Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In 1983, a man approached the Getty Museum with a kouros, “a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides" (3). The sculpture was in near-perfect condition, whereas most kouroi were usually found in fragments. The museum inspected the statue carefully, noting that it conformed in style to other kouroi and that its outer surface showed ancient weathering. The museum bought the artwork for $10 million.

Antiquities experts who looked at the statue believed it was a fake, however, so the museum sent the kouros to Greece where it was roundly condemned as fraudulent. The statue’s letters of provenance turned out to be forged, and its style was a pastiche resembling a known forgery from the 1980s. Even the surface patina is fake. The Getty catalog described its kouros as “About 530 BC, or modern forgery" (12).

The experts realized at once that the statue was inauthentic, while the Getty technical team, for all its expertise, in 14 months of work completely missed the most important attributes of the kouros that proved it’s a fake.

In another example, scientists presented four card decks, two blue and two red, to test subjects; some cards win and some lose.