In the past few years, I have learned to listen to my instincts much better: to respond to the gut. In choosing to rely upon those snap decisions I also acknowledged that something mystical almost spiritual must be at play. For where else could these internal signals, seemingly based on nothing, be coming from? Yet once again, Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink, (as he did with The Tipping Point) has caused me to pause for further examination of my own behavior. The author tries to help explain those inklings and snap judgments and from whence they come. Admittedly, Gladwell seems to drift and sometimes not be totally convinced of his own theories. Still, as it turns out, the answers may not be so mystical, after all.

“With ‘Blink,’ I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition. Certainly that's what we've always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world." says Gladwell.

The author attempts to show how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus To really accept Gladwell’s theories, one must first understand what he calls “thin-slicing” – the ability to unconsciously find patterns based on very narrow slices of experiences. This processing allows us to quickly get below the surface of things and make fast, often very accurate judgments.

An experiment was conducted to ascertain if it could be determined which doctors would be or had been sued more than others based solely on listening to conversations between doctors and their patients. The study showed that while some highly skilled doctors get sued, other doctors who make the same mistakes or worse do not. How could someone briefly observing make that judgment? The critical factor was the patients’ feelings about their doctors, which was directly related to how much time doctors spent with their patients answering questions, discussing procedures, or just listening. The difference of approximately 4 minutes less time spent with their patients easily separated the doctors who had been sued from those who had not. 

The negative side of “thin-slicing”, as Gladwell describes it, happens when something interrupts your chain of thinking, such as implicit associations. These occur when prior associations come into play while making a decision. Conscious attitudes such as in reference to race and gender are what we choose to believe. However, the unconscious attitudes are immediate and automatic. For example, if you had to match entrepreneur and sales clerk with female and male, what would be your automatic match-up? Just for fun, you can test yourself at www.implicit.harvard.edu; Harvard University developed a series of tests to measure implicit associations.

Gladwell suggests that we tend to be careless with our immediate cognition of things. He believes that these snap judgments need to be examined so that we understand how they may be influenced or biased by our other experiences. Once we are cognizant of these interfering stimuli, then we can make better decisions in the blink of an eye and know that our conclusion is probably pretty accurate. Interesting.

It is worth reading, but do not expect the wit and clarity of The Tipping Point.