Blink

patiently after they had been primed to be polite, they wouldn’t
have been able to tell us. If we 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 eighty cards. Sam Gosling and John Gottman 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 than by asking them
directly. And Vic Braden discovered that while people are very
willing and very good at 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