malpractice lawsuits show that they are highly skilled doctors who get sued a lot and doctors who make lots of mistakes and never get sued at the same time the overwhelming number of people who suffer an injury due to the negligence of a doctor never file a malpractice suit at all in other words patients don't file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy Medical Care patients file lawsuits because they've been harmed by shoddy Medical Care and something else happens to them what is that something else it's how they were treated on a personal level by their doctor what comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly people just don't Sue doctors they like is how Alice Birkin a leading medical malpractice lawyer puts it in all the years I've been in this business I've never had a potential client walk in and say I really like this doctor and I feel terrible about doing it but I want to sue him we we've had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist and we'll say we don't think that doctor was negligent we think it's your primary care doctor who was at fault and the client will say I don't care what she did I love her and I'm not suing her burin once had a client who had a breast tumor that wasn't spotted until it had metastasized and she wanted to sue her internist for the delayed diagnosis in fact it was your radiologist who was potentially at fault but the client was Adam she wanted to sue the internist in our first meeting she told me she hated this doctor because she never took the time to talk to her and never asked her about her other symptoms Burkin said she never looked at me as a whole person the patient told us when a patient has a bad medical result the doctor has to take the time to explain what happened and to answer the patient's questions to treat him like a human being the doctors who don't are the ones who get sued it isn't necessary then to know much about how a surgeon operates in order to know his likelihood of being sued what you need to understand is the relationship between that doctor and his patients recently the medical researcher Wendy Levon recorded hundreds of conversations between a group of Physicians and their patients roughly half of the doctors had never been sued the other half had been sued at least twice and levenson found that just on the basis of those convers conv ation she could find clear differences between the two groups the surgeons who had never been sued spent more than 3 minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued 18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes they were more likely to make orienting comments such as first I'll examine you and then we will talk the problem over or I will leave time for your questions which help patients get a sense of what the visit is supposed to accomplish and when they ought to ask questions they were more likely to engage in active listening saying such things as go on tell me more about that and they were far more likely to laugh and be funny during the visit interestingly there was no difference in the amount or quality of information that they gave their patients they didn't provide more details about medication or the patient condition the difference was entirely in how they talked to their patients it's possible in fact to take this analysis even further the psychologist nelini amid listened to levenson's tapes zeroing in on the conversations that had been recorded between just surgeons and their patients for each surgeon she picked two patient conversations then from each conversation she selected two 10-second clips of the doctor talking so her slice was a total of 40 seconds finally she content filtered the slices which means she removed The High Frequency sounds from speech that enable us to recognize individual words what's left after content filtering is a kind of garble that preserves intonation pitch and Rhythm but erases content using that slice and that slice alone ombre did a Gman style analysis she had judges rate the slices of garble for such qualities as warmth hostility dominance and anxiousness and she found that by using only those r she could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn't AMD says that she and her colleagues were totally stunned by the results and it's not hard to understand why the judges knew nothing about the skill level of the surgeons they didn't know how experienced they were what kind of training they had or what kind of procedures they tended to do they didn't even know what the doctors were saying to their patients all they were using for their prediction was their analysis of the surgeon's tone of voice in fact it was even more basic than that if the surgeon's voice was judged to sound dominant the surgeon tended to be in the sued group if the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned the surgeon tended to be in the non suit group could there be a thinner slice malpractice sounds like one of those infinitely complicated and multi-dimensional problems but in the end it comes down to a matter of respect and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice and the most corrosive tone of voice that the doctor can assume is a dominant tone did om need to sample the entire history of a patient and doctor to pick up on that tone no because a medical consultation is a lot like one of gottman's conflict discussions or a student's dorm room it's one of those situations where the signature comes through loud and clear next time you meet a doctor and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you that he's talking down to you and that he isn't treating you with respect listen to that feeling you have thin sliced him and found him wanting section six the power of the glance thin slicing is not an exotic gift it is a central part of what it means to be human we thin slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation we thin slice because we have to and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice even for no more than a second or two can tell us an awful lot it is striking for instance how many different professions and disciplines have a word to describe the particular gift of reading deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience in basketball the player who can take in and comprehend all that is happening around him or her is said to have court sense in the military brilliant generals are said to possess Kudo which translated from the French means power of the glance the ability to immediately see and make sense of the battlefield Napoleon had Kudo so did Patton the ornithologist David bibl says that in Cape May New Jersey he once spotted a bird in flight from 200 yard away and knew instantly that it was a rough a rare Sandpiper he had never seen a rough in Flight Before nor was the moment long enough for him to make a careful identification but he was able to capture what bird watchers called the bird's gist its Essence and that was enough most of bird identification is based on a sort of subjective impression the way a bird moves and little instantaneous appearances at different angles and sequences of different appearances and as it turns its head and as it flies and as it turns around you see sequences of different shapes and angles sibi says all that combines to create a unique impression of a bird that can't really be taken apart and described in words when it comes down to being in the field and looking at a bird you don't take the time to analyze it and say that it shows this this and this and therefore it must be this species it's more natural and instinctive after a lot of practice you look at the bird and it triggers little switches in your brain it looks right you know what it is at a glance the Hollywood producer Brian graser who has produced many of the biggest hit movies of the last 20 years uses almost exactly the same language to describe the first time he met the actor Tom Hanks it was in 1983 Hanks was then a virtual unknown all he had done was the now justly forgotten TV show called Bosom Buddies he came in and read for the movie Splash and right there in the moment I can tell you just what I saw graser says in that first instant he knew Hanks was special we read hundreds of people for that part and other people were funnier than him but they weren't as likable as him I felt like I could live inside of him I felt like his problems were problems I could relate to you know in order to make somebody laugh you have to be interesting and in order to be interesting you have to do things that are mean comedy comes out of anger and interesting comes out of angry otherwise there's no conflict but he was able to be mean and you forgave him and you have to be able to forgive somebody because at the end of the day you still have to be with him even after he's dumped the girl or made some choices you don't agree with all this wasn't thought out in words at the time it was an intuitive conclusion that only later I could deconstruct my guess is that many of you have the same impression of Tom Hanks if I asked you what he was like you would say that he's decent and trustworthy and down to earth and funny but you don't know him you're not friends with him you've only seen him in the movies playing a wide range of different characters nonetheless you've managed to extract something very meaningful about him from those thin slices of experience and that impression has a powerful effect on how you experience Tom hanks's movies everybody said they couldn't see Tom Hanks as an astronaut graser says of his decision to cast Hanks in the hit movie Apollo 13 well I didn't know whether Tom Hanks was an astronaut but I saw this as a movie about a spacecraft in Jeopardy and who does the world want to get back the most who does America want to save Tom Hanks we don't want to see him die we like him too much if we couldn't thin slice if you really had to know someone for months and months to get at their true selves then Apollo 13 would be robbed of its drama and splash would not be funny and if we could not make sense of complicated situations in a Flash basketball would be chaotic and bird watchers would be helpless not long ago a group of psychologists reworked the divorce prediction test that I found so overwhelming they took a number of goatman's couples videos and showed them to non-experts only this time they provided the Raiders With a Little Help they gave them a list of emotions to look for they broke the tapes into 30 second segments and allowed everyone to look at each segment twice once to focus on a man and once to focus on the woman and what happened this time around the Observer ratings predicted with better than 80% accuracy which marriages were going to make it that's not quite as good as gotman but it's pretty impressive and shouldn't come as a surprise we're old hands at thin [Music] slicing chapter 2 the locked door The Secret Life Of snap decisions not long ago one of the world's top tennis coaches a man named Vic Braden began to notice something strange whenever he watched a tennis match in tennis players are given two chances to successfully hit a serve and if they miss on their second chance they are said to double fault and what Braden realized was that he always knew when a player was about to double fault a player would toss the ball up in the air and draw his racket back and just as he was about to make contact brayen would blurt out oh no double fault and sure enough the ball would go wide or long or it would hit the net it didn't seemed to matter who was playing man or woman whether he was watching the match live or on television or how well he knew the person serving I was calling double faults on girls from Russia I'd never seen before in my life Braden says nor was Braden simply lucky lucky is when you call a coin toss correctly but double faulting is rare in an entire match a professional tennis player might hit hundreds of serves and double fault no more than three or four times one year at the big professional tennis tournament at Indian Wells near Braden's house in Southern California he decided to keep track and found he correctly predicted 16 out of 17 double faults in the matches he watched for a while it got so bad that I got scared Braden says it literally scared me I was getting 20 out of 20 right and we're talking about guys who almost never double fault Braden is now in his 70s when he was young he was a worldclass tennis player and over the past 50 years he has coached and counseled and known many of the greatest tennis players in the history of the game he's 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 it isn't surprising then that Vic Braden should be really good at reading a serve in the blink of an eye it really isn't any different from the ability of an Art Expert to look at the Getty kurus and know instantly that it's a fake something in the way the tennis players hold themselves or the way they toss the ball or the fluidity of their motion triggers something in his unconscious he instinctively picks up the gists of a double fault he thin slices some part of the service motion and blink he just knows but here's the catch much to Braden's frustration he simply cannot figure out how he knows what did I see he says I would lie in bed thinking how did I do this I don't know it drove me crazy it tortured me I'd go back and I'd go over the Ser in my mind and i' try to figure it out did they stumble did they take another step did they add a bounce to the ball something that changed their motor program the evidence he used to draw his conclusions seemed to be buried somewhere in his unconscious and he could not dredge it up this is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious snap judgments are first of all enormously quick they rely on the thinnest slices of experience but they are also unconscious in the Iowa gambling experiment the gamblers started avoiding the dangerous red decks long before they were actually aware that they were avoiding them it took another 70 cards for the conscious brain to finally figure out what was going on when Harrison and hoving and the Greek experts first confronted the kuros they experienced waves of revulsion and words popping into their heads and Harrison blurted out I'm sorry to hear that but at that moment of first doubt they were a long way from being able to enumerate precisely why they felt the way they did hoving has talked to many art experts whom he calls fake Busters and they all described the act of getting at the truth of of a work of art as an extraordinarily imprecise process a kind of mental Rush a flurry of visual facts flooding their minds when looking at a work of art one fake Buster described the experience as if his eyes and senses were a flock of hummingbirds popping in and out of dozens of way stations within minutes sometimes seconds this fake Buster registered hosts of things that seemed to call out to him watch out here is hoving on the art historian Bernard bar son he sometimes distressed his colleagues with his inability to articulate how he could see so clearly the tiny defects and inconsistencies in a particular work that branded it either an unintelligent reworking or a fake in one court case in fact baronson was able to say only that his stomach felt wrong he had a curious ringing in his ears he was struck by a momentary depression or he felt woozy and off balance hardly scientific descriptions of how he knew he was in the presence of something cooked up or Faked but that's as far as he was able to go snap judgments and Rapid cognition take place behind a locked door Vic Braden tried to look inside that room he stayed up at night trying to figure out what it is in the delivery of a tennis serve that primes his judgment but he couldn't I don't think we are very good at dealing with the fact of that locked door it's it's one thing to acknowledge the enormous power of snap judgments and thin slices but quite another to place our trust in something so seemingly mysterious my father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said but I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking at least half of this is bull I mean you know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him he literally goes into a spasm and it's this early warning sign clearly this is part of the reason why George Soros is so good at what he does he is someone who is aware of the value of the products of his unconscious reasoning but if you or I were to invest our money with Soros we'd feel nervous if the only reason he could give for a decision was that his back hurt a highly successful CEO like Jack Welch May entitle his Memoir Jack straight from the gut but he then makes it clear that what said set him apart wasn't just his gut but carefully worked out theories of management systems and principles as well our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted and if we say how we feel we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way this is why it was so hard for the Getty at least in the beginning to accept the opinion of people like hoving and Harrison and Zer it was a lot easier to listen to the scientists and the lawyers because the scientists and the lawyers could provide pages and pages of documentation supporting their conclusions I think that approach is a mistake and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments we need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that sometimes we're better off that way section one primed for Action imagine that I'm a professor and I've asked you to come and see me in my office you walk down a long Corridor come through the doorway and sit down at a table in front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five-word sets I want you to make a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as possible out of each set it's called a scrambled sentence test ready number one one him was worried she always number two from our Florida oranges temperature number three ball thee throw toss silently number four shoes give replace old the number five he observes occasionally people watches number six be will sweat lonely they number seven Sky the seamless gray is number eight should now withdraw forgetful we number nine us Bingo sing play let number 10 sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins that seems straightforward right actually it wasn't after you finish that test believe it or not you would have walked out of my office and back down the hall more slowly than you walked in with that test I affected the way you behaved how well think back at the list scattered throughout it are certain words such as worried Florida old lonely gray Bingo and wrinkle you thought that I was just making you take a language test but in fact what I was also doing was making the big computer in your brain your adaptive unconscious think about the state of being old it didn't inform the rest of your brain about its sudden Obsession but it took all this talk of old age so seriously that by the time you finished and walked down the corridor you acted old you walked slowly this test was devised by a very clever psychologist named John barge it's an example of what is called a priming experiment and Barge and others have done numerous even more fascinating variations of it all of which show just how much goes on behind that locked door of our unconscious for example on one occasion barge and two colleagues at New York University Mark Chen and Lara buroughs staged an experiment in the hallway just down from Bar's office they used a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave everyone in the group one of two scrambled sentence tests 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 in neither case were there so many similar words that the students picked up on what was going on once you become conscious of being primed of course the priming doesn't work after doing the test which takes only about 5 minutes the students were instructed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment in order to get their next assignment whenever a student arrived at the office however barge made sure that the experimentor was busy locked in conversation with someone else a Confederate who was standing in the hallway blocking the doorway to the experimentor office barge wanted to learn whether the people who were primed with the polite words would take longer to interrupt the conversation between the experimentor and the Confederate than those primed with the rude words he knew enough about the strange power of unconscious influence to feel that it would make a difference but he thought the effect would be slight earlier when barge had gone to the committee at NYU that approves human experiments they had made him promise that he would cut