100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

91. The Unconscious Knows First

One of my favorite pieces of research on unconscious mental processing was conducted by Antoine Bechara (1997) and his team. Participants in the study played a gambling game with decks of cards. Each person received $2,000 of pretend money. They were told that the goal was to lose as little of the $2,000 as possible, and to try to make as much over the $2,000 as possible. There were four decks of cards on the table. Each participant turned over a card from any of the four decks, one card at a time, and continued turning over cards from the deck of their choice until the experimenter told them to stop. The subjects didn’t know when the game would end. They were told that they earned money every time they turned ...