What’s going on in our brains when we see an authentic work versus a copy? Experts, it seems, tend to be right when they follow their initial “vibe,” an instinctual judgment call uncluttered by additional material. From my research into how forgers successfully hoodwinked experts, I know that it is usually the additional material (origin or discovery stories that push the right buttons, doctored or invented provenance) that passes off a forgery, when the object itself, if examined in a vacuum, shouldn’t fool anyone. In Gladwellian terms, this means that the smartest forgers plant clues that provoke “analysis paralysis” and encourage experts to overlook their “thin-slice” response: we might call it encouraging “thick-slicing.”