off the conversation in the hall at 10 minutes we looked at them when they said that and thought you've got to be kidding barge remembered the joke was that we would be measuring the difference in milliseconds I mean these are New Yorkers they aren't going to just stand there we thought maybe a few seconds or a minute at most but barge and his colleagues were wrong the people primed to be rude eventually interrupted on average after about 5 minutes but of the people primed to be polite the overwhelming majority 82% never interrupted at all if the experiment hadn't ended after 10 minutes who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway a polite and patient smile on their faces the experiment was right down the hall from my office barge remembers I had to listen to the same conversation over and over again every hour Whenever there was a new subject it was boring boring the people would come down the hallway and they would see the Confederate whom the experimentor was talking to through the doorway and the Confederate would be going on and on about how she didn't understand what she was supposed to do she kept asking asking and asking for 10 minutes where do I mark this I don't get it barge winced at the memory and the strangeness of it all for a whole semester this was going on and the people who had done the polite test just stood there priming is not it should be said like brainwashing I can't make you reveal deeply personal details about your childhood by priming you with words like nap and bottle and teddy bear nor can I program you to rob a bank for me on the other hand the effects of priming aren't trivial two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer 42 fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit half were asked to Take 5 minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind those students got 55.6% of the questions right the other half of the students were asked to First sit and think about soccer hooligans they ended up getting 42.6% of the Trivial Pursuit questions right the professor group didn't know more than the soccer hooligan group they weren't smarter or more focused or more serious they were simply in a smart frame of mind and clearly associating themselves with the idea of something smart like a professor made it a lot easier in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked to blurt out the right answer the difference between 55 .6 and 42.6% it should be pointed out is enormous that can be the difference between passing and failing the psychologists Claude steel and Joshua arenson created an even more extreme version of this test using black college students and 20 Questions taken from The Graduate record examination the standardized test used for entry into graduate school when the students were asked to identify their race on a pre-test questioner that simple Act was sufficient to Prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African-Americans and academic achievement and the number of items they got right was cut in half as a society we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker's ability and knowledge but are they really if a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from inner city school is it because she's truly a better student or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of smart even more impressive however is how mysterious these priming effects are when you took that sentence completion test you didn't know that you were being primed to think old why would you the clues were pretty subtle what is striking though is that even after people walked slowly out of the room and down the hall they still weren't aware of how their behavior had been affected barge once had people play board games in which the only way the participants could win was if they learned how to cooperate with one another so he primed the players with thoughts of cooperativeness and sure enough they were far more cooperative and the game went far more smoothly afterward barge says we ask them questions like how strongly did you cooperate how much did you want to cooperate and then we correlate that with their actual Behavior and the correlation is zero this is a game that goes on for 15 minutes and at the end people don't know what they have done they just don't know it their explanations are just random noise that surprised me I thought the people could at least have consulted their memories but they couldn't arenson and steel 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 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's 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's really concerned about old age and let's behave accordingly urine conscious 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 deasio 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 in 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 high section two blink in black and white 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 or the IAT the IAT was devised by Anthony Greenwald maerin Boni and Brian NOK and it is based on a seemingly obvious but nonetheless quite profound observation we make connections much more quickly between Pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between Pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us what does that mean let me give you an example what follows is a list of names as you hear each name assign it in your mind to the category to which you think it belongs the two categories are male and female don't skip over words and don't worry if you make any mistakes John Bob Amy Holly Joan Derek Peggy Jason Lisa Matt Sarah that was easy right and the reason that is easy is that when we read or hear the name John or Bob or Holly we don't even have to think about whether it's a masculine or a feminine name we all have a strong prior association between a first name like John and the male gender or a name like Lisa and things female that was a warm-up now let's complete an actual IAT it works like the warm-up except that now I'm going to mix two entirely separate categories together the first category is male or career and the second is female or family once again Place each word in the category to which it belongs Lisa Matt laundry entrepreneur John Merchant Bob capitalist Holly Joan home corporation siblings Peggy Jason kitchen housework parents Sarah Derek my guess is that most of you found that a little harder but that you were still pretty fast at putting the words into the right categories now try this the two categories have been changed to male or family and female or career here is the list babies Sarah Derek merch employment John Bob Holly domestic entrepreneur office Joan Peggy cousins grandparents Jason home Lisa Corporation Matt did you notice the difference this test was quite a bit harder than the one before it wasn't it if you are like most people it took you a little longer to put the word entrepreneur into the career category when career was paired with female than when career was paired with male that's because most of us have much stronger mental associations between maleness and career oriented Concepts than we do between femaleness and ideas related to careers male and capitalist go together in our minds a lot like John and male did but when the category is male or family we have to stop and think even if it's only for a few hundred milliseconds before we decide what to do with a word like Merchant when psychologists administer the IAT they usually do it on a computer the words are flashed on the screen one at a time and if a given word belongs in the left hand column you hit the letter e and if the word belongs in the right hand column you hit the letter I the advantage of doing the IAT on a computer is that the responses are measurable down to the millisecond and those measurements are used in assigning the test taker's score so for example if it took you a little longer to complete part two of the work family IAT than it did part one we would say that you have a moderate association between men and the workforce if it took you a lot longer to complete part two we'd say that when it comes to the workforce you have a strong automatic male Association one of the reasons that the IAT has become so popular in recent years as a research tool is that the effects it is measuring are not subtle as those of you who felt yourself slowing down on the second half of the work family IAT can attest the IAT is the kind of tool that hits you over the head with its conclusions when there's a strong prior Association people answer in between 400 and 600 milliseconds says Greenwald when there isn't they might take 200 to 300 milliseconds longer than that which in the realm of these kinds of effects is huge one of my cognitive psychologist colleagues described this as an effect you can measure with a Sund dial if you'd like to try a computerized IAT you can go to ww w. implicit harvard.edu there you'll find several tests including the most famous of all the iats the race IAT I've taken the race IAT on many occasions and the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy at the beginning of the test you are asked what your attitudes toward blacks and whites are I answered as I'm sure most of you would that I think of the two races as equal then comes the test you're encouraged to complete it quickly first comes the warmup a series of pictures of faces flash on the screen when you see a black face you press e and put it in the left hand category when you see a white face you press I and put it in the right hand category it's blink blink blink I didn't have to think at all then comes part one the first category is European ameran or bad and the second is African-American or good here's the list hurt evil glorious picture of an African-American picture of a European ameran wonderful and so on immediately something strange happened to me the task of putting the words in faces in the right categories suddenly became more difficult I found myself slowing down I had to think sometimes I assign something to one category when I really meant to assign it to the other category I was trying as hard as I could and in the back of my mind there was a growing sense of mortification why was I having such trouble when I had to put a word like glorious or wonderful into the good category when good was paired with African-American or when I had to put the word evil into the bad category when bad was paired with European ameran then came part two this time the categories were reversed so that category one was European American or good and category two was African-American or bad here is the list again hurt evil glorious picture of an African-American picture of a European ameran wonderful and so on now my mortification grew still further now I was having no trouble at all evil African-American or bad hurt African-American are bad wonderful european- ameran are good I took the test a second time and then a third time and then a fourth time hoping that the awful feeling of bias would go away it made no difference it turns out that more than 80% of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete answers when they are required to put good words into the black category than when they were required to link bad things with black people I didn't do quite so badly on the race IAT I was rated as having a moderate automatic preference for whites but then again I'm half black my mother is Jamaican so what does this mean does this mean I'm a racist a self-hating black person not exactly what it means is that our attitudes toward things like race or gender operate on two levels first of all we have our conscious attitudes this is what we choose to believe these are our stated values which we use to direct our Behavior deliberately 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 dis discrimination and when we talk about racism or the fight for civil rights this is the kind of discrimination that we usually refer to but the IAT measures something else it measures our second level of attitude our racial attitude on an unconscious level the immediate automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think we don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes and as I told you in the first chapter we may not even be aware of them the giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from all the experiences we've had the people we've met the lessons we've learned the books we've read the movies we've seen and so on and it forms an opinion that's what's coming out in the IAT the disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values as it turns out for example of the 50,000 African-Americans who have taken the race IAT so far about half of them like me have stronger associations with whites than with blacks how could we not we live in North America where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good you don't choose to make positive associations with the dominant group says maerin banaji who teaches psychology at Harvard University and is one of the leaders in IAT research but you are required to all around you that group is being paired with good things you open the newspaper and you turn on the television and you can't escape it the IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes it's also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations if you have a strongly pro-white pattern of associations for example there is evidence that it will affect the way behave in the presence of a black person it's not going to affect what you'll choose to say or feel or do in all likelihood you won't be aware that you're behaving any differently than you would around a white person but chances are you'll lean forward a little less turn away slightly from him or her close your body a bit be a bit less expressive maintain less eye contact stand a little farther away smile a lot less hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more laugh at jokes a bit less does that matter of course it does suppose the conversation is a job interview and suppose the applicant is a black man he's going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance and that may well make him a little less certain of himself a little less confident and a little less friendly and what will you think then 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 what this unconscious first impression will do in other words is throw the interview hopelessly off course or what if the person you are interviewing is tall I'm sure that on a conscious level we don't think that we treat tall people any differently from how we treat short people but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that height particularly in men does trigger a certain set of very positive un conscious associations I pulled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list the list of the largest corporations in the United States asking each company questions about its CEO overwhelmingly the heads of big companies are as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone white men which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias but they are also almost all tall in my sample I found that on average male CEOs were were just a shade under 6t tall given that the average American male is 5'9 that means that CEOs as a group have about three Ines on the rest of their sex but this statistic actually understates the matter in the US population about 14.5% of all men are 6 feet or taller among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies that number is 58% even more striking in the general American population 3.9% % of adult men are 6'2 or taller among my CEO sample almost a third were 6'2 or taller the lack of women or minorities among the top executive ranks at least has a plausible explanation for years for a number of reasons having to do with discrimination and cultural patterns there simply weren't a lot of women and minorities entering the management ranks of American corporations so today when Boards of directors look for people with the necessary experience to be candidates for top positions they can argue somewhat plausibly that there aren't a lot of women and minorities in the executive pipeline but this is not true of short people it is possible to staff a large company entirely with white males but it is not possible to staff a large company without short people there simply Aren't Enough tall people to go around yet few of those short people ever make it into the Executive Suite of the tens of millions of American American men below 5'6 a grand total of 10 in my sample have reached the level of CEO which says that being short is probably as much of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American the grand exception to all of these Trends is American Express CEO Kenneth chanal who is both on the short side 5' n and black he must be a remarkable man to have overcome two Warren Harding errors is this a deliberate Prejudice of course not no one ever says dismissively of a potential CEO candidate that he's too short this is quite clearly the kind of unconscious bias that the IAT picks up on most of us in ways that we are not entirely aware of automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature we have a sense of what a leader is supposed to look like and that stereotype is so powerful that when someone fits it we simply become blind to other considerations and this isn't confined to the Executive Suite not long ago researchers who analyzed the data from four large research studies that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood calculated that when corrected for such variables as age and gender and height an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary that means that a person who is 6 ft tall but otherwise identical to someone who is 5'5 will make on average $ 5,525 more per year as Timothy judge one of the authors of the height salary study points out if you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it we're talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their ways into positions of authority in companies and organizations it's because when it comes to even the most important positions our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think we see a tall person and we Swoon section three taking care of the customer the sales director of the Flemington Nissan dealership in the central New Jersey town of Flemington is a man named Bob gallb gallb is in his 50s with short thinning black hair and wire rimmed glasses he wears dark conservative suits so that he looks like a bank manager or a stock broker since starting in the car business more than a decade ago Golab has sold on average about 20 cars a month which is more than double what the average car salesman sells on his desk Golab has a row of five gold stars given to him by his dealership in honor of his performance in the world of car salesman gallb is a virtuoso being a successful salesman like gallb is a task that places extraordinary demands on the ability to thin slice someone you've never met walks into your dealership perhaps about to make what may be one of the most expensive purchases of his or her life some people are insecure some are nervous some know exactly what they want some have no idea some know a great deal about cars and will be offended by a Salesman who adopts a patronizing tone some are desperate for someone to take them by the hand and make sense of what seems to them like an overwhelming process a Salesman if he or she is to be successful has to gather all of that information figuring out say the dynamic that exists between a husband and a wife or a father and a daughter process it and adjust his or her own behavior according ly and do all of that within the first few moments of the encounter Bob gallab is clearly the kind of person who seems to do that kind of thin slicing effortlessly he's the Evelyn Harrison of car selling he has a quiet watchful intelligence and a courtly charm he is thoughtful and attentive he's a wonderful listener he has he says three simple rules that God his every action take care of the customer take care of the customer take care of the customer if you buy a car from Bob gallab he will be on the phone to you the next day making sure everything is all right if you come to the dealership but don't end up buying anything he'll call you the next day thanking you for stopping by you always put on your best face even if you're having a bad day you leave that behind he says even if things are horrendous at home you give the customer your best when I I met gallab he took out a thick three- ring binder filled with a mountain of letters he's received over the years from satisfied customers each one of these has a story to tell he said he seemed to remember everyone as