Nobel Award-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, throws our old model of human behavior into moth balls. We are not the roiling masses of conflict between our “rational” minds and our “irrational” drives and emotions long popularized by social science.

Rather, Kahneman writes, the big action is entirely between our ears. Not in a coldly logical Spock vs. warm-blooded Kirk way, but Spock vs. the knee-jerk reactive Homer Simpson. For marketing and reputation management, Kahneman’s work represents a whole new way of considering how audiences will respond to words, images and messages. It’s a way to find out how people really think in a way that predicts how they’ll actually behave.

Kahneman pits our fast-thinking, largely automatic brains against our slow-thinking, deliberate brains. It’s often not a fair fight. We’re much more Homer than we want to admit, acting quickly on instinct and responding to the images freshest in our mind. The deliberate, thorough Spock is a supporting player.

One example: we all have a strong bias toward judging someone’s career not as a sum of good and bad experiences but according to how good it was at the end. Our lives are judged by the tyrant of memory, and memory judges by peak and valley moments, especially toward the end. A misstep late in life can weigh equally with a lifetime of accomplishment.

Consider Richard Nixon. For years after Watergate, he was shunned. Yet by constantly writing and speaking about lofty issues, Nixon eventually crafted a reputation as a wise statesman seasoned by hard experience. Watergate didn’t disappear, but Nixon largely succeeded in fitting it more proportionately into a career that included progressive accomplishments like founding the EPA and the public broadcasting system.

Ergo, people need to fight incredibly hard to create “new endings” after their reputations have taken a public hit. Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno is an unfortunate example of not getting a chance to do what Nixon did. Unlike Nixon, Paterno died soon after his fall from grace, leaving him no time to atone for his perceived failure to act when told of an assistant’s alleged sexual predation on young boys.

Another example is what Kahneman calls the “focusing illusion.” As it turns out, we get more pleasure from our car when we think about driving versus when we’re actually driving (at which point we’re hopefully thinking about other things, like where we’re going).

Now think of the car commercials that try to recreate some exhilarating driving experience (“warning: professional drivers on a test course”) vs. the ones that simply allow you to luxuriate in the pleasant thoughts of car ownership. Marketers might accomplish more promoting the illusion.

Now, if you’re like me, reading this book will give you a lot more respect for our intuitive, Homer-brained selves. If nothing else, without its quick associations and snap judgments (dodging falling branches, reading your spouse’s body language), our species (and marriages) would never have made it this far.

But for all its admirable qualities, our intuitive brain isn’t very trustworthy. Like Homer, we’re terrific at rationalizing, but not at giving rational accounts of our own behavior.  This is exactly why social experiments never tell study subjects the purpose of the study. If they know why, they intuitively try to “help” us, which in turn only screws up the results.

So what does this say about the future of market research? So much of what people tell us is what they think we want to hear, what they makes them look good or normal, or just whatever seems rational. That’s why the emerging field of social media analytics is going to be huge as a new tool for formative research and campaign evaluation.

Catching people in the act of behaving is the much surer pathway to understanding what they’re thinking.