Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [27]
that was filled with all kinds of different tools, objects, and furniture. The ropes were far enough apart that if you held the end of one rope, you couldn’t get close enough to grab hold of the other rope. Everyone who came into the room was asked the same question: How many different ways can you come up with for tying the ends of those two ropes together? There are four possible solutions to this problem. One is to stretch one rope as far as possible toward the other, anchor it to an object, such as a chair, and then go and get the second rope. Another is to take a third length, such as an extension cord, and tie it to the end of one of the ropes so that it will be long enough to reach the other rope. A third strategy is to grab one rope in one hand and use an implement, such as a long pole, to pull the other rope toward you. What Maier found is that most people figured out those three solutions pretty easily. But the fourth solution — to swing one rope back and forth like a pendulum and then grab hold of the other rope — occurred to only a few people. The rest were stumped. Maier let them sit and stew for ten minutes and then, without saying anything, he walked across the room toward the window and casually brushed one of the ropes, setting it in motion back and forth. Sure enough, after he did that, most people suddenly said aha! and came up with the pendulum solution. But when Maier asked all those people to describe how they figured it out, only one of them gave the right reason. As Maier wrote: “They made such statements as: ‘It just dawned on me’; ‘It was the only thing left’; ‘I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it’; ‘Perhaps a course in physics suggested it to me’; ‘I tried to think of a way to get the cord over here, and the only way was to make it swing over.’ A professor of Psychology reported as follows: ‘Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete.’ ”
Were these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting a hint? Not at all. It’s just that Maier’s hint was so subtle that it was picked up on only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier’s subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one.
This is the price we pay for the many benefits of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking — particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious — we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers. When it comes to romance, of course, we understand that. We know we cannot rationally describe the kind of person we will fall in love with: that’s why we go on dates — to test our theories about who attracts us. And everyone knows that it’s better to have an expert show you — and not just tell you — how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction. But in other aspects of our lives, I’m not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn’t possible, and, as we’ll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. “After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, ‘Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,’ ” psychologist Joshua Aronson says. “But how on earth could she know that? What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh’s research with the interrupters, and Maier’s experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”
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