he flipped through the book He pointed randomly at a short typewritten letter Saturday afternoon late November 1992 a couple they came in with this glazed look on their faces I said folks have you been sh shopping for cars all day they said yes no one had taken them seriously I ended up selling them a car and we had to get it from I want to say Rhode Island we sent a driver 400 miles they were so happy he pointed at another letter this gentleman here we've delivered six cars to him already since 1993 and every time we deliver another car he writes another letter there's a lot like that here's a guy who lives way down by Keyport New Jersey 40 m away he brought me up a platter of scallops there's another even more important reason for golab's Success however he follows he says another very simple rule he may make a million snap judgments about a customer's needs in state of mind but he tries never to judge anyone on the basis of his or her appearance he assumes that everyone who walks in the door has the exact same chance of buying a car you cannot prejudge people in this business he said over and over when we met and each time he used that phrase his face took on a look of utter conviction 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 Gob says I have a farmer I deal with who have sold all kinds of cars over the years we seal our deal with a handshake and he hands me a $100 bill and says bring it out to my farm we don't even have to write the order up now if you saw this man with his coveralls and his cow dong you'd figure he was not a worthy customer but in fact as we say in the trade he's all cashed up or sometimes people see a teenager and they blow him off well then later that night the teenager comes back with Mom and Dad and they pick up a car and it's the other salesperson that writes them up what Gall is saying is that most salespeople are prone to a classic Warren Harding error they see someone and somehow they let the first impression they have about that person's appearance drown out every other piece of information they managed to gather in that first Instant gallb by contrast tries to be more selective Ive he has his antenna out to pick up on whether someone is confident or insecure knowledgeable or naive trusting or suspicious but from that thin slicing flurry he tries to edit out those Impressions based solely on physical appearance The Secret of gb's success is that he has decided to fight the Warren Harding error section four spotting the sucker why does Bob golab's strategy work so well because Warren Harding errors it turns out play an enormous largely unow role in the car selling business consider for example a remarkable social experiment conducted in the 1990s by a law professor in Chicago named Ian SS SS put together a team of 38 people 18 white men seven white women eight black women and five black men heirs took great pains to make them appear as similar as possible all were in their mid-20s all were of average attractiveness all were instructed to dress in conservative casual wear the women in blouses straight skirts and flat shoes the men in polo shirts or button-downs slacks and loafers all were given the same cover story they were instructed to go to a total of 242 car dealerships in the Chicago area and present themselves as college educated young professionals sample job systems analyst at a bank living in the Tony Chicago neighborhood of streeterville their instructions for what to do were even more specific they should walk in they should wait to be approached by a salesperson I'm interested in buying this car they were supposed to say pointing to the lowest priced car in the showroom then after they heard the salesman's initial offer they were instructed to bargain back and forth and till the salesman either accepted an offer or refused to bargain any further a process that in almost all cases took about 40 minutes what SS was trying to do was zero in on a very specific question all other things being absolutely equal how does skin color or gender affect the price that a Salesman in a car dealership offers the results were stunning the white men received initial offer offers from the salesman that were $725 above the Dealer's invoice that is what the dealer paid for the car from the manufacturer white women got initial offers of $935 above invoice black women were quoted a price on average of $1,195 above invoice and black men their initial offer was $1,687 above invoice even after 40 minutes of bargaining the black men could get the price on average down to only $1,551 above invoice after lengthy negotiations SS's black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than SS's white men were offered without having to say a word what should we make of this are the car salesmen of Chicago incredible sexist and big that's certainly the most extreme explanation for what happened in the car selling business if you can convince someone to pay the sticker price the price on the window of the car in the showroom and if you can talk them into the full premium package with the leather seats and the sound system and the aluminum wheels you can make as much in commission off that one gullible customer as you might from half a dozen or so customers who are prepared to drive a hard bargain if you are a Salesman in other words there is a tremendous temptation to try and spot the sucker car salesman even have a particular word to describe the customers who pay the sticker price they're called a laydown one interpretation of Airs of study is that these car salesman simply made a blanket decision that women and blacks are laydowns they saw someone who wasn't a white male and thought to themselves aha this person is so stupid and naive that I can make a lot of money off them this explanation however doesn't make much sense SS's black and female car buyers after all gave one really obvious sign after another that they weren't stupid and naive they were college educated professionals they had high profile jobs they lived in a wealthy neighborhood they were dressed for Success they were Savvy enough to bargain for 40 minutes does anything about these facts suggest a sucker if SS's study is evidence of conscious discrimination then the car salesman 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 I think instead that there is something more subtle going on here what if for whatever reason Experience car selling lore what they've heard from other salesmen they have a strong automatic association between laydowns and women and minorities what if they linked those two concepts in their mind unconsciously the same way that millions of Americans linked the words Evil And Criminal with African-American on the race IAT so that when women and black people walk through the door they instinctively think sucker these salesmen May well have a strong conscious commitment to racial and gender equality and they would probably insist up and down that they were quoting prices based on the most sophistic icated reading of their customer's character but the decisions they made on the spur the moment as each customer walked through the door was of another sort this was an unconscious reaction they were silently picking up on the most immediate and obvious fact about A's car buyers their sex and their color and sticking with that judgment even in the face of all manner of new and contradictory evidence they are behaving just like the voters did in the 1920 presidential election when they took one look at Warren Harding jumped to a conclusion and stopped thinking in the case of the voters their era gave them one of the worst US presidents ever in the case of the car salesman their decision to quote an outrageously high price to women and blacks alienated people who might otherwise have bought a car gallb tries to treat every customer exactly the same because he's aware of just how dangerous snap judgments are when it comes to race and sex and appearance sometimes the unprepossessing farmer with his filthy coveralls is actually an enormously rich man with a 4,000 Acres spread and sometimes the teenager is coming back later with mom and dad sometimes the young black man has an MBA from Harvard sometimes the petite blonde makes the car decisions for her whole family sometimes the man with a silver man and broad shoulders and Lantern jaw is a lightweight so gollop doesn't try to spot the laydown he quotes everyone the same price sacrificing High profit margins on an individual car for the benefits of volume and word of his fairness has spread to the point where he gets up to a third of his business from the referrals of satisfied customers can I simply look at someone and say this person is going to buy a car asks goab you'd have to be pretty darn good to do that and there's no way I could sometimes I get completely taken AB sometimes I'll have a guy come in waving a checkbook saying I'm here to buy a car today if the numbers are right I'll buy a car today and you know what nine times out of 10 he never buys section five think about Dr King what should we do about Warren Harding errors the kinds of biases we're talking about here aren't so obvious that it's easy to identify a solution if there's a law on the books that says that black people can't drink at the same water fountains as white people the obvious solution is to change the law but unconscious discrimination is a little bit trickier the voters in 1920 didn't think they were being suckered by Warren Harding's good looks any more than '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 if something is happening outside of awareness how on Earth do you fix it the answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions they may bubble up from the unconscious from behind a locked door inside of our brain but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control 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 wit of difference but believe it or not if before you take the IIT I would ask you to look over a series of pictures or articles about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or colen Powell your reaction time would change suddenly it won't seem so hard to associate positive things with black people I had a student who used to take the IAT every day Boni says it was the first thing he did and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went then this one day he got a positive association with blacks and he said that's odd I've never gotten that before because we've all tried to change our IAT score and we couldn't but he's a track and field guy and what he realized is that he'd spent the morning watching the Olympics our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment which section three The Perils of introspection on Paul Van riper's first tour in Southeast Asia when he was out in the bush serving as an adviser to the South Vietnamese he would often hear gunfire in the distance he was then a young Lieutenant new to combat and his first thought was always to get on the radio and ask the troops in the field what was happening after several weeks of this however he realized that the people he was calling on the radio had no more idea than he did about what the gunfire meant it was just gunfire it was the beginning of something but what that something was was not yet clear so ven rer stopped asking on his second tour of Vietnam whenever he heard gunfire he would wait I would look at my watch ven rer says and the reason I looked was that I wasn't going to do a thing for 5 minutes if they needed help they were going to holler and after 5 minutes if things had settled down I still wouldn't do anything you've got to let people work out the situation and work out what's happening the danger in calling is that they'll tell you anything to get you off their backs and if you act on that and take it at face value you could make a mistake plus you're diverting them now they're looking upward instead of downward you're preventing them from resolving the situation van rer carried this lesson with him when he took over the Helm of red team the first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control van rer says echoing the words of the management Guru Kevin Kelly by that I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership but the forces in the field wouldn't depend on intricate orders coming down from the top they were to use their own ini itive and be Innovative as they went forward almost every day the commander of the red Air Forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together using these General techniques of trying to overwhelm blue team from different directions but he never got specific guidance from me of how to do it just the intent once the fighting Started Van rer didn't want introspection he didn't want long meetings he didn't want explanations I told our staff that we would use none of the terminology that blue team was using I never wanted to hear that word effects except in a normal conversation I didn't want to hear about operational net assessment we would not get caught up in any of these mechanistic processes we would use the wisdom the experience and the good judgment of the people we had this kind of management system clearly has its risks it meant van rer didn't all always have a clear idea of what his troops were up to it meant he had to place a lot of trust in his subordinates it was by his own admission a messy way to make decisions but it had one overwhelming Advantage allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv it enables rapid cognition let me give you a very simple example of this picture in your mind mind the face of the waitress or waiter who served you the last time you ate at a restaurant or the salesperson who served you at a store last week or the person who sat next to you on the bus today any stranger whom you've seen recently will do now if I were to ask you to pick that person out of a police lineup could you do it I suspect you could recognizing someone's face is a classic example of unconscious cognition we don't have to think about it faces just pop into our minds but suppose I would to ask you to take a pen and paper and write down in as much detail as you can what your person looks like describe her face what color was her hair what was she wearing was she wearing any jewelry believe it or not you will now do a lot worse at picking that face out of a lineup this is because the act of describing a face has the effect of impairing your otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face the psychologist Jonathan W schoer who pioneered research on this effect calls it verbal overshadowing your brain has a part the left hemisphere that thinks in words and a part the right hemisphere that thinks in pictures and what happened when you described the face in words was that your actual visual memory was displaced your thinking was bumped from the right to the left hemisphere here when you were faced with the lineup the second time around what you were drawing on was your memory of what you said the waitress looked like not your memory of what you saw she looked like and that's a problem because when it comes to faces we're an awful lot better at visual recognition than we are at verbal description if I were to show you a picture of Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein you'd recognize both faces in a fraction of a second my guess is that right now you can see them both almost perfectly in your imagination but how accurately can you describe them if you wrote a paragraph on Marilyn Monroe's face without telling me whom you were writing about could I guess who it was we all have an instinctive memory for faces but by forcing you to verbalize that memory to explain yourself I separate you from those instincts recognizing faces sounds like a very specific process but schooler has shown that the implications of ver veral overshadowing carry over to the way we solve much broader problems consider the following puzzle a man and his son are in a serious car accident the father is killed and the son is rushed to the emergency room upon arrival the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps this child is my son who is the doctor this is an Insight puzzle it's not like a math or a logic problem that can be worked out systematically with pencil and paper the only way you can get the answer is if it comes to you suddenly in the blink of an eye you need to make a leap beyond the automatic assumption that doctors are always men they aren't always of course the doctor is the boy's mother here's another Insight puzzle a giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its Point any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over underneath the pyramid is a $1,000 bill how do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid think about this problem for a few moments then after a minute or so write down in as much detail as you can everything you can remember about how you were trying to solve the problem your strategy your approach or any solutions you've thought of when schooler did its experiment with a whole sheet of insight puzzles he found the people who were asked to explain themselves ended up solving 30% fewer problems than those who weren't in short when you write down your thoughts your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired just as describing the face of your waitress made you unable to pick her out of a police lineup the solution to the pyramid Problem by the way is to destroy the bill in some way to tear it or burn it with a logic problem asking someone to explain himself or herself makes no difference whatsoever in some cases in fact it may help but problems that require a flash of insight operate by different rules it's the same kind of paralysis through analysis you find in sports context schooler says when you start becoming reflective about the process it undermines the ability you lose the flow there are certain kinds of flow fluid intuitive nonverbal kinds of experience that are vulnerable to this process as human beings we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and Instinct we can hold a face in memory and we can solve a puzzle in a Flash but what schooler is saying is that all these abilities are incredibly fragile Insight is not a light bulb that goes off inside our heads it's a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out Gary kleene the decision-making expert once did an interview with a fire department commander in Cleveland as part of a project to get professionals to talk about times when they had to make tough split-second decisions the story the fireman told was about a seemingly routine call he had taken years before when he was a lieutenant the fire was in the back of a one-story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen the lieutenant and his men broke down the front door laid down their hose and then as firemen say charged the line dousing the flames in the kitchen with water something should have happened at that point the fire should have abated but it didn't so the men sprayed again still it didn't seem to make much difference the fireman retreated back through the archway into the living room and there suddenly the lieutenant thought to himself there's something wrong he turned to his men let's get out now he said and moments after they did the floor on which they had been standing collapsed the fire it turned out had been in the basement he didn't know why he had ordered everyone out Klein remembers he believed it was espb he was serious he thought he had ESB and he felt that because of that ESB he'd been protected throughout his career kleene is a decision researcher with a PhD a deeply intelligent and thoughtful man and he wasn't about to accept that as an answer instead for the next 2 hours again and again he led the firefighter back over the events of that day in an attempt to document precisely what the lieutenant did and didn't know the first thing was that the fire didn't behave the way it was supposed to kle says kitchen fires should respond to water this one didn't then they moved back into the living room Klein went on he told me that he always keeps his ear flap up because he wants to get a sense of how hot the fire is and he was surprised at how hot this one was a kitchen fire shouldn't have been that hot I asked him what else often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn't happen and the other thing that surprised him was that the fire wasn't noisy it was quiet and that didn't make sense given how much heat there was in retrospect all those anomalies make perfect sense the fire didn't resp respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn't centered in the kitchen it was quiet because it was muffled by the floor the