JAD ABUMRAD: Hello this is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today we are talking about decision making, how we make decisions.

ROBERT: Whoa, whoa, whoa,whoa,whoa. I want to just stop you in that pronoun you just happened to use. You say "we" make decisions.

JAD: We. Yeah.

ROBERT: So when you, Jad Abumrad, when you decide to choose a pen black over blue, if you decide to choose a cereal, Cheerios over Special K.

JAD: Cheerios, definitely.

ROBERT: I'm assuming that you feel very much in charge of that choice. If someone said, "Hey, who chose?" You'd say ...

JAD: This feels like a trick question.

ROBERT: It's gonna be a trick question.

JAD: I chose the Cheerios.

ROBERT: Well, you think you chose.

ROBERT: Would you please welcome the studly Malcolm Gladwell?

ROBERT: But in talking with Malcolm Gladwell, the writer of The Tipping Point, and he at the time he'd just written the book Blink. We were at the 92nd Street Y in New York. He raised an interesting question. We began the discussion by talking about a dangerous element in decision making, which he calls ...

ROBERT: You called this The Perils of Introspection. And you tell the story of a poster contest. It involves hanging cats versus impressionists. Do you recall this?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, yes. Actually I have no memory. Yeah. This is a famous study by Tim Wilson, who's one of my favorite psychologists at UVA and a guy named John Schooler, who's absolutely brilliant. They—they have a whole bunch of posters and they bring students in and they say, "Take any one you want. It's yours." And then they bring in another group and they say, "Take anyone you want. But by the way, before you go home with it, just explain, write out a paragraph about why you're taking it home, why you like it." And then they call up a student six months later and they say "That poster you got for free six months ago, do you like it? Are you still happy with it?" And ones who didn't have to explain themselves still love their poster, and the ones who did hate their poster. And furthermore, the ones who had to explain themselves, it turns out, only took the posters of the hanging cats, of little kittens. You know, hanging their babies.

ROBERT: What do you mean hanging cats? It doesn't mean like [gag sound]?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, no, no. You know those posters. Surely you saw them. Or maybe you have lived in the upper kind of intellectual precincts for so long that you've lost contact with the rest of us but, you know, if you've never seen them, the little kitten hanging on a bar and it says, 'Hang in there, baby,' you know? Oh, yeah.

ROBERT: Oh, oh yeah. All right. Yes. I don't think of it as hanging. I think it is sort of ...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You're just faking it, you're just saying it.

ROBERT: Yeah. Yeah. No, no, you're right. You're right. I am faking it.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. My—actually, when I first saw that, I thought the kitten was having to do a chin up and so it didn't have the desired effect. I thought, "Why are they torturing this kitten?" Right? "Why do kittens have to work? Is it, you know, is it not enough that human beings have to go to the gym?" Anyways, but—but you had those, then you had Impressionist posters, and the kids who had to explain their preferences overwhelmingly chose the kittens and those who didn't have to explain themselves chose the impressionist posters. So what that says is the act of making you explain your preferences, not only biased you in favor of something that you didn't actually want, it also made you change your preference away from something that was sophisticated and in favor of something that was unsophisticated. If you think about the whole universe of focus group testing in something that determines all of the cultural products that get into our society, that makes you really stop and worry, right? We're putting people through a process that alienates them from their true needs and that biases them in favor of the unsophisticated, an overwhelming majority of the greatest and most successful movies or sitcoms or television shows of all time tested badly. Almost by definition, the really breakthrough shows will test badly in focus groups. I actually saw the focus group results for Mary Tyler Moore Show, which were devastating. They hated it! Mary was abrasive, Rhoda was, you know, obnoxious, you know the—in the focus group testing of All In the Family which got one of the lowest scores of any pilot that tested CBS, the overwhelming majority of people who watched the show said that the only way to fix it was to turn Archie into a kind of cuddly, sensitive ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

MALCOLM GLADWELL: You know, it's crazy. It's crazy. The only reason these shows ever make it on the air is that somebody at some point just says, "You know what, ignore that stuff. I like it."

ROBERT: And so the suggestion here is that because these snap judgments are—are a—mysterious, over-explained, therefore corrected in the wrong direction, frankly, capitalist—capitalism should have no cutting edge excitement, except that there are these occasional people that take the risk with the system. So that's one consequence. The other, though, is very, very more interesting to me. If you can't know why you have a feeling in your gut and you can't explain why you have a feeling in your gut and to some extent you can't control what's the feeling in your gut you wonder who's in charge of the choices that you make. And there's a whole section of this book which is maybe the scariest, which is about something called priming, where external clues, things that you see, trigger biases inside you. So let me run you through some of those. There's a game you asked your readers to play, where you play—there are words in the game, and in one of the games you play the words 'wrinkle,' 'bingo' and 'Florida' appear matter of factly. What happens to people who see while doing something else, 'wrinkle,' 'bingo' and 'Florida?'

