This summer I read all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books: The Tipping Point, Blink, and The Outliers. Though I can recommend them all as fantastic books, my favorite was Blink.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
Blink is a book about first impressions – the adaptive unconscious part of our brain that assimilates information and makes snap judgements.
“The difference between good decision making and bad has less to do with how much information we process than with our ability to focus on a few, particular details.”
The purposes behind Blink are stated in the book:
“To convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”
To answer the question, “When should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them?”
“The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. . . . Just as we can teach ourselves to think logically and deliberately, we can also teach ourselves to make better snap judgments.”
The example in Blink that blew my mind was the experiments done by John Gottman. The topic was on ‘thin-slicing’ – the idea that less information is sometimes more accurate than more. John Gottman did an experiment with couples. He would tell them to go into a room by themselves and have them discuss “any topic in their marriage that had become a point of contention”. The couple was hooked up to sensors to determine their heart rate, etc. Gottman found that according to his formula, he could predict with 95% accuracy whether the couple would divorce in the next 15 years, by watching the couple go back and forth for one hour. If he only watched them for 15 minutes, he was 90% accurate.
I realize that may sound ridiculous, but his conclusions actually make a lot of sense. He categorized the different emotions he saw displayed in the conversation, such as neutralality, anger, or whining. Gottman found that there were four emotions that predicted failure for the marriage. He nicknamed them ‘the Four Horsemen’: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. He has found that the key factor is contempt.
What Gottman is saying, is you can know a couple very well, but if you don’t know what to look for, you might not have a clue about the actual state of their marriage. It all comes down to knowing how to accurately thin-slice.
Another really cool concept that Gladwell talks about in Blink is the IAT – Implicit Association Test. These tests ‘study the role our unconscious (or implicit) associations play in our beliefs and behavior’. I’m not going to explain the IAT much further, as I find it rather complicated to put into words; but if you’d like to see how they work, go to www.implicit.harvard.edu. I’ve played around on the site some, I find it intriguing. It’s like the ultimate personality test!
Blink is made up of dozens of fascinating examples like these: how this concept plays out in salespeople, in policemen, in dating relationships – put simply, it’s a study of snap judgments – and it’s fascinating! I couldn’t put it down.
You can purchase the book on Amazon, or read more about Blink and excerpts from the book at Malcolm Gladwell’s website.
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