living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room and heat rises at the time though the lieutenant made none of these connections consciously all of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious this is a beautiful example of thin slicing in action the fireman's internal computer effortlessly and in instantly found a pattern in the chaos but surely the most striking fact about that day is how close it all came to disaster had the lieutenant stopped and discussed the situation with his men had he said to them let's talk this over and try and figure out what's going on had he done in other words what we often think leaders are supposed to do to solve difficult problems he might have destroyed his ability to jump to the Insight that saved their lives in Millennium challenge this is exactly the mistake the blue team made they had a system in place that forced their commanders to stop and talk things over and figure out what was going on that would have been fine if the problem in front of them demanded logic but instead van rer presented them with something different blue team thought they could listen to Van rper's Communications but he started sending messages by couriers on motorcycles they thought he couldn't launch his Planes but he borrowed a forgotten technique from World War II and used Lighting systems they thought he couldn't track their ships but he flooded the gulf with little PT boats and then on the spur the moment van rper's field commanders attacked and all of a sudden what blue team thought was a routine kitchen fire was something they could not factor into their equations at all they needed to solve an Insight problem but their powers of insight had been extinguished what what I heard is the blue team had all these long discussions van rer says they were trying to decide what the political situation was like they had charts with up arrows and down arrows I remember thinking wait a minute you were doing that while you were fighting they had all these acronyms the elements of National Power were diplomatic informational military and economic that gives you dime they would always talk about the blue dime then there were the political milit Ary economic social infrastructure and information instruments PMI so that have all these terrible conversations where it would be our dime versus their PMI I wanted to gag what are you talking about you know you get caught up in forms in matrices in computer programs and it just draws you in they were so focused on the mechanics and the process they never looked at the problem holistically in the act of tearing something part you lose its meaning the operational net assessment was a tool that was supposed to allow us to see all know all major general Dean cash one of the senior jfcom officials involved in the war game admitted afterward well obviously it failed section four a crisis in the ER on West Harrison Street in Chicago 2 miles west of the city's downtown town there is an ornate block-long building designed and built in the early part of the last century for the better part of 100 years this was the home of Cook County Hospital it was here that the world's first Blood Bank opened where Cobalt beam therapy was pioneered where surgeons once reattached four severed fingers and where the trauma center was so famous and so busy treating the gunshot wounds and injuries of the surrounding gangs that had inspired the television series ER in the late 1990s however Cook County Hospital started a project that may one day earn the hospital as much a claim as any of those earlier accomplishments Cook County changed the way its Physicians diagnosed patients coming to the ER complaining of chest pain and how and why they did that offers another way of understanding Paul Van riper's unexpected Triumph in Millennium challenge cook County's big experiment began in 1996 a year after a remarkable man named Brendan Riley came to Chicago to become chairman of the hospital's Department of Medicine the institution that rale inherited was a mess as the city's principal public Hospital Cook County was the place of Last Resort for the hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans without health insurance resources were stretched to the Limit the hospitals cavernous Wards were built for another Century there were no private rooms and patients were separated by flims plywood dividers there was no cafeteria or private telephone just a pay phone for everyone at the end of the hall in one possibly apocryphal story doctors trained a homeless man to do routine lab tests because there was no one else available in the old days says one physician at the hospital if you wanted to examine a patient in the middle of the night there was only one light switch so if you turned on the light the whole Ward lit up it wasn't until the mid 70s that they got individual bedl lights because it wasn't air conditioned they had these big fans and you can imagine the racket they made there would be all kinds of police around because Cook County was where they brought patients from the jails so you'd see prisoners Shackled to the beds the patients would bring in TVs and radios and they would be blaring and people would sit out in the hallways like they were sitting on a porch in a summer evening there was only one bathroom for these hallways filled with patients so people would be walking up and down dragging their IVs then there were the nurses bells that you buzzed to get a nurse but of course there weren't enough nurses so the bells would constantly be going ringing and ringing try listening to someone's heart or lungs in that setting it was a crazy Place Riley had begun his medical career at the medical center at Dartmouth College a beautiful prosperous state-of-the-art Hospital nestled in the Breezy Rolling Hills of New Hampshire West Harrison Street was another world the first summer I was here was the summer of 95 when Chicago had a heat wave that killed hundreds of people and of course the hospital wasn't air conditioned Raleigh remembers the heat index inside the hospital was 120 we had patients sick patients trying to live in that environment one of the first things I did was grab one of the administrators and just walk her down the hall and have her stand in the middle of one of the wards she lasted about 8 seconds the list of problems Riley faced was endless but the emergency department the Ed seemed to cry out for special attention because so few Cook County patients had health insurance most of them entered the hospital through the emergency department and the smart patients would come first thing in the morning and pack a lunch and a dinner there were long lines down the hall the rooms were jammed a staggering 200 50,000 patients came through the Ed every year A lot of times says Riley I'd have trouble even walking through the Ed it was one gurnie on top of another there was constant pressure about how to take care of these folks the sick ones had to be admitted to the hospital and that's when it got interesting it's a system with constrained resources how do you figure out who needs what how do you figure out how to direct resources to those who need them the most a lot of those people were suffering from asthma because Chicago has one of the worst asthma problems in the United States so Raleigh worked with his staff to develop specific protocols for efficiently treating asthma patients and another set of programs for treating the homeless but from the beginning the question of how to deal with heart attacks was front and center a significant number of those people filing into the Ed on average about 30 a day were worried that they were having having a heart attack and those 30 used more than their share of beds and nurses and doctors and stayed around a lot longer than other patients chest pain patients were resource intensive the treatment protocol was long and elaborate and worst of all maddeningly inconclusive a patient comes in clutching his chest a nurse takes his blood pressure a doctor puts a stethoscope on his chest and listens for the distinctive crinkling sound that will tell her whether the patient has fluid in his lungs a sure sign that his heart is having trouble keeping up its pumping responsibilities she asks him a series of questions how long have you been experiencing chest pain where does it hurt are you in particular pain when you exercise have you had heart trouble before what's your cholesterol level do you use drugs do you have diabetes which has a powerful association with heart disease then a technician comes in pushing a small device the size of a desktop computer printer on a trolley she places small plastic stickers with hooks on them at precise locations on the patient's arms and chest an electrode is clipped to each sticker which reads the electrical activity of his heart and prints out the pattern on a sheet of pink graph paper this is the electro cardiogram in theory a healthy patient's heart will produce a distinctive and consistent pattern on the page that looks like the profile of a mountain range and if the patient is having heart trouble the pattern will be distorted lines that usually go up may now be moving down lines that once were curved may now be flat or elongated or spiked and if the patient is in the throws of a heart attack the ECG readout is supposed to have two very particular and recognizable shapes the key words though are supposed to the ECG is far from perfect sometimes someone with an ECG that looks perfectly normal can be in serious trouble and sometimes someone with an ECG that looks terrifying can be perfectly healthy there are ways to tell with absolute certainty whether someone is having a heart attack but those involve tests of particular enzymes that can take hours for results and the doctor confronted in the emergency room with a patient in agony and another hundred patients in a line down the corridor doesn't have hours so when it comes to chest pain doctors gather as much information as they can and then they make an estimate the problem with that estimate though is that it isn't very accurate one of the things Riley did early in his campaign at cook for instance was to put together 20 perfectly typical case histories of people with chest pain and give the histories to a group of doctors cardiologists internists emergency room docs and IAL residents people in other words who had lots of experience making estimates about chest pain the point was to see how much agreement there was about who among the 20 cases was actually having a heart attack what Riley found was that there really wasn't any agreement at all the answers were all over the map the same patient might be sent home by one doctor and checked into intensive care by another we asked the doctors to estimate on a scale of 0 to 100 the probability that each patient was having an acute myocardial infarction heart attack and the odds that each patient would have a major life-threatening complication in the next 3 days Raleigh says in each case the answers we got pretty much ranged from 0 to 100 it was extraordinary the doctors thought they were making reason judgments but in reality they were making something that looked a lot more like a guess and the problem with guessing of course is that it leads to mistakes somewhere between 2 and 8% of the time in American hospitals a patient having a genuine heart attack gets sent home because the doctor doing the examination thinks for some reason that the patient is healthy more commonly though doctors correct for their uncertainty by aing heavily on the side of caution as long as there is a chance that someone might be having a heart attack why take even the smallest Risk by IGN ignoring her problem say you've got a patient who presents to ER complaining of severe chest pain Riley says he's old and he smokes and he has high blood pressure there are lots of things to make you think gee it's his heart but then after evaluating the patient you find out that his ECG is normal what do you do well you probably say to yourself This is an old guy with a lot of risk factors who's having chest pain I'm not going to trust the ECG in recent years the problem has gotten worse because the medical community has done such a good job of educating people about heart attacks that patients come running to the hospital at the first sign of chest pain at the same time the threat of malpractice has made doctors less and less willing to take a chance on a patient with the result that these days only about 10% of those admitted to a hospital on suspicion of having a heart attack actually have a heart attack this then was Riley's problem he wasn't back at Dartmouth or over in one of the plush private hospitals on Chicago's north side where money wasn't an issue he was at Cook County he was running the Department of Medicine on a Sho string yet every year the hospital found itself spending more and more time and money on people who were not actually having a heart attack a single bed in cook County's coronary care unit for instance costs roughly $2,000 a night and a typical chest pain patient might stay for three days yet the typical chest pain patient might have nothing at that moment wrong with him is this the doctors at Cook County asked themselves any way to run a hospital the whole sequence began in 1996 Riley says we just didn't have the number of beds we needed to deal with patients with chest pain we were constantly fighting about which patient needs was Cook County at that time had eight beds in its coronary care unit and another 12 beds in what's called intermediate coronary care which is a ward that's a little less intensive and a little cheaper to run about $11,000 a night instead of $2,000 and staffed by nurses instead of cardiologists but that wasn't enough beds so they opened another section called the observation unit where they could put a patient for half a day or so under the most basic care we created a third lower level option and said let's watch this let's see if it helps but pretty soon what happened is that we started fighting about who gets into the observation unit I'd be getting phone calls all through the night it was obvious that there was no standardized rational way of making this decision Riley is a tall man with a runnner slender build he was raised in New York City the product of a classical Jesuit education Regis for high school where he had four years of Latin and Greek and forom University for college where he read everything from the Ancients to vicenin and heiger and thought about an academic career in philosophy before settling on medicine once as an assistant professor at Dartmouth Raleigh grew frustrated with the lack of any sort of systematic textbook on the everyday problems that doctors encounter in the outpatient setting things like dizziness headaches and abdominal pain so he sat down and in his free evenings and weekends wrote an 800 page textbook on the subject painstakingly reviewing the available evidence for the most common problems a general practitioner might encounter he's always exploring different topics whether it's philosophy or Scottish poetry or the history of medicine says his friend and colleague Arthur Evans who worked with Riley on the chest pain project he's usually reading five books at once and when he took a sabatical leave when he was at Dartmouth he spent the time writing a novel no doubt Riley could have stayed on the East Coast writing one paper after another in airconditioned Comfort but he was drawn to Cook County the thing about a hospital that serves only the poorest and the neediest is that it attracts the kinds of nurses and doctors who want to serve the poorest and neediest and Riley was one of those the other thing about Cook County was that because of its relative poverty it was a place where it was possible to try something radical Cook County had to change to survive and what better place to go for someone interested in change Riley's First Act was to turn to the work of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman in the 1970s Goldman got involved with a group of mathematicians who were very interested in developing statistical rules for telling apart things like subatomic particles Goldman wasn't much interested in physics but it struck him that some of the same mathematical principles the group was using might be helpful in deciding whether someone was suffering a heart attack so he fed hundreds of cases into a computer looking at what kinds of things actually predicted a heart attack and came up with an algorithm an equation that he believed would take much of the guesswork out of treating chest pain doctors he concluded ought to combine the evidence of the ECG with three of what he called urgent risk factors one is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina two is there fluid in the patient's lungs and three is the patient's blood pressure below 100 for each combination of risk factors Goldman Drew up a decision tree that recommended a treatment option for example a patient with a normal ECG who was positive on all three urgent risk factors would go to the Intermediate Unit A patient whose ECG showed acute esea that is the heart muscle wasn't getting enough blood but who had either one or no risk factors would be considered low risk and go to the short stay unit someone with an ECG positive for ES schea and two or three risk factors would be sent directly to the Cardiac Care Unit and so on gold man worked on his decision tree for years steadily refining and perfecting it but at the end of his scientific articles there was always a plaintive sentence about how much more Hands-On real world research needed to be done before the decision tree could be used in clinical practice as the years passed however no one volunteered to do that research not even at Harvard Medical School where Goldman began his work or at the equally prestigious University of California at San Francisco where he completed it for all the rigor of his calculations it seemed that no one wanted to believe what he was saying that an equation could perform better than a trained physician ironically a big chunk of the funding for goldin's initial research had come not from the medical community itself but from the Navy here was a man trying to come up with a way to save lives and improve the quality of care in every hospital in the country and save billions of dollars in health care costs and the only group that got excited was the Pentagon why did the Pentagon for the most Arcane of reasons if you are in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean quietly snooping in enemy Waters and one of your Sailors starts suffering from chest pain you really want to know whether you need to surface and give away your position in order to rush him to a hospital or whether you can stay underwater and just send him to his bunk with a couple of rolls blades but Riley had no such qualms about Goldman's findings he was in a crisis he took Goldman's algorithm presented it to the doctors in the Cook County Ed and the doctors in the department of medicine and announced that he was holding a bake off for the first few months the staff would use their own judgment in evaluating chest pain the way they always had then they would use Goldman's algorithm and the diagnosis and outcome of every patient treated under the two systems would be compared for 2 years data were collected and in the end the result wasn't even close Goldman's rule one hands down it was a whopping 70% better than the old method at recognizing the patients who weren't actually having a heart attack at the same time it was safer the whole point of chest pain prediction is to make sure that patients who end up having major complications are assigned right away to the coronary and intermediate units left to their own devices the doctors guessed right on the most serious patients somewhere between 75 and 89% of the time the algorithm guessed right more than 95% of the time for Riley that was all the evidence he needed he went to the Ed and changed the rules in 2001 Cook County became one of the first Medical institut tions in the country to devote itself full time to the Goldman algorithm for chest Bane and if you walk into the Cook County ER you'll see a copy of the heart attack decision tree posted on the wall section five when less is more why is the Cook County experiment so important because we take it as a given that the more information decision makers have the better off they are if section one a second look at First Impressions in behind the Oval Office his Memoir of his years as a political pollster Dick Morris writes about going to Arkansas in 1977 to meet with the state's 31-year-old attorney general an ambitious young man by the name of Bill Clinton I explained that I got this idea