she asked. “He’s from Louisiana. I loved the accent. And I
dropped my pen, just to see what he would do, and he picked it
up right away.” As it turned out, lots of the women there liked
Ron the instant they met him, and lots of the men liked Lillian
the instant they met her. Both of them had a kind of contagious,
winning spark. “You know, girls are really smart,” Jon, a
medical student in a blue suit, said at the end of the evening.
“They know in the first minute, Do I like this guy, can I take
him home to my parents, or is he just a wham-bam kind of
jerk?” Jon is quite right, except it isn’t just girls who are smart.
When it comes to thin-slicing potential dates, pretty much
everyone is smart.
But suppose I were to alter the rules of speed-dating just
slightly. What if I tried to look behind the locked door and
made everyone explain their choices? We know, of course, that
that can’t be done: the machinery of our unconscious thinking is
forever hidden. But what if I threw caution to the winds and
forced people to explain their first impressions and snap
judgments anyway? That is what two professors from Columbia
University, Sheena Iyengar and Raymond Fisman, have done,
and they have discovered that if you make people explain
themselves, something very strange and troubling happens.