Blink - The power of thinking without thinking

We make decisions in every single moment we live. Some decisions are trivial and others are serious enough that we need to spend considerable time and effort for information accumulation and reasoning. However, Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book “Blink”, suggests that despite the complexity and the consequences of decisions they can be made rapidly and automatically from little information and reasoning.

Blink is about making decisions in blink of an eye. First Malcolm convinces the reader that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. Then he advices on when should we trust our instincts and when should we be wary of them. Then he suggests that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

The main technique brain uses in making very quick judgments is as Malcolm defined is “thin slicing”. It refers to the ability of our unconsciousness to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. The part of the brain that leaps to quick conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious.

What are rapid judgments?

Rapid judgments are taking only two seconds to be made. They are different from intuition which are based on emotions and do not seem entirely rational. Rapid or snap judgments are entirely rational but they can be made in very short time. As we are not aware that we are reasoning when we make such judgments Malcolm calls this “thinking without thinking”. Thus the Blink is a book which teaches us the power of thinking without thinking.

While reading Blink I always remember a snap judgment I made few years back. I was driving faster on a rainy day and the road was little slippery. I almost forgot the gap which I need to maintain with the vehicle in front. The passenger bus running in front was stopped suddenly and I immediately push the break paddle. However, within a second I realized that there is a high chance that my car is not going to stop before collapsing into the bus. Clearly there were two choices, pushing the break paddle furthest and hope that the car will manage to stop without clashing or turn the car away from the bus. If I turn left the car will clash into the pavement and can manage the situation with minor damages to the car. It was a two lane road and if I turn right car will go into the opposite lane and if any vehicle comes in the opposite direction the outcome can be very serious. However, I turned right and there were no vehicles on the other lane. I was not clear whether I have look at the other lane and checked whether there are no vehicles. It is quite clear that certain level of reasoning happened but rapid nature of the decision do not qualify for a post analysis of the situation. Malcolm says “If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.”. This mysterious nature of snap judgments can be understood by considering several examples of snap judgments.

Malcolm describes several good examples for snap judgments. The story of Getty Kouros is about a statue brought to a museum in California. The museum brought the statue after analyzing it for months and very confident that the statue is an original. However, several experts in Greek sculpture later examined the status and most of them within few seconds were able to conclude that the statue is a fake. However, they couldn’t able to provide any good reasoning for their judgments.

In another example, a group of firefighters entered into a building with fire. They suspected that the fire is in the kitchen and open their hoses. In a moment one person realized that there is something unusual and call the team to get out of the house. Few moments after them came out the floor was collapsed. The fire was in the basement. The person who realized that something unusual is there did not have any explanation to why he ordered others to exit the place.

Thin slicing

Thin slicing is a technique where the brain divides an event or experience into very small pieces and identifies patterns in those small pieces of experience. A good example is selecting a book to read from a library. When selecting a book, most of us do not need to read more than couple of sentences to judge what sort of book it is. Just by considering the size of the book, the cover, the length of the sentences, and the language use we can decide whether it is a type of book that we read. This sort of a short series of quick reasoning is what thing slicing is about.

Malcolm shares a very interesting story about university lecturers. In a study carried out by a university a group of students were selected for evaluate their teachers before they started a semester. Even before they see the teachers they were shown a five second video clip of each teacher and asked to evaluate their teaching ability. Then they were asked to do the same evaluation at the end of the semester where they had enough exposure to the teachers. The study found that the accuracy of the initial evaluation is very high. Thus Malcolm suggests that thin slicing is what we do in making snap judgments and argue that there is nothing wrong in utilizing snap judgment as a main tool in our decision making.

In real life situations we can use thin slicing to a greater extend. Malcolm suggests “Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.”.

A similar technique has been used by a researcher in predicting divorces. He has developed the skills in thin slicing where he can predict the probability of a couple to be still married after 15 years just by listening to an ordinary conversation between the partners. The accuracy of his judgments was as high as 95%. Another example which is very similar to this is tracking German Morse code operators in World War II. By identifying the patterns of communication the Allies intelligence officers were able to track the position of the armies by tracking the Morse code operators. Even though they couldn’t recognize the messages been transmitted, they were able to detect which operator is sending the messages. Thus the can track the operators and by that they track the army units. Blink says “If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don't need to know every detail of the couple’s relationship… Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.”).

How can we go wrong

Although the snap judgment is a very versatile technique in decision making, they are not always correct. Because of various reasons the rapid judgments can go wrong. However, in most of such cases rapid judgments are taken because the decisions are to be taken rapidly. Thus deliberate thinking exercise is not an alternative for snap judgment.

Stereotyping is one of the main hurdles for making snap judgments. Once of the good examples from the book is about car sellers. The initial offerings made by them for the customers are very different from the race and the gender of the customer. White women told a slightly high price than white men and black men told very high prices compared to white men. A success of a particular salesman was solely due to the fact that he never bias to race and gender. He was able to sell very high number of vehicles than an average salesman. The book further emphasizes “Treat every customer exactly the same because he's aware of just how dangerous snap judgments are when it comes to race and sex and appearance.”.

Another barrier for successful snap judgment is information overload. This has explained using a story about diagnosing heat attacks in a hospital in Chicago. Doctors believe it is better to collect as much as information possible in decision making. However, a researcher named Goldman developed an algorithm for triage chest pain patients. Doctors were advised to gather less information on their patients and ignore the details. This allowed the hospital to become a well-recognized place in diagnosing chest pain. Blink says “And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.”).

Another distortion for snap judgment is priming. Priming effect is the effect of a stimulus to a subsequent stimulus. A person who treated with politeness will be behaving in a different way than a person who treated in a strange way. Blink advices “Once you become conscious of being primed, of course, the priming doesn’t work.”

How to make use of Blink

Malcom says “When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad”. Thus identifying when to make rapid judgments and when not to make them is the key factor for success in Blink type rapid decision making. We can be trained in rapid decision making by making ourselves conscious about such decisions made by us in day to day life.