Blink: Free Will

Many years ago, the psychologist R.F. Maier hung two long ropes from the ceiling of a room that was filled with  all kinds of different tools, objects, and furniture. The ropes were far enough apart that if you held the end of one rope, you couldn't get slose enough to grab hold of the other rope. Everone who came into the room was asked the same question: How many different ways can you come up with for tying the ends of those two ropes together? There are four possible solutions to this problem. One is to stretch one rope as far as possible toward the other, anchor it to an object, such as a chair, and then go and get the second rope. Another is to take a third length, such as an extension cord, and tie it to the end of one of the ropes so that it will be long enough to reach the other rope. A third strategy is to grab one rope in one hand and use an implement, such as a long pole, to pull the other rope toward you. What Maier found is that most people figured out these three solutions pretty easily. But the fourth solution - to swing the rope - occurred to only a few people. The reset were stumped. Maier let them sit and stew for ten minutes and then, without saying anything he walked across the room toward the window and casually brushed one of the ropes, setting it in motion back and forth. Sure enough, after he did that, most peopel suddenly said "aha!" and came up with the pendulum solution. But when Maier asked all those people to describe how they figured it out, only one of them gave the right reason. As Maier wrote: "They made such statements as: "It just dawned on me"; "It was the only thing left", "I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened enough weight to it"; "Perhaps a course in physics suggested it to me"; "I tried to think of a way to get the cord over here, and the only way was to make it swing over."  A professor of Psychology reported as follows: "Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously wit the solution. The idea appeared complete."
Were all these people lying? Were they ashamed to admit that they could solve the problem only after getting  the hint? Not at all. It's just that Maier's hit was so subtle that it was picked up only on an unconscious level. It was processed behind the locked door, so, when pressed for an explanation, all Maier's subjects could do was make up what seemed to them the most plausible one. This is the price we pay for the benefit of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking - particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious - we need to be careful in how we interpret the answers.