Blink: Chapters 5–6

He looks like a rock star, but he has none of a rock star’s swagger and braggadocio and staginess.

The Coca-Cola mystique had always been based on its famous secret formula, unchanged since the earliest days of the company.

But here was seemingly incontrovertible evidence that time had passed Coke by.

Maybe the way we assuage our thirst has changed.

The seemingly inexorable rise of Pepsi—which had also been so clearly signaled by market research—never materialized either.

Dollard says, for instance, that one of the biases in a sip test is toward sweetness: “If you only test in a sip test, consumers will like the sweeter product. But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying.”

Christian Brothers looked like a bottle of wine: it had a long, slender spout and a simple off-white label. E & J, by contrast, had a far more ornate bottle: more squat, like a decanter, with smoked glass, foil wrapping around the spout, and a dark, richly textured label.

The more you go to cartoon characters, the more of an abstraction Hector becomes, the less and less effective you are in perceptions of the taste and quality of the ravioli.

“The mistake Coca-Cola made,” Rhea says, “was in attributing their loss in share to Pepsi entirely to the product. But what counts for an awful lot in colas is the brand imagery, and they lost sight of that..."

Stumpf and Chadwick’s first idea was to try to make the most ergonomically correct chair imaginable.

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.

What was the Aeron? It was the exact opposite: a slender, transparent concoction of black plastic and odd protuberances and mesh that looked like the exoskeleton of a giant prehistoric insect.

“If you build a chair that has a wiry frame, people’s perception is that it isn’t going to hold them. They get very tentative about sitting in it. Seating is a very intimate kind of thing. The body comes intimately into contact with a chair, so there are a lot of visual cues like perceived temperature and hardness that drive people’s perceptions.”

The comfort scores got above eight, which is phenomenal. But the aesthetic scores started out between two and three and never got above six in any of our prototypes.

It looked different. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different.'

“It comes down to the quality of the vanilla. I don’t like my crème brûlée adulterated, because then you can’t taste through to the quality of the ingredients.”

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

We know unconsciously what good jam is: it’s Knott’s Berry Farm. But suddenly we’re asked to stipulate, according to a list of terms, why we think that, and the terms are meaningless to us.

Mayonnaise, for example, is supposed to be evaluated along six dimensions of appearance (color, color intensity, chroma, shine, lumpiness, and bubbles), ten dimensions of texture (adhesiveness to lips, firmness, denseness, and so on), and fourteen dimensions of flavor, split among three subgroups—aromatics (eggy, mustardy, and so forth); basic tastes (salty, sour, and sweet); and chemical-feeling factors (burn, pungent, astringent).

They aren’t cola experts, and to force them to be—to ask too much of them—is to render their reactions useless.

And it appeared that he stepped backwards into the vestibule as we were approaching, like he didn’t want to be seen.

Carroll later said that “amazed” him: How brazen was this man, who didn't run at the sight of the police? Diallo wasn’t brazen. He was curious.

At the end of a cocktail party, a crowd of people would sit rapt at Tomkins’s feet.

For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, had been sorting through the footage, cutting extraneous scenes, focusing just on close-ups of the faces of the tribesmen in order to compare the facial expressions of the two groups.

“These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful,” he said.

Ekman and Friesen decided, then and there, to create a taxonomy of facial expressions.

On the few occasions when they couldn’t make a particular movement, they went next door to the UCSF anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle.

“Ooh! You’ve got a fantastic thirty-nine. That’s one of the best I’ve ever seen. It’s genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore unknown talent. You’ve got it, you’ve got it.”

Philby is wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. His hair is straight and parted on the left. His face has the hauteur of privilege.

He has been seeing Peter for years, and he speaks of his condition not with condescension or detachment but matter-of-factly, as if describing a minor character tic.

One camera recorded the movement of Peter’s fovea—the centerpiece of his eye. The other camera recorded whatever it was Peter was looking at, and then the two images were superimposed.

The way you and I would look at that scene is straightforward: our eyes would follow in the direction that Nick is pointing, alight on the painting, swivel back to George’s eyes to get his response, and then return to Nick’s face, to see how he reacts to the answer.

Perhaps the most poignant scene Klin studied comes at a point in the movie when Martha is sitting next to Nick, flirting outrageously, even putting a hand on his thigh.

But we have no idea until it comes out that it’s a ruse—so there is this genuine moment of fear.

Fyfe says that he recently gave a deposition in a case in Chicago in which police officers shot and killed a young man at the end of a chase, and unlike Rodney King, he wasn’t resisting arrest.

The cops said he was driving erratically.

“All cops want two-man cars,” says de Becker. “You have a buddy, someone to talk to. But one-man cars get into less trouble because you reduce bravado. A cop by himself makes an approach that is entirely different. He is not as prone to ambush. He doesn’t charge in. He says, ‘I’m going to wait for the other cops to arrive.’ He acts more kindly. He allows more time.”

De Becker, whose firm provides security for public figures, puts his bodyguards through a program of what he calls stress inoculation.

Stroke victims who have lost the ability to speak, for example, are virtuosos, because their infirmity has forced them to become far more sensitive to the information written on people’s faces.

Every moment—every blink—is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.