from the polling my friend dick Dresner had done for the movie industry before a new James Bond movie or a sequel to a film like Jaws came out a film company would hire Dresner to summarize the plot and then ask people whether they wanted to see the movie Dresner would read respondents proposed PR blurbs and slogans about the movie to find out which ones work the best sometimes he even read them different endings or described different places where the same scenes were shot to see which they preferred and you just apply these techniques to politics Clinton asked I explained how it could be done why not do the same thing with political ads or speeches or arguments about the issues and after each statement ask them again whom they're going to vote for then you can see which arguments move how many voters and which voters they move we talked for almost 4 hours in eight lunch at his desk I showed the Attorney General sample polls i' had done he was fast fascinated by the process here was a tool he could use a process that could reduce the mysterious ways of politics to Scientific testing and evaluation Morris would go on to become a key adviser to Clinton when Clinton became president and many people came to view his obsession with polling as deeply problematic as a Corruption of the obligation of elected officials to provide leadership and act upon principle in truth that's a little harsh mors was simply bringing to the world of Politics the very same Notions that guide the business World everyone wants to capture the mysterious and Powerful reactions we have to the world around us the people who make movies or detergent or cars or music all want to know before bringing their products to Market what we think of their products that's why it wasn't enough for the people in the music business Who Loved Kenna to act on their gut feelings gut feelings about what the public wants are too mysterious and too iffy Kenna was sent to the market researchers because it seems as though the most accurate way to find out how consumers feel about something is to ask them directly but is that really true if we had asked the students in John Bar's experiment why they were standing in the Hall so patiently after they had been primed to be polite they wouldn't have been able to tell us if we had had asked the Iowa gamblers why they were favoring cards from the blue decks they wouldn't have been able to say at least not until they had drawn 80 cards Sam Gosling and John gotman found that we can learn a lot more about what people think by observing their body language or facial expressions or looking at their bookshelves and the pictures on their walls then by asking them directly and Vic Braden discovered that while people are very willing and very good volunteering information explaining their actions those explanations particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious aren't necessarily correct in fact it sometimes seems as if they are just plucked out of thin air so when marketers ask consumers to give them their reactions to something to explain whether they liked a song that was just played or a movie they just saw or a politician they just heard how much trust should be placed in their answers finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy but the truth is that it isn't and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven't always been sensitive to this fact getting to the bottom of the question of how good Kenna really is requires a more searching exploration of the intricacies of our snap judgments section two Pepsi's challenge in the early 1980s the Coca-Cola company was profoundly nervous about its future once cab been Far and Away the dominant soft drink in the world but Pepsi had been steadily chipping away at Coke's lead in 1972 18% of soft drink users said they drank coke exclusively compared with 4% who called themselves exclusive Pepsi drinkers by the early 1980s Coke had dropped to 12% and Pepsi had risen to 11% and this despite the fact that coke was much more widely available than Pepsi and spending at least aund million more on Advertising every year in the midst of this upheaval Pepsi began running television commercials around the country pitting Coke head-to-head with Pepsi in what they called the Pepsi challenge dedicated Coke drinkers were asked to take a sip from two glasses one marked q and one marked M which did they prefer invariably they would say m and lo and behold M would be revealed as Pepsi K's initial reaction to the Pepsi challenge was to dispute its findings but when they privately conducted blind head-to-head taste tests of their own they found the same thing when asked to to choose between Coke and Pepsi the majority of tasters 57% preferred Pepsi a 57 to 43% Edge is a lot particularly in a world where millions of dollars hang on the tenth of a percentage point and it's not hard to imagine how devastating this news was to Coca-Cola management the Coca-Cola Mystique had always been based on its famous secret formula unchanged since the earliest days of the company but here was seemingly incontrovertible evidence that time had passed kooch by Coca-Cola Executives next did a flurry of additional market research projects the news seemed to get worse maybe the principal characteristics that made Coke distinctive like its bite consumers now describe as harsh the company's head of American operations Brian Dyson said at the time and when you mention words like rounded and smooth they say Pepsi maybe the way we assuage our thirst has changed the head of K's consumer marketing research Department in those years was a man named Roy Stout and stout became one of the leading advocates in the company for taking the results of the Pepsi challenge seriously if we have twice as many vending machines have more shelf space spend more on advertising and are competitive ly priced why are we losing market share he asked K's top management you look at the Pepsi Challenge and you have to begin asking about taste this was the Genesis of what came to be known as New Coke K's scientists went back and tinkered with the fabled secret formula to make it a little lighter and sweeter more like Pepsi immediately C's Market researchers noticed an improvement in blind tastes of some of the early prototypes Coke pulled even with Pepsi they tinkered some more in September of 1984 they went back out and tested what would end up as the final version of New Coke they rounded up not just thousands but hundreds of thousands of consumers all across North America and in head-to-head blind taste tests New Coke beat Pepsi by 6 to8 percentage points Coca-Cola executive were elated the new drink was given the green light in the press conference announcing the launch of New Coke the company's CEO Roberto C Goa called the new product the shest move the company's ever made and there seemed little reason to doubt what he said consumers in the simplest and most direct manner imaginable had been asked for their reaction and they had said they didn't much like the old Coke but they very much liked the new Coke how could New Coke fail but it did it was a disaster Coke drinkers rose up in outrage against New Coke there were protests around the country Coke was plunged into crisis and just a few months later the company was forced to bring back the original formula as classic Coke at which point sales of New Coke virtually disappeared the predicted success of New Coke never materialized I ized but there was an even bigger surprise the seemingly inexurable rise of Pepsi which had also been so clearly signaled by market research never materialized either for the last 20 years Koke has gone head to head with Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior but Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world the story of New Coke in other words is a really good illustration of how complicated it is is to find out what people really think section three the blind leading the blind the difficulty with interpreting the Pepsi challenge findings begins with the fact that it was based on what the industry calls a sip test or a CLT central location test tasters don't drink the entire can they take a sip from a cup of each of the brands being tested and then make their choice now suppose I were to ask you to test a soft drink a little differently what if you were to take a case of the drink home and tell me what you think after a few weeks would that change your opinion it turns out it would Carol Dollard who worked for Pepsi for many years in new product development says I've seen many times when the CLT will give you one result and the home use test will give you the exact opposite for example in a CL tea consumers might taste three or four different products in a row taking a sip or a couple of sips of each a sip is very different from sitting and drinking a whole beverage on your own sometimes a sip tastes good and a whole bottle doesn't that's why home use tests give you the best information the user isn't in an artificial setting they're at home sitting in front of the TV and the way they feel in that situation is the most reflective of how they will behave when the product hits the market Dollard says for instance that one of the biases in a sip test is towards sweetness if you only test in a sip test consumers will like the sweeter product but when they have to drink a whole bottle or can that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying Pepsi is sweeter than Coke so right away it had a big advantage in a sip test Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavor burst unlike the more raisiny vanilla taste of Coke but that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can and that is another reason Coke suffered by comparison Pepsi in short is a drink built to shine in a sip test does this mean that the Pepsi challenge was a fraud not at all it just means that we have two different reactions to colas we have one reaction after taking a sip and we have another reaction after drinking a whole can in order to make sense of people's Cola judgments we need to First decide which of those two reactions most interests us then there's the issue of what is called sensation transference this is a concept coined by one of the great figures in 20th century marketing a man named Lewis chesin who was born in UK crine at the turn of the century and immigrated to the United States as a child cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store without realizing it they transfer Sensations or Impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself to put it another way chesin believed that most of us don't make a Distinction on an unconscious level between the package and the product the product is the the package and the product combined one of the projects cheskin worked on was margarine in the late 1940s margarine was not very popular consumers had no interest in either eating it or buying it but chesin was curious why didn't people like margarine was their problem with margarine intrinsic to the food itself or was it a problem with the associations people had with margarine he decided to find out in that era margarine was white cheskin colored it yellow so that it would look like butter then he staged a series of lunch with Homemakers because he wanted to catch people unawares he didn't call the lunch margarine testing luncheons he merely invited a group of women to an event my bat is that all the women wore little white gloves says Davis Masten who today is one of the principles in the consulting firm chesin it cheskin brought in speakers and served food and there were little Pats of butter for some and little Pats of margarine for others the margarine was yellow in the context of it they didn't let people know there was a difference afterwards everyone was asked to rate the speakers and the food and it ended up the people thought the butter was just fine it was an indirect method to see whether this was simply a perceptual issue or whether there was fundamental a problem with margarine itself market research had said there was no future for margarine Lewis said let's go at this more indirectly and whoo people liked it just fine now the question of how to increase sales of margarine was suddenly much clearer cheskin told his client to call their product Imperial margarine so they could put an impressive looking crown on the package and as he had learned at the luncheon the color was critical he told them the margin had to be yellow then he told them to wrap it in foil because in those days foil was associated with high quality and sure enough if they gave someone two identical pieces of bread one buttered with white margarine and the other buttered with foil wrapped yellow Imperial margarine the second piece of bread won hands down in taste tests every time you never ask anyone do you want foil or not because the answer is always going to be I don't know or why would I says Masten you just ask them which tastes better and by that indirect method you get a picture of what their true motivations are the cheskin company demonstrated a particularly elegant example of sensation transference a few years ago when they studied two competing brands of inexpensive Brandy Christian brothers and ianj the latter of which to give you some idea of the market segment to which the two belong is known to its clientele as easy Jesus their client Christian Brothers wanted to know why after years of being the dominant brand in the category it was losing market share to e andj their Brandy wasn't more expensive it wasn't harder to find in the store and they weren't being out advertised since there is very little advertising at this end of The Branding segment so why were they losing ground cheskin set up a blind taste test with 200 Brandy drinkers the two brandies came out roughly the same cheskin then decided to go a few steps further we went out and did another test with 200 different people explains darl Ray another principal in The Firm this time we told people which glass was Christian Brothers and which glass was IJ now you having sensation transference from the name and this time Christian Brothers numbers are up clearly people had more positive associations with the name Christian Brothers than with ianj that only deepened the mystery because if Christian Brothers had a stronger brand why were they losing market share so now we do another 200 people this time the actual bottles of each brand are in the background we don't ask about the packages but there they are and what happens now we get a statistical preference for E andj so we've been able to isolate what Christian Brothers problem is the problem is not the product and it's not The Branding it's the package Ry pulled out a picture of the two Brandy bottles as they appeared in those days Christian Brothers looked like a bottle of wine it had a long slender spout and a simple off-white label I andj by contrast had a far more ornate bottle more squat like a decanter with smoked glass foil wrapping around the spout and a dark richly textured label to prove their point Ray and his colleagues did one more test they served 200 people Christian Brothers Brandy out of an E&J bottle and E&J Brandy out of a Christian Brothers bottle which Brandy won Christian Brothers hands down by the biggest margin of all now they had the right taste the right brand and the right bottle the company redesigned their bottle to look a lot more like ij's and sure enough their problem was solved cheskin offices are just outside San Francisco and after we talked Mast and Ray took me to a Knob Hill Farm Supermarket down the street one of those shiny cavernous food Emporia that populate the American suburbs we've done work in just about every aisle Masten said as we walked in in front of us was the beverage section Ray leaned over and picked up a can of seven up we tested 7even up we had several versions and what we found is that if you add 15% more yellow to the green on the package if you take this green and add more yellow what people report is that the taste experience has a lot more lime or lemon flavor and people were upset you are changing my seven up don't do a new Coke on me it's exactly the same product but a different set of Sensations have been transferred from the bottle which in this case isn't necessarily a good thing from the C beverage section we wandered to the can goods a Masten picked up a can of Chef Boyard ravioli and pointed at the picture of the chef on the label of the can his name is is Hector we know a lot about people like this like Orville Redenbacher or Betty Crocker or the woman on the sunmade raisins package the general rule is the closer consumers get to the food itself the more consumers are going to be conservative what that means for Hector is that in this case he needs to look pretty literal you want to have the face as a recognizable human being that you can relate to typically closeup of the face work better than full body shots we tested Hector in a number of different ways can you make the ravioli tastes better by changing him mostly you can blow it like by making him a cartoon figure we looked at him in the context of Photography down to cartoon character kinds of things the more you go to cartoon characters the more of an abstraction Hector becomes the less and less effective you are in perceptions of the taste and quality of the ravioli Masten picked up a can of horl canned meat we did this too we tested the Hormel logo he pointed at the tiny sprig of parsley between the r and the M that little bit of parsley helps bring freshness to canned food Ry held out a bottle of Classico tomato sauce and talked about the meanings attached to various kinds of containers when Del Monte took the peaches out of the tin and put them in a glass container people said ah this is something like my grandmother used to make people say peaches taste better when they come in a glass jar it's just like ice cream in a cylindrical container as opposed to a rectangular package people expect it's going to taste better and they're willing to pay 5 10 cents more just on the strength of that package what Mast and Ray do is tell companies how to manipulate at our first impressions and it's hard not to feel a certain uneasiness about their efforts if you double the size of the chips in chocolate chip ice cream and say on the package new bigger chocolate chips and charge 5 to 10 cents more that seems honest and fair but if you put your ice cream in a round as opposed to a rectangular container and charge 5 to 10 cents more that seems like you're pulling the wool over people's eyes if you think about it though there really isn't any practical difference between those two things we are willing to pay more for ice cream when it tastes better and putting ice cream in a round container convinces us it tastes better just as surely as making the chips bigger in chocolate chip ice cream does sure we're conscious of one Improvement and not conscious of the other but why should that distinction matter why should an ice cream company be able to profit only from improvements that were conscious of you might say Well they're going behind our back but who's going behind our back the ice cream company or our own unconscious neither Mas nor Rey believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad tasting product the taste of the product itself matters a great deal their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations and it is foolish of a company to service one dimension and ignore the other in that context then Coca-Cola's error with new Coke becomes all the more egregious it wasn't just that they placed too much emphasis on sip tests it was that the in entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous they shouldn't have cared so much that they were losing blind taste tests with old Coke and we shouldn't at all be surprised that Pepsi's dominance in blind taste tests never translated to much in the real world why not because in the real world no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind we transfer to our sensation of the Coca-Cola taste all of the unconscious assoc iations we have of the brand the image the can and even the unmistakable red of the logo the mistake Coca-Cola made Ry says was in attributing their loss and share to Pepsi entirely to the product but what counts for an awful lot in colas is the brand imagery and they lost sight of that all their decisions were made on changing the product itself while Pepsi was focusing on Youth and making Michael Jackson their spokes and doing a lot of good branding things sure people like a sweeter product in a sip test but people don't make their product decisions on sip tests K's problem is that the guys in the white lab coats took over did the guys in the white lab coats take over in Kenna's case as well the market testers assumed that they could simply play one of his songs or part of one of his songs for someone over the telephone or on the Internet and the response of listeners would serve as a reliable guide to what music barers would feel about the song their thinking was that music lovers can thin slice a new song in a matter of seconds and there's nothing wrong with that idea in principle but thin slicing has to be done in context it is possible to quickly diagnose the health of a marriage but you can't just watch a couple playing pingpong you have to observe them while they're discussing something of relevance to their relationship it's possible to thin slice a surgeon's risk of being sued for malpractice on the basis of a small snippet of conversation but it has to be a conversation with a patient all of the people who warmed to Kenna had that kind of context the people at the Roxy in the noou concert saw him in the flesh Craig Colman had Kenna sing for him right there in his office Fred Durst heard Kenna through the prism of one of his trusted colleagues excitement the viewers of MTV who requested Kenna over and over had seen his video judging Kenna without that additional information is like making people choose between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test section four the chair of death several years ago the furniture maker Herman Miller Incorporated hired an industrial designer named Bill stump to come up with a new office chair stump had worked with Herman Miller before most notably on two previous chairs called the uron and the EA yet stump wasn't satisfied with his two previous efforts both had sold well but stump thought that the ergon was clumsy an immature effort the EA was better but it had since been copied by so many other firms that it no longer seems special to him the chairs I had done previously all looked alike stump says I wanted to come up with something that looked different he called his new project the Aon and the story of the Aeron illustrates a second deeper problem with trying to measure people's reactions it is hard for us to explain our feelings about unfamiliar things stump's idea was to try to make the most ergonomically correct chair imaginable he had tried that with the EA but with the air on he went even further an enormous amount of work for instance went into the mechanism connecting the back of the chair with what chair designers call the seat pan in a typical chair there's a simple hinge connecting the two so you can lean back in the chair but the problem with the hinge is that the chair pivots in a different way from how our hips pivot so tilting pulls the shirt out of our pants and puts undue stress on our back on the airon the seat pan and back of the chair moved independently through a complex mechanism and there was much more the design team at Herman Miller wanted fully adjustable arms and that was easier if the arms of the chair were attached to the back of the Aon Not underneath the seat pan as is ordinarily the case they wanted to maximize support for the shoulders so the back of the chair was wider at the top than at the bottom this was exactly the opposite of most chairs which are wide at the bottom and taper at the top finally they wanted the chair to be comfortable for people who were stuck at their desks for long periods of time I looked at straw hats and other things like wicker furniture stump says I've always hated foam chairs covered in fabric because they seemed hot and sticky the skin is an organ it breathes this idea of getting something breathable like the straw hat was intriguing to me what he settled on was a specially engineered thin elastic mesh stretched tight over the plastic frame if you looked through the mesh you could see the levers and mechanisms and hard plastic appendages which were out in plain sight below the seat pin in Herman Miller's years of working with consumers on seating they had found that when it comes to choosing office chairs most people automatically gravitate to the chair with the most presumed status something senatorial or throne-like with thick cushions and a high imposing back what was the airon it was the exact opposite a slender transparent concoction of black plastic and odd protuberances and mesh that looked like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect comfort in America is very much conditioned by Lazy Boy recliners says stump in Germany they joke about Americans wanting too much padding in their car seats we have this fixation on softness I always think of that glove that Disney put on Mickey Mouse's hand if we saw his real claw no one would have liked him what we were doing was running counter to this idea of softness in May of 1992 Herman Miller started doing what they call use testing they took prototypes of the Aeron to local companies in western Michigan and had people sit in them for at least half a day in the beginning the response was not positive Herman Miller asked people to rate the chair's Comfort on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is perfect and at least 7.5 is where you'd really love to be before you actually go to market and the early prototypes of the Aon came in at around 4.75 as a gag one of the Herman Miller staffers put a picture of the chair on the mockup cover of a supermarket tabloid with the headline chair of death everyone who sits in it dies and made it the cover of one of the early Aon research reports people would look at the wiry frame and wonder if it would hold them and then look at the mesh and wonder if it could ever be comfortable it's very hard to get someone to sit on something that doesn't look right says Rob Harvey who was K Miller's senior vice president of research and design at the time if you build a chair that has a wiry frame people's perception is that it isn't going to hold them they get very tentative about sitting in it seating is a very intimate kind of thing the body comes intimately into contact with the chair so there are a lot of visual cues like perceived temperature and hardness that drive people's perceptions but as Herman Miller tinkered with the design coming up with new and better prototypes and got people to overcome their qualms the scores began to inch up by the time Herman Miller was ready to go to market the Comfort scores were above eight that was the good news the bad news just about everyone thought the chair was a monstrosity from the beginning the aesthetic scores lagged way behind the Comfort scores said Bill Dow who was research lead on the air arm project this was an anomaly we've tested thousands and thousands of people sitting in chairs and one of the strongest correlations we've always found [Music] is chapter 6 7 seconds in the Bronx the delicate art of mind reading the 1100 block of Wheeler Avenue in the sound view neighborhood of the South Bronx is a narrow Street of modest two-story houses and apartments at one end is the bustle of Westchester Avenue the neighborhood's main commercial strip and from there the block runs about 200 yd flanked by trees and twin rows of parked cars the buildings were built in the early part of the last century many have an ornate facade of red brick with four or five step Stoops leading to the front door it is a poor and working-class neighborhood and in the late 1990s the drug trade in the area particularly on Westchester Avenue and one block over on Elder Avenue was brisk sound viw is just the kind of place where you would go if you were an immigrant in New York City who was looking to live somewhere cheap and close to a Subway and that's why amadu Dio made his way to Wheeler Avenue Dio was from Guinea in 1999 he was 22 and working as a peddler in lower Manhattan selling videotapes and socks and gloves from the sidewalk along 14th Street he was short and unassuming about 5'6 and 150 lb and he lived at 1157 wheeler on the second floor of one of the Street's narrow apartment houses on the night of February 3rd 1999 Dio returned home to his apartment just before midnight talked to his roommate and then went downstairs and stood at the top of the steps to his building taking in the night a few minutes later a group of plain closed police officers turned slowly onto Wheeler Avenue in an unmarked Ford Taurus there were four of them all white all wearing jeans and sweatshirts and baseball caps and bulletproof vests and all carrying Police Issue 9mm semi-automatic handguns they were part of what is called the street crime unit a special division of the New York City Police Department dedicated to patrolling crime hotspots in the city's poorest neighborhoods driving the Taurus was Ken boss he was 27 next to him was Shawn Carroll 355 and in the back seat were Edward McMillan 26 and Richard Murphy 26 it was Carol who spotted Dello first hold up hold up he said to the others in the car what's that guy doing there Carol claimed later that he had two thoughts one was that Dello might be the lookout for a push in robber that is a burglar who pretends to be a visitor and pushes his way into people's Apartments the other was that Dello fitted the description of a serial rapist who had been active in the neighborhood about a year earlier he was just standing there Carol recalled he was just standing on the stoop looking up and down the block peeking his hat out and then putting his head back against the wall within seconds he does the same thing looks down looks right and it appeared that he stepped backwards into the vestibule as we were approaching like he didn't want to be seen and then we passed by and I'm looking at him and I'm trying to figure out what's going on what's this guy up to boss stopped the car and backed up until the Taurus was right in front of 1157 wheeler Dell was still there which Carol would later say amazed him him I'm like all right definitely something is going on here carolly and McMillan got out of the car police mcmellon called out holding up his badge can we have a word Dio didn't answer later it emerged that Dio had a stutter so he may well have tried to say something but simply couldn't what's more his English wasn't perfect and it was rumored as well that someone he knew had recently been robbed by a group of armed men so he must have been Terri ified here he was outside in a bad neighborhood after midnight with two very large men in baseball caps their chests inflated by their bulletproof vests striding toward him Dello paused and then ran into the vestibule Carol and McMillan gave Chase Dello reached the inside door and grabbed the door knob with his left hand while as the officers would later testify turning his body sideways and digging into his pocket with his other hand show me your hands Carol called out McMillan was yelling too get your hands out of your pockets don't make me kill you but diala was growing more and more agitated and Carol was starting to get nervous too because it seemed to him that the reason DEA was turning his body sideways was that he wanted to hide whatever he was doing with his right hand we were probably at the top steps of the vestibule trying to get to him before he got through that door Carol remembered the individual turned looked at us his hand was on still on the doorknob and he starts removing a black object from his right side and as he pulled the object all I could see was a top it looked like the slide of a black gun my prior experience in training my prior arrests dictated to me that this person was pulling a gun Carol yelled out gun he's got a gun d didn't stop he continued pulling on something in his pocket and now he began to raise the black object in the direction of the officers Carol opened fire mcmellon instinctively jumped backward off the step and landed on his backside firing as he flew through the air as his bullets ricocheted around the vestibule Carol assumed that they came from Dio's gun and when he saw mcmellon flying backward he assumed that mcmellon had been shot by Dio so he kept shooting aiming as police are taught to do for Center Mass there were pieces of cement and splinters of wood flying in every direction and the air was electric with the flash of gun muzzles and the Sparks from the bullets boss and Murphy were now out of the car as well running toward the building I saw Ed McMillan boss would later testify when the four officers were brought to trial on charges of first degree manslaughter and second degree murder he was on the left side of the vest and just came flying off that step all the way down and at the same time sha Caroll is on the right hand side and he's coming down the stairs it was frantic he was running down the stairs and it was just it was intense he was just doing whatever he could to retreat off those stairs and Ed was on the ground shots are still going off I'm running I'm moving and Ed was shot that's all I could see Ed was firing his weapon Shawn was firing his weapon into the vestibule and then I see Mr Dio he's in the rear of the vestibule in the back towards the back wall where that inner door is he's a little bit off to the side of that door and he's crouched he is crouched and he has his hand out and I see a gun and I said my God I'm going to die I fired my weapon I fired it as I was pushing myself backward and then I jumped off to the left I was out of the line of fire his knees were bent his back was straight up and what it looked like was somebody trying to make a smaller Target it looked like a combat stance the same one that I was taught in the police academy at that point the attorney questioning boss interrupted and how was his hand it was out straight out straight out and in his hand you saw an object is that correct yeah I thought I saw a gun in his hand what I seen was an entire weapon a square weapon in his hand it looked to me at that Split Second after all the gunshots around me and the gunm smoke and Ed MC melon down that he was holding a gun and that he had just shot Ed and that I was next Carol and McMillan fired 16 shots each an entire clip boss fired five shots Murphy fired four shots there was silence guns drawn they climbed the stairs and approached Dio I seen his right hand boss said later it was out from his body his palm was open and where there should have been a gun there was a wallet I said where's the gun boss ran up the street toward Westchester Avenue because he had lost track in the shouting and the shooting of where they were later when the ambulance has arrived he was so distraught he could not speak Carol sat down on the steps next to diallo's bullet-ridden body and started to cry section one three fatal mistakes perhaps the most common and the most important forms of Rapid cognition are the judgments we make and The Impressions we form of other people every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling when someone says I love you we look into that person's eyes to judge his or her sincerity when we meet someone new we often pick up on subtle signals so that afterward even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner we may say I don't think he liked me or I don't think she's very happy we easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression if you were to see me grinning for example with my eyes twinkling you'd say I was amused but if you were to see me nod and smile exaggeratedly with the corners of my lips tightened you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically if I were to make eye contact with someone give a small smile and then look down and avert my gaze you would think I was flirting if if I were to follow a remark with a quick smile and then nod or tilt my head sideways you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh and wanted to take the edge off it you wouldn't need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach those conclusions they would just come to you blink if you were to approach a one-year-old child who sits playing on the floor and do something a little bit puzzling such as cupping your hands over hers the child would immediately look into your eyes why because what you have done requires explanation and the child knows that she can find an answer on your face this practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin slicing it is picking up on subtle fleeting cues in order to read someone's mind and there's almost no other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which most of the time we so effortlessly excel in the early hour hours of February 4th 1999 however the four officers cruising down Wheeler Avenue failed at this most fundamental task they did not read Dio's mind first Shan Carroll saw Dio and said to the others in the car what's that guy doing there the answer was that diala was getting some air but Carol sized him up and in that instant decided he looked suspicious that was stake number one then they backed the car up and Dio didn't move Carol later said that amazed him how Brazen was this man who didn't run at the side of the police Dello wasn't Brazen he was curious that was mistake number two then Caro and Murphy stepped toward Doo on the stoop and watched him turn slightly to the side and make a movement for his pocket in that Split Second they decided he was D dangerous but he was not he was terrified that was mistake number three ordinarily we have no difficulty at all distinguishing in a blink between someone who is suspicious and someone who is not between someone Brazen and someone curious and most easily of all between someone terrified and someone dangerous anyone who walks down a city street late at night makes these kinds of instantaneous calculations constantly yet for some reason that most basic human ability deserted those officers that night why these kinds of mistakes were not anomalous events mindreading failures happened to all of us they lie at the root of countless arguments disagreements misunderstandings and hurt feelings and yet because these failures are so instantaneous and so mysterious we don't really know how to understand them in the weeks and months that followed the Dio shooting for example as the case made headlines around the world the argument over what happened that night veered back and forth between two extremes there were those who said that it was just a horrible accident an inevitable byproduct of the fact that police officers sometimes have to make life or death decisions in conditions of uncertainty that's what the jury in the Dio trial concluded and boss Carol mcmellon and Murphy were all acquitted of murder charges on the other side were those who saw what happened as an open and shut case of racism there were protests and demonstrations throughout the city diala was held up as a Marty Wheeler Avenue was renamed amadu Dio Place Bruce Springstein wrote and performed a song in his honor called 41 Shots neither of these explanations however is particularly satisfying there was no evidence that the four officers in the Deo case were bad people or racist or out to get Dio on the other hand it seems wrong to call the shooting a simple accident since this wasn't exactly exemplary police work the officers made a series of critical misjudgments beginning with the assumption that a man getting a breath of fresh air outside his own home was a potential criminal the Yow shooting in other words falls into a kind of gray area the middle ground between deliberate and accidental mind reading failures are sometimes like that they aren't always as obvious and spectacular as other breakdowns in Rapid cognition they are subtle and complex and surprisingly common and what happened on Wheeler Avenue is a powerful example of how mind reading works and how it sometimes goes terribly arai section two the theory of mind reading much of our understanding of mind reading comes from two remarkable scientists a teacher and his pupil silven Tomkins and Paul Eckman Tomkins was the teacher he was born in Philadelphia at the turn of the last century the son of a dentist from Russia he was short and thick around the middle with a Wild Mane of white hair and huge black plastic rib died glasses he taught psychology at Princeton and Ruckers and was the author of affect imagery Consciousness a four volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant he was a legendary talker at the end of a cocktail party a crowd of people would sit wrapped at tompkins's feet someone would say one more question and everyone would stay for another hour and a half as Tomkins held forth on say comic books a television sitcom the biology of emotion his problem with Kant and his enthusiasm for the latest fad diets all infolded into one extended riff during the Depression in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard he worked as a handicapper for a Horse Racing Syndicate