Word: dutch
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...were bought and sold within weeks at steep profits, leading officials to conclude that millions of euros were being pumped through the area with little oversight - a perfect environment for large-scale money laundering. Police also say that more and more prostitutes now work for pimps, in violation of Dutch laws that require them to work independently...
Residents claim that the neighborhood has changed drastically in recent years, as the numbers of Dutch prostitutes dropped and thousands of women, many from Eastern Europe, arrived to take their place. "We used to know all the prostitutes, they were our neighbors," says Gerrit van der Veen, a management consultant who has lived in De Wallen since 1972. Van der Veen, like other locals, blames Amsterdam's government for ignoring the growing presence of traffickers and pimps, preferring instead to promote the city's open-mindedness. "The government just gave away the old center of Amsterdam," he says. Cohen admits...
Persevering, in a third experiment Newell decided to re-stage the original Dutch study as closely as possible; that experiment had involved choosing among four cars, instead of four apartments. Newell asked 90 students to choose their preference from four fictional cars, which each varied on 12 attributes, such as gas mileage, handling and whether it had a sunroof. Again, one car of the bunch had an equally weighted list of pros and cons. This time unconscious thinkers actually did worse - they were less likely to pick the best car - than conscious thinkers...
...flummoxed," says Newell, "I did some research to try to figure out why the Dutch had been able to see differences we hadn't." Theorizing that perhaps the students' decisions could be influenced by the order in which the information was presented to them, Newell set about designing a fourth, and final, experiment...
...recall the information, the thing they remember best is the last positive information they heard - a phenomenon that researchers call the "recency effect" (and one that advertisers have found very useful). Newell thinks a similar factor may have been what influenced the "sleep on it" results in the Dutch study, but because he doesn't know what order the Dutch subjects were given their information, he can't say for certain. "Both cars in the experiment were equal, so I would expect roughly equal numbers of the subjects to chose each car," says Newell...