October 26, 2004

The Unstableness of Preference

One of my favorite books about human nature, and the way things work, is Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point". He has a new book coming out, after the first of the year, called, "Blink". It's about "social intuition, how we know what we know in social situations". He gave a preview of these new discoveries at the Pop!Tech conference that was just held in Camden, Maine.

The story of the Aeron chair suggests that somewhere in that transaction there is a problem, and the problem is that there is something that is being lost between the expression of a preference and the feeling of a preference. ... So this is my question, why would people say they didn't like an idea, that they really liked? ... [One lesson from this is that] preference, our feelings about something, are extraordinarily unstable.


This is a 30 minute, 13meg, mp3. Download it and listen in your spare time. Fascinating stuff from an interesting speaker.

Posted by jackhodgson at October 26, 2004 09:52 AM