Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [26]
Iyengar looked puzzled. “I don’t know that’s what a psychologist would say.”
They couldn’t agree. But then, that’s because there isn’t a right answer. Mary has an idea about what she wants in a man, and that idea isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. The description that she starts with is her conscious ideal: what she believes she wants when she sits down and thinks about it. But what she cannot be as certain about are the criteria she uses to form her preferences in that first instant of meeting someone face-to-face. That information is behind the locked door.
Braden has had a similar experience in his work with professional athletes. Over the years, he has made a point of talking to as many of the world’s top tennis players as possible, asking them questions about why and how they play the way they do, and invariably he comes away disappointed. “Out of all the research that we’ve done with top players, we haven’t found a single player who is consistent in knowing and explaining exactly what he does,” Braden says. “They give different answers at different times, or they have answers that simply are not meaningful.” One of the things he does, for instance, is videotape top tennis players and then digitize their movements, breaking them down frame by frame on a computer so that he knows, say, precisely how many degrees Pete Sampras rotates his shoulder on a cross-court backhand.
One of Braden’s digitized videotapes is of the tennis great Andre Agassi hitting a forehand. The image has been stripped down. Agassi has been reduced to a skeleton, so that as he moves to hit the ball, the movement of every joint in his body is clearly visible and measurable. The Agassi tape is a perfect illustration of our inability to describe how we behave in the moment. “Almost every pro in the world says that he uses his wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he hits a forehand,” Braden says. “Why? What are they seeing? Look” — and here Braden points to the screen — “see when he hits the ball? We can tell with digitized imaging whether a wrist turns an eighth of a degree. But players almost never move their wrist at all. Look how fixed it is. He doesn’t move his wrist until long after the ball is hit. He thinks he’s moving it at impact, but he’s actually not moving it until long after impact. How can so many people be fooled? People are going to coaches and paying hundreds of dollars to be taught how to roll their wrist over the ball, and all that’s happening is that the number of injuries to the arm is exploding.”
Braden found the same problem with the baseball player Ted Williams. Williams was perhaps the greatest hitter of all time, a man revered for his knowledge and insight into the art of hitting. One thing he always said was that he could look the ball onto the bat, that he could track it right to the point where he made contact. But Braden knew from his work in tennis that that is impossible. In the final five feet of a tennis ball’s flight toward a player, the ball is far too close and moving much too fast to be seen. The player, at that moment, is effectively blind. The same is true with baseball. No one can look a ball onto the bat. “I met with Ted Williams once,” Braden says. “We both worked for Sears and were both appearing at the same event. I said, ‘Gee, Ted. We just did a study that showed that human beings can’t track the ball onto the bat. It’s a three-millisecond event.’ And he was honest. He said, ‘Well, I guess it just seemed like I could do that.’ ”
Ted Williams could hit a baseball as well as anyone in history, and he could explain with utter confidence how to do it. But his explanation did not match his actions, just as Mary’s explanation for what she wanted in a man did not necessarily match who she was attracted to in the moment. We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.
Many years ago, the psychologist Norman R. F. Maier hung two long ropes from the ceiling of a room