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Morris would go on to become a key advisor to Clinton when Clinton became President, and many people came to view his obsession with polling as deeply problematic — as a corruption of the obligation of elected officials to provide leadership and act upon principle. In truth, that’s a little harsh. Morris was simply bringing to the world of politics the very same notions that guide the business world. Everyone wants to capture the mysterious and powerful reactions we have to the world around us. The people who make movies or detergent or cars or music all want to know what we think of their products. That’s why it wasn’t enough for the people in the music business who loved Kenna to act on their gut feelings. Gut feelings about what the public wants are too mysterious and too iffy. Kenna was sent to the market researchers because it seems as though the most accurate way to find out how consumers feel about something is to ask them directly.

But is that really true? If we had asked the students in John Bargh’s experiment why they were standing in the hall so patiently after they had been primed to be polite, they wouldn’t have been able to tell us. If we had asked the Iowa gamblers why they were favoring cards from the blue decks, they wouldn’t have been able to say — at least not until they had drawn eighty cards. Sam Gosling and John Gottman found that we can learn a lot more about what people think by observing their body language or facial expressions or looking at their bookshelves and the pictures on their walls than by asking them directly. And Vic Braden discovered that while people are very willing and very good at volunteering information explaining their actions, those explanations, particularly when it comes to the kinds of spontaneous opinions and decisions that arise out of the unconscious, aren’t necessarily correct. In fact, it sometimes seems as if they are just plucked out of thin air. So, when marketers ask consumers to give them their reactions to something — to explain whether they liked a song that was just played or a movie they just saw or a politician they just heard — how much trust should be placed in their answers? Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy. But the truth is that it isn’t, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact. Getting to the bottom of the question of how good Kenna really is requires a more searching exploration of the intricacies of our snap judgments.

2. Pepsi’s Challenge

In the early 1980s, the Coca-Cola Company was profoundly nervous about its future. Once, Coke had been far and away the dominant soft drink in the world. But Pepsi had been steadily chipping away at Coke’s lead. In 1972, 18 percent of soft drink users said they drank Coke exclusively, compared with 4 percent who called themselves exclusive Pepsi drinkers. By the early 1980s, Coke had dropped to 12 percent and Pepsi had risen to 11 percent — and this despite the fact that Coke was much more widely available than Pepsi and spending at least $100 million more on advertising per year.

In the midst of this upheaval, Pepsi began running television commercials around the country, pitting Coke head-to-head with Pepsi in what they called the Pepsi Challenge. Dedicated Coke drinkers were asked to take a sip from two glasses, one marked Q and one marked M. Which did they prefer? Invariably, they would say M, and, lo and behold, M would be revealed as Pepsi. Coke’s initial reaction to the Pepsi Challenge was to dispute its findings. But when they privately conducted blind head-to-head taste tests of their own, they found the same thing: when asked to choose between Coke and Pepsi, the majority of tasters — 57 percent — preferred Pepsi. A 57 to 43 percent edge is a lot, particularly in a world where millions of dollars hang on a tenth of a percentage point, and it is not hard to imagine how devastating this news was to Coca-Cola management. The Coca-Cola mystique had always been based on its famous secret