MALCOLM GLADWELL: They walk out of the room after the test is over more slowly than they walked into them.

ROBERT: You asked people to play a game of Trivial Pursuit. Some of them say, "First, before we play this game, let's think about professors for a moment and now we'll play Trivial Pursuit." Another group, you say, "Let's play Trivial Pursuit, but now let's think about soccer hooligans, and then we'll play Trivial Pursuit." What's the difference?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: If I make you think about professors first, your scores are substantially superior. You win. Basically, if I make you think about hooligans, you lose.

ROBERT: Just thinking about them?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes.

JAD: Can we step away from the 92nd Street Y for just a moment?

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: Because this priming thing that you and Malcolm are discussing gets kind of eerie when you go actually beyond words. Like, here, why don't you have a sip of this coffee?

ROBERT: This coffee here?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Right now?

JAD: Yeah. Just go ahead and have a sip

ROBERT: [slurps] Why are you looking at me like that?

JAD: Because I've just primed you.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: [laughs] Because I just primed you.

ROBERT: You just what?

JAD: Primed you.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

JAD: I'm going to explain.

JOHN BIRGE: Hi, I'm John.

JAD: We—we talked to a psychologist.

JOHN BIRGE: My name is John Birge, and I'm a professor at Yale University, in the Psychology Department.

JAD: And John did an interesting experiment. 

PRODUCER: Hey, check one two.

JAD: He and a grad student by the name of Lawrence Williams. Here's what they did. Lawrence went out into the world. He had a bunch of stuff with him, a briefcase, some coffee, some papers, so much stuff that he could barely carry it all. And he went out ...

JOHN BIRGE: Went out into the front of the library or in town, and he would approach somebody.

JAD: And he'd say, Excuse me, sir, ma'am, would you mind taking this survey? Just a minute of your time?

JOHN BIRGE: They'd give their agreement to be in the study. Great.

JAD: It's a pretty simple survey.

ROBERT: What kind of survey?

JAD: Well, it had a picture of a guy on it, and a—and a description of the guy. It's got—the guy's name was Joe.

JOHN BIRGE: So here's Joe.

ROBERT: Joe?

JOHN BIRGE: Joe has these six traits.

JAD: There's a little description of Joe right there on the paper. "All I want you to do," he would say, "All I want you to do for this survey is just tell me, gut feeling, what do you think of Joe? Do you like him?"

ROBERT: That's it?

JAD: That's it.

ROBERT: Do I like ...

JOHN BIRGE: "How much do you like Joe?"

ROBERT: That's—that's the whole question?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: You mean, like ...

JAD: Rate him.

JOHN BIRGE: One to ten.

ROBERT: One to ten, oh I see.

JOHN BIRGE: And everyone saw the same person described the same way, everyone sees the same description.

JAD: But there's one thing I haven't told you yet.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Somewhere in this process, toward the beginning, he would ever so casually ask them, "Can you just do me a favor, my hands are full, can you hold this cup of coffee."

JOHN BIRGE: "Here, hold this just for a second. Thanks." And they'd just take it for a second.

JAD: [laughs] They were.

JOHN BIRGE: It's all very natural.

ROBERT: Now I see.

JOHN BIRGE: So it's not even seen as part of the experiment.

JAD: Because it was just a second. Or, I should say, not everybody got the same cup of coffee. In fact, he would hand half the people a cup of hot coffee, and he would hand the other half a cup of iced coffee, like I gave you.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: And it was always really fast.

JOHN BIRGE: They only hold the cup for maybe a second at most.

JAD: But that second, whether it was hot or cold, seems to have made a difference, because the hot coffee people ...

JOHN BIRGE: People who saw—who had touched or held the hot coffee ...

JAD: When they were asked, "Do you like Joe?" the majority said, "Yeah."

JOHN BIRGE: Exactly.

JAD: They liked Joe, whereas the cold coffee people, by and large ...

JOHN BIRGE: They didn't like him.

ROBERT: Oh, come on. Is that right?

JAD: I ...

ROBERT: Just by ...

JAD: I kid you not, they have repeated this study many, many times. Always the same result. People who hold the hot coffee are more pro-Joe than the people who hold the iced coffee. In other words, something happens in that second when they hold the cup, some sort of mistranslation in their brain where warm cup becomes warm Joe, real warm.

JOHN BIRGE: This physical sensation ...

JAD: Gets confused with the metaphor.

