Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

For the second half of the experiment, Dijksterhuis went to the furniture store IKEA, where people were making much more complicated and expensive purchases. Now the reverse was true. A few weeks later, the thinkers were least happy, and those who had gone with their gut instinct were the happiest. Dijksterhuis argues that his findings represent a fundamental principle of human cognition, and that “there is no a priori reason to assume that [it] does not generalize to other types of choices—political, managerial, or otherwise.” Not long after I read the Science study, a reader sent me the following quotation from Sigmund Freud. It seems that the father of the unconscious agreed: “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”