unusual and controversial. As soon as Zappa had been introduced and
seated, the following exchange occurred:
PINE: I guess your long hair makes you a girl.
ZAPPA: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.
Aside from containing what may be my favorite ad-lib, the above
dialogue illustrates a fundamental theme of this book: Very often in
making a decision about someone or something, we don’t use all the
relevant available information; we use, instead, only a single, highly
representative piece of the total. And an isolated piece of information,
even though it normally counsels us correctly, can lead us to clearly
stupid mistakes—mistakes that, when exploited by clever others, leave
us looking silly or worse.
At the same time, a complicating companion theme has been present
throughout this book: Despite the susceptibility to stupid decisions that
accompanies a reliance on a single feature of the available data, the pace
of modern life demands that we frequently use this shortcut. Recall that
early in Chapter 1, our shortcut approach was likened to the automatic
responding of lower animals, whose elaborate behavior patterns could
be triggered by the presence of a lone stimulus feature—a “cheep-cheep”
sound, a shade of red breast feather, or a specific sequence of light
flashes. The reason infrahumans must often rely on such solitary stim-
ulus features is their restricted mental capability. Their small brains
cannot begin to register and process all the relevant information in their
environments. So these species have evolved special sensitivities to
certain aspects of the information. Because those selected aspects of
information are normally enough to cue a correct response, the system
is usually very efficient: Whenever a female turkey hears “cheep-cheep,”
click, whirr, out rolls the proper maternal behavior in a mechanical
fashion that conserves much of her limited brainpower for dealing with
the variety of other situations and choices she must face in her day.
We, of course, have vastly more effective brain mechanisms than
mother turkeys, or any other animal group, for that matter. We are
unchallenged in the ability to take into account a multitude of relevant
facts and, consequently, to make good decisions. Indeed, it is this in-
formation-processing advantage over other species that has helped
make us the dominant form of life on the planet.
Still, we have our capacity limitations, too; and, for the sake of effi-
ciency, we must sometimes retreat from the time-consuming, sophistic-
ated, fully informed brand of decision making to a more automatic,
primitive, single-feature type of responding. For instance, in deciding
206 / Influence