BLINK

A pretty awesome book discussing the goings-on in our unconscious mind. He starts off with the Getty Kouros, which was a fake statue that tricked all the non-art experts but couldn't fool the art experts. All because of their ability to thin-slice.

What the hell is thin-slicing? It's basically your unconscious brain's ability to make a judgment within milliseconds. It's that gut feeling you get. And while it leads to some great awesomeness, it invariably leads to messed up bias. Like police officers who weren't experienced scaring the living daylights out of some poor immigrant and then shooting him 41 times because they thought he was pulling out a gun (which ended up being his wallet). If you want to avoid shooting someone 41 times by mistaking a wallet for a gun, slow it down. New police procedures have banned car chases (because the insane adrenaline rush kills your cognitive processes and reduces your mental capacity to that of a dog) and encourage taking your time and waiting for backup.

I think the most useful thing though was about how we thin-slice goods. Everyone's heard of the New Coke disaster. Well it turns out that while Pepsi was a winner when you just sipped it, Coke Classic was much more bearable when consumed as an entire beverage, which explains how Coke still managed to keep the championship belt of most popular sugar water. In this case, the thin-slice, the sip, was totally misleading. And in the case of other products, the smallest things will make the biggest differences, like packaging. Take a good rum and put in a boring bottle and a bad rum in an ornate bottle and the bad rum wins out more often. Switch the bottles and the good rum smokes the bad rum. When you're not an expert rum drinker, it's fairly easy to just accept the thin-slice that took into account the fancy package.

And there is credence to that phrase, the consumer never knows what the hell he wants. If some new product is 'new' and 'different', normal people who don't know anything about the product, i.e. those people that market research firms survey, won't know what to think of it and habitually reject it, as we do with anything that's different (VERY important lesson here). Experts are really the only people we can trust to truly evaluate something's merit (because of their experience and ability to more accurately thin-slice).

That's just a small taster. Read a book for once and let this be the first one on your list.