Author Malcolm Gladwell starts off Blink with one of his many anecdotes - and it is the anecdote that serves as one of his primary tools of argument (the other being scientific studies). It looks at the Getty Museum in Southern California, which bought what turned out to be a highly controversial piece of work called a kouros (a type of Greek sculpture from antiquity). It was arguably the most pristine of any one of its counterparts found, and was subjected to extensive geological tests. The tests confirmed its authenticity. However, when experts of the kouros had a first look at it, they almost immediately stated that it was a fake. How could it be that months of meticulous testing could be disaffirmed by a split-second judgment, albeit by experts?

This moment, or 'blink', is what Gladwell focuses his argument on throughout the book. He first delves into the concept of 'thin-slicing' - in which he argues that sometimes it is necessary only to have a small amount of information in order to make important, and also effective, decisions. Having certain expectations about any given situation based on very little information is much more common and widespread, in ways both good and bad, then people would like to think. What this means is that a context in which a person is observed can give vastly different types of information about that person than other, equally valid, contexts.

The ideas come from the book “How of Happiness” by University of California Happiness researcher and professor of psychology, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. Before we jump into the strategies let’s understand what we have wrong.

In the next part of the book, Gladwell looks at 'snap judgments' and how thin-slicing information can lead people to make almost instantaneous decisions - whether it is a coach assessing their player's technique or a student taking a test. In light of a lack of information, people often unconsciously vigorously scan for information that their conscious mind cannot conceive of. This is where the subtle, and often invisible, perspectives, attitudes, and decisions that tend to be difficult to describe arise. A lack of information, Gladwell argues, is something that is not seen as appropriate in today's world, but often those with the best acumen in any given profession cannot completely explain their decisions.

Gladwell further looks at the discrepancy between stated conscious values and unconscious values. He provides the example of how US President Warren Harding came to power - largely based upon his “senatorial” and “stately” looks. Gladwell states that people found him to look and walk like a president, so their unconscious apparatuses came to accept him above other (possibly) more competent candidates. These biases are difficult to identify, says Gladwell, and even more difficult to admit. Such an argument posits that many decisions people make on a daily basis are a lot less likely based in reason and rationality than people would like to think.

Gladwell moves onto an even more complex situation concerning a former Marine named Paul Van Riper, who is asked by the US Military to play a Middle Eastern dictator gone rough in a war game that was conducted before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The team led by the military had every possible advantage over Riper’s team - tactical, weaponry, technology, and control over political and economic conditions. Nonetheless, Riper’s team managed to sink the opposing team's ships in a matter of a few hours - completely voiding the entire effort. This was because Riper used more traditional methods of communication (such as delivering messages through codes transported via a motorcycle) to make an attack. Gladwell uses this anecdote to illustrate Riper’s mix of instinctive and deliberate thinking, thus qualifying the overall claim of the book - that a mix of approaches is sometimes necessary for successful decision-making to happen. Deepavali bgm ringtone download.

Gladwell then looks at experts - and there is another qualification in his argument here. The skill and experience that experts have allow them to more clearly articulate unconscious decisions they make, because they have habituated the explanatory aspect of decision-making. However, this goes back to the fact that deliberate or delineated, careful thinking is necessary to make quick decisions - but expertise is necessary for explaining those decisions.

In the final chapter, Gladwell speaks of heightened sensitivity in high-stress situations. He cites police brutality, writing about an incident involving four officers who shot a man they believed was pulling a gun from his pocket. The officers fired a few dozen bullets at him, but then learned that the man was reaching for his wallet. They later recounted that they had little time to make coherent decisions.

Gladwell ends Blink with a short nod to classical music auditions and how the process has changed over time to create less bias amongst the judges; after the audition process was made more rigorous and less biased, the number of successful female applicants in America’s top symphonies skyrocketed. This alludes to the fact that judges could not be neutral in their judgments unless they were made unaware of the applicant's identity - another example of unconscious biases at work.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) is Malcolm Gladwell's second book. It presents in popular science format research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious: mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as prejudice and stereotypes.

Summary[edit]

The author describes the main subject of his book as 'thin-slicing': our ability to use limited information from a very narrow period of experience to come to a conclusion. This idea suggests that spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones. To reinforce his ideas, Gladwell draws from a wide range of examples from science and medicine (including malpractice suits), sales and advertising, gambling, speed dating (and predicting divorce), tennis, militarywar games, and the movies and popular music. Gladwell also uses many examples of regular people's experiences with 'thin-slicing,' including our instinctive ability to mind-read, which is how we can get to know a person's emotions just by looking at his or her face.

Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to 'thin slice' can be corrupted by their likes and dislikes, prejudices, and stereotypes (even unconscious ones). A particular form of unconscious bias Gladwell discusses is psychological priming. Het also discusses the implicit-association test^[1], designed to measure the strength of a person's subconscious associations/bias.

Gladwell also mentions that sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgment, or a doctor's diagnosis. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with volumes of analysis. This is commonly called 'Analysis paralysis.' The challenge is to sift through and focus on only the most critical information. The other information may be irrelevant and confusing. Collecting more information, in most cases, may reinforce our judgment but does not help make it more accurate. Gladwell explains that better judgments can be executed from simplicity and frugality of information. If the big picture is clear enough to decide, then decide from this without using a magnifying glass.

The book argues that intuitive judgment is developed by experience, training, and knowledge. For example, Gladwell claims that prejudice can operate at an intuitive unconscious level, even in individuals whose conscious attitudes are not prejudiced. One example is the halo effect, where a person having a salient positive quality is thought to be superior in other, unrelated respects. The example used in the book is the Warren Harding trap. Because Warren G. Harding looked so much like a respectable person in 1899, Henry Daugherty was impressed and helped him become president of the United States of America, while Harding himself did nothing extraordinary for his political career.^[2]

Gladwell uses the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, where four New York policemen shot an innocent man on his doorstep 41 times, as another example of how rapid, intuitive judgment can have disastrous effects.^[3]

Lessons learned from this book:^[4]

• Disdain in a relationship is an indicator that the relationship won´t last very long as John Gottman found out.
• You can easily judge a persons´ personality if you have the opportunity to see their living room for about 15 minutes as in the experiment of Samuel Gosling and his students.
• Respected medical doctors who respect and listen to their patients' needs are less likely to get sued. See the research of Alice Burkin and Wendy Levison.
• Prejudices and false first impressions may be overcome through positive examples of people all over the world and experience.
• If a manager gives power to his coworkers, they can act more independently and faster while at the same time being more innovative. This is shown through Paul van Riper.
• If people are asked to explain their impressions and experience, they are less likely to remember what they felt. The act of describing an experience with words overrides part of the ability in the brain to remember the feelings as Jonathan W. Schooler showed.

Research and examples[edit]

The book begins with the story of the Getty kouros, which was a statue brought to the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. It was thought by many experts to be legitimate, but when others first looked at it, their initial responses were skeptical. For example, George Despinis, head of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, said 'Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground could tell that that thing has never been in the ground'. Gradually, the argument for the legitimacy of the kouros' provenance fell apart. The letters tracing its history turned out to be fakes, referencing postal codes and bank accounts that did not exist until after the letters were supposedly written. However, experts to this day are unsure whether the kouros is authentic or not. The museum notes that 'anomalies of the Getty kouros may be due more to our limited knowledge of Greek sculpture in this period rather than to mistakes on the part of a forger.'^[5]

John Gottman is a researcher on marital relationships whose work is explored in Blink. After analyzing a normal conversation between a husband and wife for an hour, Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 15 minutes, his accuracy is around 90%. But if he analyses them for only three minutes, he can still predict with high accuracy who will get divorced and who will make it. This is one example of when 'thin slicing' works.^[6]

The studies of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who created the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), indicates that a lot of 'thin slicing' can be done within seconds by unconsciously analyzing a person's fleeting look called a microexpression. Ekman claims that the face is a rich source of what is going on inside our mind and although many facial expressions can be made voluntarily, our faces are also dictated by an involuntary system that automatically expresses our emotions.^[7] On example of how movements of the face result in emotions is shown in an experiment from Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen and Robert Levenson. They asked their test subjects to remember negative or burdening experiences. Another group was asked only to make faces that resembled negative feelings like anger, sadness and the like. Both groups were connected to sensors which measured their physiological reactions (puls and body temperature). Interestingly the latter group showed the same physical reactions as the first group.^[8]

In a study done by Fritz Strack and his colleagues students had to watch a movie. One group did so with a pen between their teeth while the other group had to hold the pen with their lips. The first group interpreted the movie funnier than the second, because the muscles responsible for smiling were used and then made the brain release hormones related to being happy.^[8] These studys show that facial expressions are not only the result of emotions but can also be their cause.^[8]

Reception[edit]

