Blink 194
| Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | |
| author | Malcolm Gladwell |
| pages | 288 pages |
| publisher | Little, Brown (January 11, 2005) |
| rating | 8 |
| reviewer | James Mitchell |
| ISBN | 0316172324 |
| summary | This book discusses in narrative style the mechanics of subconscious snap decisions. |
First, Gladwell introduces a concept called "thin-slicing." This involves the human brain's critical reduction of information to make predictions about complicated systems. For example, a system developed at the University of Washington can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will be divorced within fifteen years, based entirely upon one hour of observed interaction.
Next, Gladwell discusses analogous ways the human brain uses thin-slicing to make subconscious snap decisions. Interestingly, this rapid decision-making process can easily be primed by external influences. External influences affect more decisions than many people care to admit; these factors form the basis for snap judgments and first impressions.
Gladwell relates a study of how well a subject's personality was evaluated either by strangers who visited the subject's dorm room for fifteen minutes or by friends that knew the subject well. Friends were more accurate about extraversion and agreeableness, but the strangers were better at gauging conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. Thin-slicing isn't always correct; it depends on having the right information.
Superficial traits can be used to the advantage of an actor trying to project a particular characterization. Similarly, an authority figure can dress and behave in a particular fashion to influence subordinates. Warren G. Harding made overwhelmingly positive first impressions throughout his political career, although he is considered by historians to be one of the worst American presidents. Despite his consistently lackluster performance, his attractive bearing and appearance camouflaged his shortcomings.
On the other hand, by understanding the fallibilities of intuition, one can influence others' unconscious decision-making processes and be more aware of influences on one's own intuition. People can control and develop their intuitive decision-making skills. For instance, a successful car salesman would never be distracted by the appearance of a customer to the detriment of a sale. A portion of the book discusses physiological tests that reveal the strength of stereotypes in subconscious decision making by measuring reaction times.
Having defined the capabilities and limitations of intuitive decision-making, Gladwell spends a chapter focusing on spontaneity through the story of General Paul Van Riper and Millennium Challenge '02. A technologically advanced military with a vast array of information collection and "common operational picture" was pitted against a less technologically capable adversary led by General Van Riper. Much as David defeated Goliath, Van Riper's force inflicted staggering losses on his information-gorged enemy. His victory illustrates the utility of pre-arranged structure (such as "commander's intent" or "desired endstate") to empower subordinates to make spontaneous decisions. The fog of war couldn't really be defied, but decision makers could be trained to cope well with uncertainty.
The latter parts of the book discuss how intuitive decision-making can fall short. Humans' senses and subconscious minds can be negatively affected in stressful environments where stimuli are distorted and thin-slicing can easily go awry. Gladwell takes examples from recent developments in police procedures designed to avoid situations that adversely affect law enforcement personnel. For instance, many departments make their officers patrol individually. Without partners, they are more likely to wait for backup before entering dangerous situations. The author also performs a detailed deconstruction of the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City. He concludes that the tragedy was not a product of conscious injustice, but simply a chain reaction of impaired snap decisions made within seven seconds of violence.
Overall, Blink makes for a quick read and is sure to stimulate conversation. Its premise is simple, and it contains ample food for thought. Its discussion of priming the intuition with particular stimuli and impaired "thin-slicing" provides a useful tool in deconstructing human behavior. The strengths and weaknesses of intuition-priming and thin-slicing are useful knowledge for any professional decision-maker.
You can purchase Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is that system, i want it.
Like Bruce Lee said.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Author of The Tipping Point (Score:3, Interesting)
A question [possibly addressed by the book] (Score:5, Interesting)
I do a significant amount of research in an effort to predict certain kinds of market trends and behaviors but what bothers me is that he [often] gets the same results without that work.
Nevertheless, I wonder mostly, why he is dismissive of a technical method that produces his results. Sometimes, it produces different results, and for those times he is extremely grateful, but when it doesn't- that is, when a technical and exhaustive method yields the same result as his snap decisions, he is very frustrated that the technical method was performed at all.
Like it's "obvious" to those of us without the manager hair and posture...
Van Riper (Score:5, Interesting)
Van Riper (playing for Iraq) utilized (what seemed to the military brass to be) unorthodox methods and won. The military brass found this to be unacceptable and changed the rules of the war game midway, so that Van Riper lost. Then the US invaded Iraq.
Basically a case of "if the results of the test do not coincide with what we are looking for, change the test."
3 Books You Should Put On Your List (Score:4, Interesting)
The Tipping Point
The Wisdom Of Crowds
First Impressions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Author of The Tipping Point (Score:4, Interesting)
Some other comment described the book as obvious. I'd strongly disagree. The conclusions were very surprising and interesting. I'd highly recommend The Tipping Point. Blink is now on my list.
Re:Not true, also accounts for probablities (Score:4, Interesting)
In application of this, let's say we didn't have time to actually figure out whether the number is prime. I might say, "4,294,967,297 is a big number, which means it's generally unlikely to be prime." I look at the last digit, and there's no real clue there (an even number or 5, for example, would be a giveaway).
The question then becomes whether the OP is the sort of guy who would pull a big number out of nowhere, or whether he would go through the trouble of finding an actual prime number that was big enough that people wouldn't know immediately. With some loose data about the sort of people on /. and the amount of time generally spent composing /. posts, as well as the general tone of the message itself, I'd guess "no". I'm guessing he didn't bother to come up with a real prime number.
