Psychology 37 (1979): 1660–1672.
John Bargh’s fascinating research can be found in John A.
Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows, “Automaticity of Social
Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype
Activation on Action,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 71, no. 2 (1996): 230–244.
On the Trivial Pursuit study, see Ap Dijksterhuis and Ad van
Knippenberg, “The Relation Between Perception and Behavior,
or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit,” Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 74, no. 4 (1998): 865–877.
The study on black and white test performance and race
priming is presented in Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s
“Stereotype Threat and Intellectual Test Performance of African
Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 5
(1995): 797–811.
The gambling studies are included in Antonio Damasio’s
wonderful book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 193.
The human need to explain the inexplicable was described,
most famously, by Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson in the
1970s. They concluded: “It is naturally preferable, from the