About the book
Drunk Tank Pink (n): A bubblegum-pink color; in the early 1980s, psychologists daubed jail cells with drunk tank pink paint and discovered that the color calmed aggressive prisoners. Soon, enterprising football coaches began painting their visitors’ locker rooms with the same shade, hoping to pacify their opponents. Buses painted their seats pink and discovered that vandalism rates declined; door-to-door charity workers wore pink shirts and their donations rose threefold.
Drunk Tank Pink, the book, is a compendium of context effects—relationships between features of the environment and our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and even broader outcomes in life. Each chapter describes how a different feature affects us, beginning with the names our parents gave us at birth, and the names we in turn give to our children, companies, and hurricanes, and ending with the weather patterns that affect us all.
By the time you’ve finished reading Drunk Tank Pink, you’ll understand how two identical people with identical pasts and presents can come to experience two very different futures. Much of the answer lies in whether they’re unwittingly exposed to the nine cues that make up the world described in the book: the world within us, the world between us, and the world around us.
Praise
“The best science book I read all year.”
“Adam Alter has collected the most wonderfully strange and surprising nuggets of recent psychological research in one book. I guarantee you’ll want to share the incredible anecdotes in Drunk Tank Pink with friends.”
“You’ll laugh, you’ll gasp, you’ll shake your head in disbelief as Alter shows you that we are all, to some degree, balls in a giant pinball machine. If you want to see the bumpers — and regain some control of your destiny — read this delightful book.”
“Reading Adam Alter’s book will change the way you look at our world. Seemingly banal things will begin to mean more than you ever realized.”
Press & Reviews
Smithsonian
“Adam Alter’s book about the many ways our perceptions are affected is so compelling that it put me in a seriously suspicious frame of mind… Alter’s book is essentially a compendium of such studies, with a refreshing lack of editorializing; he seems to realize that his material does not require much to make it fascinating—not even a fancy font.”
Barnes & Noble
“Popular NYU psychology and marketing professor Adam Alter has applied his own inquisitiveness to compose a fascinating tome about the hidden things that make us think, act, and feel the way we do. The debut result will please readers of Malcolm Gladwell and other writers about unexpected wonders.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Alter’s findings are intriguing… he peppers his text with illustrative anecdotes, incidents, studies and characters, making the book highly readable and informative.”
Publishers Weekly
“Alter fluently moves between psychology, medicine, and cultural history, offering surprises to readers at many levels of expertise.”
