I have only recently been able to read Malcolm Gladwell’s, much talked about best seller, “Blink: The power of Thinking Without Thinking,” a book about the kind of thinking which occurs in a blink of an eye, hence the title.
The author, a British-born Canadian journalist and pop-sociologist, acknowledges that although “Blink” is about intuition, he does not like that word and never mentions it in the book: “Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings, thoughts and impressions that don’t seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational.”
This book, largely based on academic work, is easy to read because Gladwell has the knack of popularizing unknown works in a clear and interesting manner.
In his introduction, he talks about the $10 million Greek statue purchased in the 80s by the J. Paul Getty Museum, which turned out to be a fake.
The Getty accepted the conclusions of a geologist and ignored the gut feelings of experts who saw immediately that the statue was not what it seemed to be.
Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saw the famous statue and his first impression was that it looked “fresh,” an odd reaction when the statue is supposedly 2,000 years old.
Hoving spoke to many art experts whom he referred to as “fake busters”. They all agreed that trying to search for the truth of a work of art is an irrational process “a kind of mental rush, a flurry of visual facts flooding their minds when looking at a work of art.”
Gladwell uses striking examples to show how some people know immediately what is going to happen to a person by simply studying his facial expressions.
Paul Ekman created a taxonomy of facial expressions known as the Facial Action Coding system, which is currently being used by computer animators at Pixar (Toy Story) and DreamWorks (Shrek).
Ekman remembers that when he first saw Bill Clinton, during the 1992 Democratic primaries, he told his wife: “This is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar and have us love him for it at all cost.” Ekman tried to contact someone on Clinton’s communications team explaining that the way he rolled his eyes along with a certain expression conveyed a negative impression.
He offered to teach Clinton how not to do that in a three hours session but he was told that Clinton cannot take the risk to be seen with an expert on lying.
Ekman concluded that Clinton needed to “get caught and he got caught”.
Ekman’s research proves that the information seen on our face tells us what is going on inside our mind.
In other words whenever we experience an emotion, it shows on our face. That reaction may only last a second but it is nevertheless always there and electrical sensors can detect it.
Gladwell’s basic theory is that snap judgments, which he calls “thin slicing” and, quick decisions, can be as good as carefully planned decisions”.
He also attempts to convince us that snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled so we know when to trust our instincts and when to be wary of them.
He warns us that when our heart rate goes beyond 145 beats per minute our bodies begin closing down so many sources of information that we gradually become ineffective and incompetent.
Our vision is affected and our behavior becomes unusually aggressive.
For those reasons, a number of police departments in the United States, have banned high-speed chases, not just because of the risk of running into innocent onlookers, but also mainly because of what can happen after the chase.
After a high-speed chase, cops ill-treated Rodney King and this brutal act gave way to the infamous Los Angeles riot.
The author also mentions the interesting experiment undertaken at the Cook County Hospital that makes use of the so-called Goldman algorithm for chest pain.
When a patient complains of chest pain, it is vitally important that if he is having a heart attack he should be immediately sent to a coronary unit.
The algorithm gives the right diagnosis 95 percent of the time without asking the patient for too much information.
A successful decision-maker edits subconsciously the information overload. The algorithm provides the ER medical personnel with a successful and fast method to determine if a patient is having a heart attack.
Gladwell candidly admits that he got the idea to write “Blink” when he decided to grow his hair long. He immediately noticed that his life changed. He kept having speeding tickets, he was pulled out of airport security lines for special attention and he was even mistaken for a rapist. It turned out that they both had “a large head of curly hair”.
“Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers’ thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions,” says Blackwell.
Blink’s core ideas are captivating but it did fall short of my expectations.
The reader is left wanting more information on good rapid cognition and bad rapid cognition. The book is however fun to read and at the end you will definitely analyze your first impressions and think twice after you make a snap judgment.