and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper East Side at the track where he sat in the stands for hours staring at the horses through binoculars he was known as the professor he had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him based on their emotional relationship emman remembers if a mail horse for instance had lost to a mayor in his first or second year he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mayor next to him in the lineup or something like that no one really knew for certain Tomkins believed that faces even the faces of horses held valuable Clues to Inner emotions and motivations he could walk into a post office it was said go over to the wanted posters and just by looking at the mug shots say what crimes the various fugitives had committed he would watch the show to tell the truth and without fail he could always pick out the people who were lying his son Mark recalls he actually wrote the producer at one point to say it was too easy and the man invited him to come to New York go backstage and show his stuff Virginia deos who teaches psychology at Harvard recalls having long conversations with Tomkins during the 1988 Democratic National Convention we would sit and talk on the phone and he would turn the sound down while say Jesse Jackson was talking to Michael dukus and he would read the faces and give his predictions on what would happen it was profound Paul Eckman first encountered Tomkins in the early 1960s emman was then a young psychologist just out of graduate school and he was interested in studying faces was there a common set of rules he wondered that governed the facial expressions that human beings made silvin Tomkins said that there was but most psychologists said that there wasn't the conventional wisdom at the time held that Expressions were culturally determined that is we simply used our faces according to a set of learned social conventions Amman didn't know which view was right so to help him decide he traveled to Japan Brazil and Argentina and even to remote tribes in the jungles of the Far East carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of distinctive faces to his amazement everywhere he went people agreed on what those expressions meant Tomkins he realized was right not long afterward Tomkins visited emman at his laboratory in San Francisco emman had tracked down a 100,000 ft of film that had been shot by the virologist Carlton gusk in the remote jungles of Papa New Guinea some of the footage was of a tribe called the South foray who were a peaceful and friendly people the rest was of the cuckoo CUO a hostile and murderous tribe with a homosexual ritual in which pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as cortis for the male Elders of the tribe for 6 months emman and his collaborator Wallace friezen had been sorting through the footage cutting extraneous scenes focusing just on the close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups emman set up the projector Tomkins waited in the back he had been told nothing about the tribes involved all identifying context had been edited out Tomkins looked on intently peering through his glasses at the end of the film he approached the screen and pointed to the faces of the South foray these are a sweet gentle people very indulgent very peaceful he said then he pointed to the faces of the cuckoo CU coo this other group is violent and there is lots of evidence to suggest homosexuality even today a third of a century later emman cannot get over what Tomkins did my God I vividly remember saying silvin how on Earth are you doing that emman recalls and he went up to the screen and while we played the film backward in slow motion he pointed out the particular bulges and wrinkles in the faces that he was using to make his judgment that's when I realized I've got to unpack the face it was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored this guy could see it and if he could see it maybe everyone else could too emman and FZ decided then and there to create a taxonomy of facial expressions they combed through medical textbooks that outlined the facial muscles and they identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make there were 43 such movements Amman and Fen called them action units then they sat across from each other again for days on end and began manipulating each Action Unit in turn first locating the muscle in their minds and then concentrating on isolating it watching each other closely as they did checking their movements in a mirror making notes on how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would change with each muscle movement and videotaping the movement for their records on the few occasions when they couldn't make a particular movement they went next door to the UCSF Anatomy department where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle that wasn't pleasant at all emman recalls when each of those action units had been mastered ecin and Fen began working action units in combination layering one movement on top of another the entire process took s years there are 300 combinations of two muscles Ekman says if you add in a third you get over 4,000 we took it up to five muscles which is over 10,000 visible facial configurations most of those 10,000 facial expressions don't mean anything of course they are the kind of nonsense faces that children make but by working through each Action Unit combination equin and Fen identified about 3,000 that did seem to mean something until they had cataloged the essential repertoire of human facial displays of emotion Paul emman is now in his 60s he is clean shaven with closely set eyes and thick prominent eyebrows and although he is of medium build he seems much larger there is something stubborn and substantial in his demeanor he grew up in Newark New Jersey the son of a pediatrician and entered the University of Chicago at 15 he speaks deliberately before he laughs he pauses slightly as if waiting for permission he is the sort who makes lists and numbers his arguments his academic writing has an orderly logic to it by the end of an emman essay each stray objection and problem has been gathered up and cataloged since the mid 1960s he has been working out of a ramshackle Victorian townhouse at the University of California at San Francisco where he holds a professorship when I met emman he sat in his office and began running through through the action unit configurations he had learned so long ago he leaned forward slightly placing his hands on his knees on the wall behind him were photographs of his two Heroes Tomkins and Charles Darwin everybody can do action unit four he began he lowered his brow using his depressor gabelli depressor super silly and corrugator almost everyone can do au9 he wrinkled his nose using his levor Lei superioris alqua Nasi everybody can do five he contracted his levor palp superioris raising his upper eyelid I was trying to follow along with him and he looked up at me you've got a very good five he said generously the more deeply set your eyes are the harder it is to see the five then there's seven he squinted 12 he flashed a smile activating the zygomatic major the inner parts of his eyebrows shot up that's au1 distress anguish then he used his frontalis pars lateralis to raise the outer half of his eyebrows that's au2 it's also very hard but it's worthless it's not part of anything except Kabuki theater 23 is one of my favorites it's the narrowing of the red margin of the lips very reliable anger sign it's very hard to do voluntarily he narrowed his lips moving one ear at a time is still one of the hardest things to do I have to really concentrate it takes everything I've got he laughed this is something my daughter always wanted me to do for her friends here we go he wiggled his left ear then his right ear emman does not appear to have a particularly expressive face he has the demeanor of a psychoanalyst watchful and impassive and his ability to transform his face so easily and quickly was astonishing there is one I can't do he went on it's a39 fortunately one of my posts can do it au38 is dilating the nostrils 39 is the opposite it's the muscle that pulls them down he shook his head and looked at me again oh you've got a fantastic 39 that's one of the best I've ever seen it's genetic there should be other members of your family who have this here to unknown Talent you've got it you've got it he laughed again you're in a position to flash it at people see you should try that in a singles bar emman then began to layer one action unit on top of another in order to compose the more complicated facial expressions that we generally recognize as emotions happiness for instance is a essentially au6 and 12 Contracting the muscles that raise the cheek obicularis oculi Pars orbitalis in combination with the zygomatic major which pulls up the corners of the lips fear is au1 2 and four or more fully 1 2 4 5 and 20 with or without action units 25 26 or 27 that is the inner brow razor frontalis pars medialis plus the outer brow razor frontalis pars lateralis plus the brow lowering depressor supery plus the levator palp superioris which raises the upper lid plus the rorius which stretches the lips plus The Parting of the lips depressor layby plus the massader which drops the jaw discussed that's mostly au9 the wrinkling of the nose levator leby Superior or cqu nayi but it can sometimes be 10 and in either case it may be combined with au5 or 16 or 17 emman and Fen ultimately assembled all these combinations and the rules for reading and interpreting them into the facial action coding system or facts and wrote them up in a 500 page document it is a strangely riveting work full of such details as the possible movements of the lips elongate de elongate narrow widen flatten protrude tighten and stretch the four different changes of the skin between the eyes and the cheeks bulges bags pouches and lines and the critical distinctions between infraorbital furos and the nasolabial furrow John gotman whose research on marriage I wrote about in chapter 1 has collaborated with emman for years and uses the principles of facts in analyzing the emotional states of couples other researchers have employed ekman's system to study everything from schizophrenia to heart disease it has even been put to use by computer animators at Pixar Toy Story and Dreamworks Shrek fax takes weeks to master in its entirety and only 500 people around the world have been certified to use it in research but those who have mastered it gain an extraordinary level of insight into the messages we send each other when we look into one another's eyes emman recalled the first time he saw Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic primaries I was watching his facial expressions and I said to my wife this is PC's bad boy Amman said this is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar and have us love him for it anyway there was this expression that's one of his favorites it's that hand in the cookie jar love me Mommy because I'm a rascal look it's Au 12 15 17 and 24 with an eye roll emman paused then reconstructed that particular sequence of Expressions on his face he contracted his zygomatic major au12 in a classic smile then tugged the corners of his lips down with his triangularis au15 he flexed the mentalis au7 which raises the chin slightly pressed his lips together in au24 and finally rolled his eyes and it was as if slick Willie himself was suddenly in the room I knew someone who was on Clinton's communication staff so I contacted him I said look Clinton's got this way of rolling his eyes along with a certain expression and what it conveys is I'm a bad boy I don't think it's a good thing I could teach him how not to do that in two or three hours and he said well we can't take the risk that he's known to be seeing an expert on lying eckman's voice trailed off it was clear that he rather liked Clinton and that he wanted Clinton's expression to have been no more than a meaningless facial tick emman Shrugged unfortunately I guess he needed to get caught and he got caught section three the naked face what emman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion in fact he makes an even Bolder claim one Central to understanding how mind reading works and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind in a certain sense it is what is going on inside our minds the beginnings of this Insight came when emman and FZ were first sitting across from each other working on expressions of anger and distress it was weeks before one of us finally admitted feeling terrible after a session where we'd been making one of those faces all day FZ says then the other realized that he'd been feeling poorly too so he began to keep track they then went back and began monitoring their bodies during particular facial movements say you do Au you want raising the inner eyebrows and six raising the cheeks and 15 the lowering of the corner of the lips emman said and then did all three what we discovered is that that expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the autonomic nervous system when this first occurred we were stunned we weren't expecting this at all and it happened to both of us we felt terrible what we were generating were sadness anguish and when I lower my brows which is four and raise the upper eyelid which is five and narrow the eyelids which is seven and press the lips together which is 24 I'm generating anger my heartbeat will go up 10 to 12 beats my hands will get hot and as I do it I can't disconnect from the system it's very unpleasant very unpleasant Amman FZ and another colleague Robert levenson who has also collaborated free section five arguing with a dog in the movies and in detective shows on television people fire guns all the time they shoot and shoot and run after people and sometimes they kill them and when they do they stand over the body and smoke a cigarette and then go and have a beer with their partner to hear Hollywood tell it shooting a gun is a fairly common and straightforward act the truth is though that it isn't most police officers well over 90% go their whole career without ever firing at anyone and those who do describe the experience as so unimaginably stressful that it seems reasonable to ask if firing a gun could be the kind of experience that could cause temporary autism here for example are excerpts of interviews that the University of Missouri criminologist David Clinger did with police officers for his fascinating book Into The Kill Zone the first is with an officer who fired on a man who was threatening to kill his partner Dan he looked up saw me and said oh not like oh I'm scared but like oh now here's somebody else I got a kill real aggressive and mean instead inad of continuing to push the gun at Dan's head he started to try to bring it around on me this all happened real fast in milliseconds and at the same time I was bringing my gun up Dan was still fighting with him and the only thought that came through my mind was oh dear God don't let me hit Dan I fired five rounds my vision changed as soon as I started to shoot it went from seeing the whole picture to just the suspect head everything else just disappeared I didn't see Dan anymore didn't see anything else all I could see was the suspect's head I saw four of my five rounds hit the first one hit him on his left eyebrow it opened up a hole and the guy's head snapped back and he said ooh like ooh you got me he still continued to turn the gun toward me and I fired my second round I saw a red dot right below the base of his left eye and his head kind of turned sideways I fired another round it hit on the outside of his left eye and his eye exploded just ruptured and came out my fourth round hit just in front of his left ear the third round had moved his head even further sideways to me and when the fourth round hit I saw a red dot open on the side of his head then close up I didn't see where my last round went then I heard the guy fall backwards and hit the ground here's another when he started towards us it was almost like it was in slow motion and everything went into a tight focus when he made his move my whole body just tensed up I don't remember having any feeling from my chest down everything was focused forward to watch and react to my target talk about an adrenaline rush sh everything tightened up and all my senses were directed forward at the man running at us with a gun my vision was focused on his torso and the gun I couldn't tell you what his left hand was doing I have no idea I was watching the gun the gun was coming down in front of his chest area and that's when I did my first shots I didn't hear a thing not one thing Allan had fired one round when I shot my first pair but I didn't hear him shoot he shot two more rounds when I fired the second time but I didn't hear any of those rounds either we stopped shooting when he hit the floor and slid into me then I was on my feet standing over the guy I don't even remember pushing myself up all I know is the next thing I knew I was standing on two feet looking down at the guy I don't know how I got there whether I pushed up with my hands or whether I pulled my knees up underneath I don't know but once I was up I was hearing things again because I could hear brass still clinking on the tile floor time had also returned to normal by then because it had slowed down during the shooting that started as soon as he started towards us even though I knew he was running at us it looked like he was moving in slow motion damnest thing I ever saw I think you'll agree that these are profoundly strange stories stories in the first instance the officer appears to be describing something that is quite impossible how can someone watch his bullets hit someone just as strange is the second man's claim not to have heard the sound of his gun going off how can that be yet in interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings these same details appear again and again extreme visual Clarity tunnel vision diminished sound and the sense that time is slowing down this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress and it makes sense our mind faced with a life-threatening situation drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us in a critical sense the police officer whom Clinger describes perform better because their sens is narrowed that narrowing allowed them to focus on the threat in front of them but what happens when this stress response is taken to an extreme Dave grman a former Army Lieutenant Colonel and the author of on killing argues that the optimal state of arousal the range in which stress improves performance is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 Beats per minute Gman says that when he measured the heart rate of champion Marksman Ron Avery Avery's pulse was at the top of that range when he was performing in the field the basketball Superstar Larry Bird used to say that at critical moments in the game the court would go quiet and the players would seem to be moving in slow motion he clearly played basketball in that same optimal range of arousal in which Ron Avery performed but very few basketball players see the court as clearly as Larry Bird did and that's because very few people play in that optimal range most of us under pressure get too aroused and past a certain point our bodies begin shutting down so many sources of information that we start to become useless after 145 Gman says bad things begin to happen complex motor skills start to break down doing doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult at 175 we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing the forbrain shuts down and the midbrain the part of your brain that's the same as your dogs all mammals have that part of the brain reaches up and hijacks the forebrain have you ever tried to have a discussion with an angry or frightened human being you can't do it you might as well try to argue with your dog Vision becomes even more restricted Behavior becomes inappropriately aggressive in an extraordinary number of cases people who are fired upon void their bowels because at the heightened level of threat represented by a heart rate of 175 and above the body considers that kind of physiological control a non-essential activity blood is withdrawn from our outer muscle layer and concentrated in core muscle mass Mass The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as hard as possible to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the event of injury but that leaves us clumsy and helpless Grossman says that everyone should practice dialing 911 for this very reason because he has heard of too many situations where in an emergency people pick up the phone and cannot perform this most basic of function with their heart