A beautiful read where Malcolm Gladwell explores the fascinating concept of rapid cognition and the power of intuition. At the heart of “Blink” lies the idea that our subconscious mind is capable of making incredibly accurate snap judgments in the blink of an eye.
There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis
Gladwell opens the book with the story of the Getty Museum’s acquisition of a supposedly ancient Greek statue. Through a series of tests and analyses, experts had concluded that the statue was genuine. However, upon first glance, art historian Federico Zeri and Greek sculpture expert Evelyn Harrison had an intuitive feeling that something was off. Their gut instinct turned out to be right—the statue was a fake. The anecdote unfolds the power of intuition and how it can sometimes outperform extensive analysis.
Thin-Slicing: The Art of Making Quick Decisions
Gladwell introduces the concept of “thin-slicing,” which refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experience. Whether we realize it or not, our brains are constantly thin-slicing, drawing conclusions from tiny snippets of data. While thin-slicing can be incredibly useful, it is important to understand it’s limitations to harness its power effectively and avoid unconscious bias.
The Gottman Experiment
John Gottman studied more than three thousand married couples and assigned a SPAFF code to every second of their interaction. SPAFF is a coding system with 20 separate categories to capture every emotion that a married couple might express – disgust, contempt, anger, defensiveness, neutral, etc. This information along with data from electrodes and sensors that measured fluctuations in their heart rate, body temperature, sweating and movement was fed into a complex equation.
Gottman could predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will still be married fifteen years later by analyzing an hour of husband and wife talking (90% with 15 mins). When we are thin slicing, we are doing an automated, accelerated unconscious version of what Gottman does with his equations.
The power of Priming
Priming is a technique in which the introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to a subsequent stimulus without conscious awareness. It is fascinating how everything we read, hear or surround ourselves with is continuously priming our adaptive consciousness.
John Bargn Experiments
A group of undergraduate students were given one of 2 scrambled sentence test – First one sprinkled with words like ‘aggressive’, ‘bold’, rude, disturb,etc and second with words like respect, considerate, appreciate ,polite, etc. After taking this quick 5 min test students were instructed to walk down the hall and talk to the instructor to get next assignment. But Bargn made sure that the instructor was engaged in conversation with someone else and appeared busy. The people primed to be rude eventually interrupted on average after 5 mins whereas the majority of students primed to be polite (82%) never interrupted at all.
Stated Values vs unconscious values
Our attitudes towards things like race or gender, operate on two levels – conscious & unconscious. Stated values are the explicit beliefs and preferences that we choose to believe. But we also have automatic associations based on our social setting and life experiences which operate on unconscious level. These values may not be consciously recognized by us, yet they profoundly impact our behaviors and decision making.
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
A disturbing test which shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values. It is based on the idea that we make connections between pair of ideas that are already related in our minds more quickly than we do between pair of ideas that are unfamiliar to us.
Go check it out at www.implicittest.harvardcom. These are quick 10 min tests. I attempted the Gender & Race IAT. The results made me introspect my unconscious biases shaped by years of social conditioning.