JOHN BIRGE: People are all the same temperature, usually. 98.6 degrees. We're not different in warmth and cold physically, but we talk about people that way. It's very important to us. You hear somebody is warm, you immediately like them. If you hear a person is cold, you don't want to be their friend, you don't want to hire them. Warmth and coldness, psychologically, is all about trust. It's all about, "Are you a friend or a foe?"
ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait. If that—but if that's true why is it true? Like ...

JAD: Why—why the confusion?

ROBERT: Yeah. Why does it boil down to something as dumb as that?

JAD: [laughs] Well, John Birge and his team have actually been asking that question, doing some neuroscience to see if maybe inside the brain they can see something that would explain it.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JOHN BIRGE: And it seems that the—the area of the brain that records temperature, that's responsive to actual, physical temperature is also the same area of the brain that is the location of where—trust, the same little part of the brain has got both of those things going on.

JAD: And he thinks that there is a good reason for that. Temperature and trust are, in fact, linked. Particularly when you are a little baby.

JOHN BIRGE: As infants, our first learning about the world is usually in terms of what we can see, and what we can touch. We don't have much memory, and we can't think very well. So it's all about our immediate experience. Well, a huge, important area of experience for a little baby is to keep close to the caretaker, and to stay warm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caretaker: Hi.]

JOHN BIRGE: I mean, this—this is something that's so critical when they're so tiny and helpless that if they don't maintain closeness, if they don't maintain warmth they don't survive. So I guess the—the point is, if you're hiring somebody, and it—and you really want to hire the right person, don't have any coffee around. But the first step is to accept the possibility. And very few people—believe me, I try to explain to my family and my friends what I do and they never believe any of these things are really true of them because we don't have any awareness of them. "I can't remember one time that ever happened to me." Well yeah, you won't remember one time because it's never gonna be in your memory. It's never gonna be in your awareness.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, no it's time—why is it so hard for us to—to concede that a huge part of our own motivations are mysterious?

ROBERT: We're back now at the 92nd Street Y, again with Malcolm Gladwell. I have to say there was a part of our conversation where this whole thing got a little scary to me. It had to do in part with race, because instead of using hot and cold as the metaphor, suppose you used black or white?
JAD: Right.

ROBERT: And he said, very flatly, there are stereotypes that we have that seem to be beyond our ability to control. In fact, he took a test, to measure the unconscious feelings that he had in him about Black and white people.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I score, on an unconscious level, it turns out I have a moderate preference for whites on an unconscious level.

ROBERT: And he is, by the way, half-Black. 

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. Which is not unusual for Black people, by the way. Nor, is it unusual for, you know, Jews to have a moderate unconscious preference for Gentiles over Jews, or for any kind of—for Blacks it's most striking. My unconscious attitudes towards Blacks are a function of the society in which I live. My unconscious basically, is collecting impressions and thoughts and biases and stuff from the world I live in. Amassing this massive database. And if—in a very, kind of, unfiltered kind of way, right? Well, my data—my unconscious database about race has more negative things about Blacks than positive things, right? I live in, you know, the United States, of course it does. And so ...

ROBERT: I don't know about the, "of course."

MALCOLM GLADWELL: How can that not affect me, you know?

ROBERT: Well, but yeah. It's just—it's horrible. Or, maybe just put it this way, that—that you can't really purge yourself of things that would bother you if you could spy on them, and that you are, in some sense, a prisoner of your culture in a way that makes you in some way ungovernable. You can't quite get on top of yourself.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: No, the more you push—I mean, I don't push this issue that far in the book, because it gets really troubling ...

ROBERT: Yeah, it does.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: The more you push it, the—the—you're right, it's deeply disturbing. And there's a book written by a guy named Daniel Wegner at Harvard, called the Illusion of Conscious Will, and it's a very difficult book. But if you're—he pushes this as far as you could go. And, you know, at the end, if you go through all of this research that's come out recently in psychology, you do end up in the position that the notion of conscious will is an illusion. It's just we make up stories that make—make us feel good about the decisions we make, but, in fact, we are not really as nearly as in charge as we think we are.

ROBERT: That was Malcolm Gladwell talking with me at the 92nd Street Y. His new book is called Outliers.

JAD: Anything you heard this hour you can hear again on our website Radiolab.org. While you are there send us an email, radiolab(@)wnyc.org is the address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Soren Wheeler and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Lulu Miller, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, Amanda Aronczyk and Jessica Benco. With help from Anna Rascouët and Ike—oops! Ike Sriskandarajah. Gotta do it again.]

[LISTENER: Thanks to Mike Pesca. Dan Ariely, Jonah Lehrer, and the 92nd Street Y. Heathwalk Tyler ...]

[LISTENER: And Sammy O'Kaye.]
[LISTENER: This is NPR, National Public Radio. Okay, that was actually pretty thrilling to do.]

 

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