Blink, the Power of Thinking without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell is an outstanding writer and storyteller and his new book offers interesting stories and food for thought. However, it falls far short of his blockbuster The Tipping Point.
Blink is about the intuitive response, the pattern recognition that happens almost instantaneously, and allows us to recognize faces and complex, non-verbal communication. Gladwell seldom uses the term intuition, referring to this phenomenon as the adaptive unconscious. He offers a series of fascinating stories focusing on the process he calls “thin-slicing,” the process of recognizing and making a decision based on incredibly small amounts of data. One example shows people accurately predicting which married couples will stay together based on only two seconds of videotape.
He offers the premise that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. However, he acknowledges that this same process can often result in bad decisions and offers little guidance on how to make the process more reliable.
One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me focused on “priming.” One group of students was asked to focus on what it meant to be a professor, the other on soccer hooligans. Their answers to the trivia questions asked? The Professors: 55.6; The Hooligans: 42.6 … a statistical anomaly attributed to the “smart” priming of the professor group. Even more dramatic was students who answered twenty questions taken the Graduate Record Exam. All of the students were black college students but “when students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement – and the number of items they got right was cut in half.”
In another experiment, students who were primed with words reflective of old age actually walked more slowly away from the experiment than on their way to the experiment before they had been primed.
To test yourself on your associations with age, gender, or race, go to www.implicit.harvard.edu. It’s a good way to test your stated beliefs with your unconscious beliefs. You may be surprised.
One of the most chilling stories is about an extensive and expensive war game exercised held in 2000. Blue Team (the good guys using state-of-the-art equipment and logical processes) were pitted against Red Team (the bad guys using guerilla tactics and non-standard techniques). The surprise was not that the Red Team quickly and decisively wiped out the Blue Team but that the defeat was erased and game replayed … after stacking the deck so that the Red Team had no possibility of winning.
Overall, this is a worthwhile book … even if it is a bit disappointing when compared to The Tipping Point.
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