Book Titles

The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.

…the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.

We like market research because it provides certainty – a score, a prediction… But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty.

When we become expert in something, our tasks grow more esoteric and complex… it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.

Overloading the decision makers with information… makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

Whenever we have something that we are good at – something we care about – that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

…when we are outside our areas of passion and expertise, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow.

Perhaps the most common – and the most important – forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people.

This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It is picking up on subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone’s mind – and there is almost no other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which, most of the time, we so effortlessly excel.

Mind-reading failures happen to all of us. They lie at the root of countless arguments, disagreements, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings.