Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [65]
Did the guys in the white lab coats take over in Kenna’s case as well? The market testers assumed that they could simply play one of his songs or part of one of his songs for someone over the telephone or on the Internet and the response of listeners would serve as a reliable guide to what music buyers would feel about the song. Their thinking was that music lovers can thin-slice a new song in a matter of seconds, and there is nothing wrong with that idea in principle. But thin-slicing has to be done in context. It is possible to quickly diagnose the health of a marriage. But you can’t just watch a couple playing Ping-Pong. You have to observe them while they are discussing something of relevance to their relationship. It’s possible to thin-slice a surgeon’s risk of being sued for malpractice on the basis of a small snippet of conversation. But it has to be a conversation with a patient. All of the people who warmed to Kenna had that kind of context. The people at the Roxy and the No Doubt concert saw him in the flesh. Craig Kallman had Kenna sing for him, right there in his office. Fred Durst heard Kenna through the prism of one of his trusted colleagues’ excitement. The viewers of MTV who requested Kenna over and over had seen his video. Judging Kenna without that additional information is like making people choose between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test.
4. “The Chair of Death”
Several years ago, the furniture maker Herman Miller, Inc., hired an industrial designer named Bill Stumpf to come up with a new office chair. Stumpf had worked with Herman Miller before, most notably on two previous chairs called the Ergon and the Equa. Yet Stumpf wasn’t satisfied with his two previous efforts. Both had sold well, but Stumpf thought that the Ergon was clumsy — an immature effort. The Equa was better, but it had since been copied by so many other firms that it no longer seemed special to him. “The chairs I had done previously all looked alike,” Stumpf says. “I wanted to come up with something that looked different.” He called his new project the Aeron, and the story of the Aeron illustrates a second, deeper problem with trying to measure people’s reactions: it is hard for us to explain our feelings about unfamiliar things.
Stumpf’s idea was to try to make the most ergonomically correct chair imaginable. He had tried that with the Equa. But with the Aeron he went even further. An enormous amount of work, for instance, went into the mechanism connecting the back of the chair with what chair designers call the seat pan. In a typical chair, there is a simple hinge connecting the two so you can lean back in the chair. But the problem with the hinge is that the chair pivots in a different way from how our hips pivot, so tilting pulls the shirt out of our pants and puts undue stress on our back. On the Aeron, the seat pan and back of the chair moved independently through a complex mechanism. And there was much more. The design team at Herman Miller wanted fully adjustable arms, and that was easier if the arms of the chair were attached to the back of the Aeron, not underneath the seat pan, as is ordinarily the case. They wanted to maximize support for the shoulders, so the back of the chair was wider at the top than at the bottom. This was exactly the opposite of most chairs, which are wide at the bottom and taper at the top. Finally, they wanted the chair to be comfortable for people who were stuck at their desks for long periods of time. “I looked at straw hats and other things like wicker furniture,” Stumpf says. “I’ve always hated foam chairs covered in fabric, because they seemed hot and sticky. The skin is an organ, it breathes. This idea of getting something breathable like the straw hat was intriguing to me.” What he settled on was a specially engineered, thin elastic mesh, stretched tight over the plastic frame. If you looked through the mesh, you could