rate saring and their motor coordination deteriorating they dial 411 and not 9911 because that's the only number they remember or they forget to press send on their cell phone or they simply cannot pick out the individual numbers at all you must rehearse it Grossman says because only if you have rehearsed it will it be there this is precisely the reason that many police departments in recent years have banned high-speed chases it's not just because of the dangers of hitting some innocent bystander during the chase although that is clearly part of the worry since about 300 Americans are killed accidentally every year during chases it's also because of what happens after the chase since pursuing a suspect at high speed is precisely the kind of activity that pushes police officers into this dangerous state of high arousal the LA riot was started by what cops did to Rodney King at the end of the high-speed chase says James F head of training for the NYPD who has testified in many police brutality cases the Liberty City riot in Miami in 1980 was started by what cops did at the end of a Chase they beat a guy to death in 1986 they had another riot in Miami based on what cobs did at the end of the chase three of the major race riots in in this country over the past quarter Century had been caused by what cops did at the end of a Chase when you get going at high speeds especially through residential neighborhoods that's scary says Bob Martin a former high-ranking LAPD officer even if it is only 50 mph your adrenaline and heart start pumping like crazy it's almost like a runner's high it's a very euphoric kind of thing you lose perspective you get wrapped up in the chase there's that old saying a dog in the hunt doesn't stop to scratch its fleas if you've ever listened to a tape of an officer broadcasting in the midst of pursuit you can hear it in the voice they almost yell for new officers there's almost hysteria I remember my first Pursuit I was only a couple of months out of the academy it was through a residential neighborhood a couple of times we even went airborne finally we captured him I went back to the car to radio in and say we were okay and I couldn't even pick up the radio I was shaking so badly Martin says that the King beating was precisely what one would expect when two parties both with soaring heartbeats and predatory cardiovascular reactions encounter each other after a chase at a key Point Stacy one of the senior officers at the scene of the arrest told the officers to back off Martin says but they ignored him why because they didn't hear him they had shut down F says that he recently gave a deposition in a case in Chicago in which police officers shot and killed a young man at the end of a Chase and unlike Rodney King he wasn't resisting arrest he was just sitting in his car he was a football player from Northwestern his name was Robert Russ it happened the same night the cops there shot another kid a girl at the end of a vehicle pursuit in a case that Johnny Cochran took and got over a $20 million settlement the cops said he was driving erratically he led them on a chase but it wasn't even that high speed they never got above 70 mph after a while they ran him off the road they spun his car out on the Dan Ryan Expressway the instructions on vehicle stock stops like that are very detailed you are not supposed to approach the car you are supposed to ask the driver to get out well two of the cops run up ahead and open the passenger side door the other was on the other side yelling at Russ to open the door but Russ just sat there I don't know what was going through his head but he didn't respond so this cop smashes the left rear window of the car and fires a sign single shot and it hits Russ in the hand and chest the cop says that he said show me your hands show me your hands and he's claiming now that Russ was trying to grab his gun I don't know if that was the case I have to accept the cops claim but it's beside the point it's still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn't have been anywhere near the car and he shouldn't have broken the window was this officer mindreading not at all mind reading allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others in the scene in who's Afraid of Virginia wolf where Martha is flirting with Nick while George lurks jealously in the background our eyes Bounce from Martha's eyes to George's to Nicks and around and around again because we don't know what George is going to do we keep gathering information on him because we want to find out but Amy Klein's autistic paat patient looked at Nick's mouth and then at his drink and then at Martha's brooch in his mind he processed human beings and objects in the same way he didn't see individuals with their own emotions and thoughts he saw a collection of inanimate objects in the room and constructed a system to explain them A system that he interpreted with such rigid and impoverished logic that when George fires his shotgun at Mar and an umbrella pops out he laughed out loud this in a way is what that officer on the Dan Ryan Expressway did as well in the extreme excitement of the Chase he stopped reading Russ's mind his vision and his thinking narrowed he constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above 70 mph did not register at all arousal leaves us mind blind section six running out of Whit space Have You Ever Seen The videotape of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan it's the afternoon of March 30 1981 Reagan has just given a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel and is walking out a side door toward his limousine he waves to the crowd voices cry out President Reagan President Reagan then a young man named John hinley lunges forward with a 22 caliber pistol in his hand and fires Six Bullets at Reagan's Entourage at Point Blank Range before being wrestled to the ground one of the bullets hits Reagan's press secretary James Brady in the head a second bullet hits a police officer Thomas Dean in the back a third hits secret service agent Timothy McCarthy in the chest and a fourth ricochets off the limousine and pierces Reagan's lung missing his heart by inches the puzzle of the Hinkley shooting of course is how he managed to get at Reagan so easily presidents are surrounded by bodyguard guards and bodyguards are supposed to be on the lookout for people like John hinley the kind of people who typically stand outside a hotel on a Cold Spring day waiting for a glimpse of their president are well-wishers and the job of The Bodyguard is to scan the crowd and look for the person who doesn't fit the one who doesn't wish well at all part of what bodyguards have to do is read faces they have to mind read so why didn't they read hinkley's mind the answer is obvious if you watch the video and it's the second critical cause of Mind blindness there is no time Gavin debecker who runs a security firm in Los Angeles and is the author of the book The Gift of fear says that the central fact in protection is the amount of white space which is what he calls the distance between the Target and any potential as salent the more white space there is the more time The Bodyguard has to react and the more time The Bodyguard has the better his ability to read the mind of any potential as salant but in the hinley shooting there was no white space hinley was in a knot of reporters who were standing within a few feet of the president the Secret Service agents became aware of him only when he started firing from the first instant when Reagan's bodyguard realized that an attack was underway what is known in the security business as the moment of recognition to the point when no further harm was done was 1.8 seconds the Reagan attack involves heroic reactions by several people debecker says nonetheless every round was still discharged by Hinkley in other words those reactions didn't make one single difference because he was too close in the videotape you see E1 bodyguard he gets a machine gun out of his briefcase and stands there another has his gun out too what are they going to shoot at it's over in those 1.8 seconds all the bodyguards could do was fall back on their most primitive automatic and in this case useless impulse to draw their weapons they had no chance at all to understand or anticipate what was happening when you remove time debecker says you are subject to the lowest quality intuitive reaction we don't often think about the role of time in life or death situations perhaps because Hollywood has distorted our sense of what happens in a violent encounter in the movies gun battles are drawn out Affairs where One Cop has time to whisper dramatically to his partner and the villain has time to call out a challenge and the gunfight builds slowly to a devastating conclusion just telling the story of a gun battle makes what happened seemed to have taken much longer than it did listen to the Becker described the attempted assassination a few years ago of the president of South Korea the Assassin stands up and he shoots himself in the leg that's how it starts he's nervous out of his mind then he shoots at the president and he misses instead he hits the president's wife in the head kills the wife The Bodyguard gets up and shoots back he misses he hits an 8-year-old boy it was a screw up on all sides everything went wrong how long do you think that whole sequence took 15 seconds 20 seconds no 3.5 seconds I think that we become temporarily autistic also in situations when we run out of time the psychologist Keith Payne for instance once sat people down in front of a computer and primed them just like John barge did in the experiments described in Chapter 2 by flashing either a black face or a white face on a computer screen then Payne showed his subjects either a picture of a gun or a picture of a wrench the image was on the screen for 200 milliseconds and everyone was supposed to identif ify what he or she had just seen on the screen it was an experiment inspired by the Dio case the results were what you might expect if you are primed with a black face first you'll identify the gun as a gun a little more quickly than if you were primed with a white face first then Payne redid his experiment only this time he sped it up instead of letting people respond at their own pace he forced them to make a decision within five 500 milliseconds half a second now people began to make errors they were quicker to call a gun A gun when they saw a black face first but when they saw a black face first they were also quicker to call a wrench a gun under time pressure they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system system a stereotype when we make a split-second decision Payne says we are really vulnerable to being Guided by our stereotypes and prejudices even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe pay has tried all kinds of techniques to reduce this bias to try and put them on their best behavior he told his subjects that their performance would be scrutinized later by a classmate it made them even more biased he told some people precisely what the experiment was about and told them explicitly to avoid stereotypes based on race it didn't matter the only thing that made a difference pay found was slowing the experiment down and forcing people to wait a beat before identifying the object on the screen our powers of thin slicing and snap judgments are extraordinary but even the giant computer computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work the art experts who judged the Getty kuros needed to see the kuros before they could tell whether it was a fake if they had merely glimpsed the statue through a car window at 60 m per hour they could only have made a wild guess at its authenticity for this very reason many police departments have moved in recent years toward one officer squad cars instead of two that may sound like a bad idea because surely having two officers work together makes more sense can't they provide backup for each other can't they more easily and safely deal with problematic situations the answer in both cases is no an officer with a partner is no safer than an officer on his own just as important two officer teams are more likely to have complaints filed against them with two officers encounters with citizens are far more likely to end in an arrest or an injury to whomever they are arresting or a charge of assaulting a police officer why because when police officers are by themselves they slow things down and when they are with someone else they speed things up all cops want Twan cars says debecker you have a buddy someone to talk to but onean cars get into less trouble because you reduce brav a cop by himself makes an approach that is entirely different he is not as prone to Ambush he doesn't charge in he says I'm going to wait for the other cops to arrive he acts more kindly he allows more time would Russ the young man in the car in Chicago have ended up dead if he had been confronted by just one officer it's hard to imagine that he would have a single officer even a single officer In the Heat of the chase would have had to pause and wait for backup it was the false safety of numbers that gave the three officers the bravado to rush the car you've got to slow the situation down F says we train people that time is on their side in the Russ case the lawyers for the other side were saying that this was a fast breaking situation but was only fast breaking because the cops let it become one he was stopped he wasn't going anywhere what police training does at its best is teach officers how to keep themselves out of this kind of trouble to avoid the risk of momentary autism in a traffic stop for instance the officer is trained to park behind the car if it's at night he shines his brights directly into the car he walks toward the car on the driver's side then stops and stands just behind the driver shining his flashlight over the shoulder onto his or her lap I've had this happen to me and I always feel a bit like I'm being disrespected why can't the officer stand and talk to me face to face like a normal human being the reason is that it would be virtually impossible for me to pull a gun on the officer if he's standing behind me first of all the officer is shining his flashlight on my lap so he can see where my hands are and whether I'm going for a gun and even if I get my hands on a gun I have to twist almost entirely around in my seat lean out the window and fire around the door pillar at the officer and remember I'm blinded by his brights and all this in his full view the police procedure in other words is from my benefit it means that the only way the officer will ever draw his gun on me is if I engage in a drawn out an utterly unambiguous sequence of actions F once ran a project in Dade County Florida where there was an unusually high number of violent incidents between police officers and civilians you can imagine the kind of tension that caused Community groups accused the police of being insensitive and racist the police responded with anger and defensiveness violence they said was a tragic but inevitable part of police work it was an all too familiar script F's response though was to sidestep that controversy and conduct a study he put observers in squad cars and had them keep a running score of how the officers Behavior matched up with proper training techniques it was things like did the officer take advantage of available cover he said we train officers to make themselves the smallest possible Target so you leave it to the bad guy to decide whether they'll be shooting or not so we were looking at things like did the officer take advantage of available cover or did he just walk in the front door did he keep his gun away from the individual at all times did he keep his flashlight in his weak hand in a burglary call did they call back for more information or did they just say 104 did they ask for backup did they coordinate their approach you know you be the shooter I'll cover you did they take a look around the neighborhood did they position another car at the back of the building when they were inside the place did they hold their flashlights off to the side because if the guy happens to be armed he's going to shoot at the flashlight on a traffic stop did they look at the back of the car car before approaching the driver these kinds of things what fi found was that the officers were really good when they were face Toof face with a suspect and when they had the suspect in custody in those situations they did the right thing 92% of the time but in their approach to the scene they were terrible scoring just 15% that was the problem they didn't take the necessary steps to steer clear of temporary autism and when Dade County zeroed in on improving what officers did before they encountered the suspect the number of complaints against officers and the number of injuries to officers and civilians plummeted you don't want to put yourself in a position where the only way you have to defend yourself is to shoot someone five says if you have to rely on your reflexes someone is going to get hurt and get hurt unne necessarily if you take advantage of intelligence and cover you will almost never have to make an instinctive decision section seven something in my mind just told me I didn't have to shoot yet what is valuable about F's diagnosis is how it turns the usual discussion of police shootings on its head the critics of police conduct invariably Focus focus on the intentions of individual officers they talk about racism and conscious bias The Defenders of the police on the other hand invariably take refuge in what F calls the Split Second syndrome an officer goes to the scene as quickly as possible he sees the bad guy there is no time for thought he acts that scenario requires that mistakes be accepted as unavoidable in the end both of these perspectives are defe they accept as a given the fact that once any critical incident is in motion there is nothing that can be done to stop or control it and when our instinctive reactions are involved that view is all too common but that assumption is wrong our unconscious thinking is in one critical respect no different from our conscious thinking in both we are able to develop our rapid decision- making with training and experience are extreme arousal and mind blindness inevitable under conditions of stress of course not debecker whose firm provides security for public figures puts his bodyguards through a program of what he calls stress inoculation in our test the principal the person being guarded says come here I hear a noise and as you come around the corner boom you get shot it's not with a real gun the round is a plastic marking capsule but you feel it and then you have to continue to function then we say you've got to do it again and this time we shoot you as you're coming into the house by the fourth or fifth time you get shot in simulation you're okay debecker does a similar exercise where his trainees are required to repeatedly confront a ferocious dog in the beginning their heart rate is 175 they can't see straight then the second or third time it's 120 and then it's 110 and they can function that kind of training conducted over and over again in combination with real world experience fundamentally changes the way a police officer reacts to a violent encounter mind reading as well is an ability that improves with practice silven Tomkins maybe the greatest mind reader of them all was compulsive about practicing he took a sabatical from Princeton when his son Mark was born and stayed in his house at the Jersey Shore staring into his son's face long and hard picking up the patterns of emotion the cycles of Interest Joy sadness and anger that flash across an infant's face in the first few months of life he put together a library of thousands of photographs of human faces in every conceivable expression and taught himself the logic of the furrows and the wrinkles and the creases the subtle differences between the pre- smile and the prec cry face Paul Eckman has developed a number of simple tests of people's mind reading abilities in one he plays a short clip of a dozen or so people claiming to have done something that they either have or haven't actually done and the test taker's task is to figure out who is lying the tests are surprisingly difficult most people come out right at the level of chance but who does well people who have practiced stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak for example are virtuosos because their infirmity has forced them to become far more sensitive to the information written on people's faces people who have had highly abusive childhoods also do well like stroke victims they've had to practice the difficult art of reading Minds in their case