Richard Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, argues that Gladwell in Blink fails to follow his own recommendations regarding thin-slicing, and makes a variety of unsupported assumptions and mistakes in his characterizations of the evidence for his thesis.^[9]The Daily Telegraph review writes, 'Rarely have such bold claims been advanced on the basis of such flimsy evidence.'^[10]

In Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye (Simon and Schuster, 2006), Michael LeGault argues that 'Blinklike' judgments are not a substitute for critical thinking. He criticizes Gladwell for propagating unscientific notions:

As naturopathic medicine taps into a deep mystical yearning to be healed by nature, Blink exploits popular new-age beliefs about the power of the subconscious, intuition, even the paranormal. Blink devotes a significant number of pages to the so-called theory of mind reading. While allowing that mind-reading can 'sometimes' go wrong, the book enthusiastically celebrates the apparent success of the practice, despite hosts of scientific tests showing that claims of clairvoyance rarely beat the odds of random chance guessing.^[11]

Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow which speaks to rationality's advantages over intuition, says:

Malcolm Gladwell does not believe that intuition is magic. He really doesn't..But here his story has helped people, in a belief that they want to have, which is that intuition works magically; and that belief, is false.^[12]

In an article titled 'Understanding Unconscious Intelligence and Intuition: Blink and Beyond', Lois Isenman agrees with Gladwell that the unconscious mind has a surprising knack for 'thinking without thinking' but argues that its ability to integrate many pieces of information simultaneously provides a much more inclusive explanation than thin-slicing. She writes:

Gladwell often speaks of the importance of holism to unconscious intelligence, meaning that it considers the situation as a whole. At the same time, he stresses that unconscious intelligence relies on finding simple underlying patterns. However, only when a situation is overwhelmingly determined by one or a few interacting factors is holism consistent with simple underlying signatures. In many situations, holism and simple underlying signatures pull in different directions.^[13]

Topics mentioned[edit]

• Aeron chair produced by Herman Miller
• Keith Johnstone's book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
• Millennium Challenge 2002 and Paul K. Van Riper
• Pepsi Challenge and New Coke
• The Goldman Algorithm^[14]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Greenwald, Anthony G.; et al. (1998). 'Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test'. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 74 (6): 1464–80. CiteSeerX10.1.1.489.4611. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464. PMID9654756.
2. ^Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963- (2007). Blink! die Macht des Moments. München: Piper. pp. 78ff. ISBN9783492249058. OCLC180710604.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
3. ^Cooper, Michael (1999-02-05). 'Officers in Bronx Fire 41 Shots, And an Unarmed Man Is Killed'. The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-04-26.
4. ^Gladwell, Malcolm, 1963- (2007). Blink! die Macht des Moments (Ungekürzte Taschenbuchausg ed.). München: Piper. ISBN9783492249058. OCLC180710604.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
5. ^'Statue of a Kouros (Getty Museum)'. Getty.edu. 2009-05-07. Retrieved 2013-05-03.
6. ^Gladwell, Malcolm (2005-01-07). 'Excerpt from 'Blink''. USA Today. Retrieved 2010-04-26.
7. ^Gladwell, Malcolm (2007). Blink. Back Bay Books. p. 206. ISBN978-0-316-01066-5.
8. ^ ^abcGladwell, Malcolm (2011). Blink! Die Macht des Moments. München: Piper Verlag GmbH. pp. 202f. ISBN9783492249058.
9. ^Posner, Richard A. (2005-01-24). 'University of Chicago Law School > News 01.17.2005: Posner Reviews Blink'. The New Republic. Tnr.com. Retrieved 2013-05-03.
10. ^Skidelsky, Edward (2005-02-06). 'Good intuition takes years of practice'. The Daily Telegraph. London.
11. ^LeGault, Michael (2006). Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye. New York. ISBN9781416524663.
12. ^Charlie Rose Show broadcast February 28, 2012 at 27:05. USA. 2012. Archived from the original on March 15, 2012. Retrieved 2012-03-16.
13. ^Isenman, Lois (2013). 'Understanding Unconscious Intelligence and Intuition: Blink and Beyond.' Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 56 (1): 148–166 p. 160. http://people.brandeis.edu/~lisenman/PBM.2013.pdf
14. ^Qamar, A (Oct 1999). 'The Goldman algorithm revisited: prospective evaluation of a computer-derived algorithm versus unaided physician judgment in suspected acute myocardial infarction'. American Heart Journal. 138 (4): 705–9. doi:10.1016/s0002-8703(99)70186-9. PMID10502217.

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