Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave
by Adam Alter
First posted April 2013
This book was my first one-star review. As I self-select what I read, one-star ratings make up just 2% of my review oeuvre (do I really have a oeuvre?). There is a strong correlation between extreme reviews and more “likes,” but this poison apple did not tempt me down the road of polarization.
I truly loathed this book and would still trade my Goodreads review with the most online traction for never having read it.
“Non-fiction subtitles” has been a particular peccadillo for me; a lot of the publishing industry’s marketing for nonfic subtitles serves to expand the target market of a book into the low-hanging fruit of the Self-Improvement section. They are so aggressively self-actualizing—so boldly declaratory, so omnipresent—that I now ignore them completely. That typically works. Incredibly effusive subtitles for non-fiction books rarely have anything to do with the text itself. Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How we Think, Feel, and Behave is, unfortunately, not in that that category. Its pushy, de facto subtitle is an apt signifier for the what you’re about to get; bland text and mild suppositions supported by anecdote, weak sources, and poor citation.
A bridge is masculine to Spanish-speakers and feminine to German-speakers, so in one experiment Spanish-speakers described bridges as big, dangerous, strong, and sturdy, while German-speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, pretty, and fragile.
The non-specific endnotes that “supports” the above excerpt gives the reader no clue from where the data points were cobbled together. It is therefore a good thing that Drunk Tank Pink relies upon a mere twenty or so endnote citations per chapter—parsing which decades-old psychology textbook or recent marketing study conducted within NYU’s Stern School of Business isn’t that trying a task. In this case, the broad swath of pages that Drunk Tank Pink indirectly cites are from Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition. The pages cited speak nothing of bridges (perhaps the underlying study that Language in Mind discusses does), but do offer this piece of advice on page 66: “Comparing studies conducted in different languages poses a deeper problem: there is simply no way to be certain that the stimuli and instructions are truly the same in both.” But that detail is irrelevant in Drunk Tank Pink, which fits facts to premises, ruthlessly culling any depth for the illusion of poignancy.
The certainty with which “evidence” is presented for the conclusions reached is astounding:
Labels go undetected as they frame how we perceive time and space, but they play their most cunning tricks when they paint a scene that doesn’t actually exist.
Isn’t one of the tenets of critical thinking to “consider the opposite?” The unwavering certainty spewed on each page is the principal culprit in making Drunk Tank Pink unreadable—the views espoused are far from certainties. It is hubris to drop them onto a non-fiction reader without any sort of mitigating statements, and it infects the tone and tenor of the book like a toxin. Because there is no substance with which to engage, the reader feels slighted, ignored; Drunk Tank Pink cares not for your entertainment, nor your education, only in blasting out as many citations as possible without having to engage with them. Most chapters contain conclusions predicated upon statements that are tautological at best. The opinions, contested results—what would be considered the substance of most non-fiction works that deal in the joint marketing/psychology field—are elided to the point of non-existence, presented as definitive, authoritarian statements of fact:
The moral of the story is that plaintiffs and defendants should never blithely adopt the descriptions offered by opposing counsel.
Drunk Tank Pink is a machine-translated textbook, a white paper of regurgitated studies culled of any human input except that all-important, unquestionable, dogmatic “conclusion.” “'I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken.' I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, and every courthouse, and, may I say, of every legislative body in the United States." Thus spoke Judge Learned Hand in 1951, and business schools have not yet been exempted from that exhortation.
Nature restores your mental functioning in the same way that food and water restore your body. The business of everyday life—dodging traffic, slavishly making decisions and judgment calls, interacting with strangers—is depleting, and what man-made environments take away from us, nature gives back. There’s something mystical and, you might say, unscientific about this claim, but it’s heart actually rests in what psychologists call attention restoration theory, or ART.
ART is a scientific topic that has some studies that support it. ART does not need to be gussied up in “replenishment” language or held up against a hyperbolic parade of horribles culminating in “slavish” decision-making. The language is in fact so absurd that even the author—the narrative force upon whom a reader relies to explain the words they read—says that the words selected may seem inappropriate. That is the case. Mystical naturopathy is not an accurate depiction of ART; it is disingenuous and shows a blithe disregard for the reader and contempt for the trust supposedly vested in a non-fiction author.
[Symbols] are especially powerful because we process symbolic images very quickly—more quickly than we process the meaning of words—and they correspondingly embed themselves more deeply in our memories.
There is no further explanation for how this conclusion is reached, or any discussion on why the mind works this way from either a neurological or psychological standpoint. Rather, it leads into a tepid outline of a study conducted by the author, focusing solely on the results; the potential marketing metrics. There is absolutely no thought given to what a person reading Drunk Tank Pink might be interested in reading. It is as if the hypothetical reader were interested solely in conclusions to the exclusion of any sort of depth; a study guide for the author’s multiple choice midterm, perhaps.
Blue-green light waves are the shortest visible light waves, and they trigger a range of biological functions that regulate circadian rhythm. Natural light is rich in these blue-green short waves, which is why sunlight is an excellent natural cure for jet lag.
No citation for where this revelation comes from is in either the text itself or contained within the endnotes. Unsurprisingly to any reader who has trudged this far through Drunk Tank Pink , there is no discussion of why, or where, this factoid came from. Just fiat “science” promulgated from on high, a zealous future citation for the pitch meeting at Boeing to sell them blue-green shortwave cabin lights; ”Your Red-Eye flight just became a Clear-Eye.” That’s copy that can sell.
But [in academic prowess] colors play a surprisingly prominent role. For a start, people are far more likely to remember pictures of a place presented in color rather than in black and white, and memory is a critical component of intellectual performance. According to the psychologists who studied this phenomenon, we’re able to bury colored scenes deeper in memory, and to later retrieve them more effectively than identical scenes in black and white.”
The circular logic and appeals to authority notwithstanding, there is absolutely no content in the preceding passage. No discussion, no interpretation, nothing for a reader to look back and say, “Yes, I did pick something up from this book.” It’s this type of universalizing that runs rampant throughout Drunk Tank Pink; a dismissive arrogance of tone that holds marketing psychology sacrosanct at the cost of the reader’s engagement. Each chapter reads like a checklist combined with a CV; dry, self-congratulatory, and without any interesting details. Studies are listed but never discussed. It absolutely holds its reader in contempt, piling on vacuous filler to create a vehicle for marketing research study citations. Drunk Tank Pink is pure conclusion, from start to finish.
Subliminal covers the neuroscience better; The Winner Effect explains more about the processes; Sleights of Mind has a unique perspective to share; Priceless gives a more comprehensive discussion of most of the marketing studies referenced here. All four are more interesting to actually read. Everything Drunk Tank Pink does, another book does better and in less abrasive style:
No matter where you go, drunk tank pink and other cues will follow—and, having read this book, you’ll be in a much better place to identify them, recognize how they’ll affect you, and harness or overcome them to maximize your health, wisdom, wealth, and well-being.
Oh, and the actual story of drunk tank pink, the color? Well, its factual history is given a brief (surprise) synopsis during the prologue, but any discussion about how the color impacts “how we think, feel, and behave” is suspiciously absent. How, then, am I to maximize my health, wisdom, wealth, and well-being?