John Gottman | University of Virginia | Timothy D. Wilson | University of Washington

Your book is full of counterintuitive insights. For instance, most people consider "jumping to conclusions" to be a mistake, but you don't see it that way.
No. We rely on snap decisions far more than we appreciate. And we suffer under the delusion that most of our important decisions are made in a very rational, deliberate way, but that's just not true. The romantic model of "love at first sight" is true of many other kinds of decisions. We make powerful judgments about people in an instant, and we don't generally go back and change our minds.

Are these judgments reliable?
A decision made in the first two seconds can be just as good as a decision made over a long period of time with lots more information.

You've delved into the work of a whole range of thinkers - psychologists, military leaders, tennis coaches, market researchers - who are exploring a new idea of the unconscious mind. What are they getting at?
The Freudian notion of the unconscious was this weird, murky place where we dealt with emotionally complicated things like sex and violence. The new notion of the unconscious, the adaptive unconscious, has been developed by Timothy D. Wilson at the University of Virginia. He argues that the thing below the surface is like a big computer that crunches data for us. It gathers information from our environment and helps us decide how to prioritize that information. If we had to govern all this consciously, we'd be unable to function.

Among the thinkers you discuss is John Gottman, the University of Washington psychologist who studies marriages. How does his work help us understand snap judgments?
Gottman does what's called "thin-slicing," drawing conclusions based on very narrow slices of experience. He's been doing this since the 1970s with hundreds of couples. Just by watching a 15-minute videotape of a couple interacting, he can predict with almost 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married 15 years later. He focuses on subtle signs of defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.