I could be right or I could be wrong, and I'm not really sure of exactly what went into that guess. I haven't even done the math to figure out if I'm right, but if I had to make an immediate guess whether 4,294,967,297 was prime, I'd have to make quick generalizations off of incomplete data and "go with my gut". Mathematical proof wouldn't be an option.
Gladwell Interview at espn.com (Score:3, Interesting)
Gladwell responds, though:
"I always thought that the critics of "Moneyball" misinterpreted what Lewis was saying. He wasn't saying that all instinctive scouting judgments are flawed. He was saying that there are some questions -- like predicting hitting ability -- that are better answered statistically, and that the task of a successful GM is to understand the difference between what can and can't be answered that way. That's my argument in Blink as well."
So the question becomes, then, how do we know when we can make an appropriate snap judgement about something? Why is "this statue looks like a fake" reasonable but "this guy looks like an athlete" not?
Gladwell makes the point that too much data can hinder, rather than help, but you end up needing to make a judgement on how much data is too much then. One of the examples Gladwell gives in "Blink" is of doctors making better diagnoses of heart trouble when they have less data- they jump to the heart, rather than investigating everything else chest pain could be. But do you really want your doctor operating on less than complete information- and if so, where do you set the line at? "Sorry, Doc, I'm afraid if I tell you how long I've had this pain, you might misdiagnose me."
I agree largely with Gladwell's ideas that snap judgements can be better than waffling, but he definitely should have done more to point out differences between good snap decisions and bad ones- he points out the "Warren Harding Effect" where someone "appears qualified" for something, but doesn't say enough in my opinion about knowing when your prejudices are boldly leading your gut astray.
Malcolm Gladwell Blinks At Racial Realities (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, it would be tremendously useful if Gladwell had figured out some general rules of thumb for when to rely on your instantaneous hunches and when not to.
But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:
Gladwell does make a genuinely useful point about how when people try to put their ideas into words, they often distort them into meaninglessness or falsehood.
Ironically, this happens to Gladwell every time he writes about race.
Because there were already plenty of books on the market advising corporate workers [vdare.com] in tiresome detail how to look before they leap, the sales potential of a book telling them, "Wotthehell, just go ahead and leap," was clear.
Unfortunately for Gladwell, the best-known examples of thinking without thinking [olimu.com] are racial and gender prejudices. But, then, you've forgotten Rule #2--Readers despise logic and consistency. So Gladwell just assumes that his otherwise beloved "rapid cognition" is 100% wrong whenever it's based on race or gender stereotypes. [amazon.com]
(And that's why he makes a $1 million annually and I don't.)
The most intriguing aspect of Gladwell's book is that its hopeless confusion and mind-melting political correctness stem from the author's own racial background. Although mostly white, Gladwell is partly of African descent (his mother [washingtonpost.com] was black, Scottish, and Jewish). But he doesn't look noticeably black in most [google.com] of his pictures [google.com].
The origin of Blink, he writes on his website [gladwell.com], came when, "on a whim," he let his hair grow long into a loose but large Afro.
As you can see in this picture of Gladwell with his Afro [isteve.com], he wound up with more of a Napoleon Dynamite Mormon 'fro [imdb.com] than the genuine kinky kind that ABA basketball players [remembertheaba.com] espoused back in the 1970s. Still, it does finally make him look marginally black.
As soon as Gladwell grew his Afro, he claims, he started getting hassled by The Man: highway patrolmen wrote him speeding tickets, [slashdot.org] airport security gave him the evil eye, and the NYPD [vdare.com] questioned him for 20 minutes because they were looking for a rapist [uexpress.com] with an Afro.
"That episode on the street got me th
I didn't get good vibes from this guy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the "instant" is because the method relies on the study of a 15 minute conversation.
Actually fascinating math (from a lecture here at UW). They modeled the couple's happiness during the conversation on an X-Y axis (one axis for each person's happiness), then modeled each other's conversational tendencies on each other as a two state-variable dynamic system. If the system had a stable solution in mutual happiness: good marriage!
The theory was developed 15 years ago, and I remember about 8 years ago they started claiming success, as most of the couples they predicted would divorce got divorced in 2-3 years.
Dr. Gottman developed a therapy that involves changing your parameters of influence on each other.
It's a war game, not a war. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:An admission (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is what comes from making a knee-jerk reaction rather than actually thinking about it - you got the parties flopped. B-)
On most issues both Liberals and Conservatives want the same things: Peace, prosperity, justice. The main ways they differ on how to get them - and how they think about it.
Liberal ideology encourages making snap judgements on an emotional basis. (Notice the substution of "I feel..." for "I think..." in their rhetoric.) Their policies (when they think about them at all) are based on either direct action to solve perceived problems by pushing in the desired direction, or indirect action to suppress something that is conceptually associated with the problem. And they treat people as members of classes - dealing with all the members of the class on the bases of the steretypical member's behavior. All of these approaches have a common thread: "Damn the side effects."
Conservative ideology, on the other hand, promotes thought about problems. The targets are largely the same. But the solutions take into account the unintended consequences of directly attacking the problem - which are often a cure far worse than the disease.
Conservatives are often people who were liberal in their younger years. They TRIED the simple solutions and found out that they made things worked. Then they thought about THAT, and came up with (or signed on to) other approaches - that were counter-intuitive but actually made things better rather than worse.
Thus the Winston Churchill quote: "If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain."
Unfortunately a lot of people either never find out that some "obvious" solutions don't work or never learn to think, and thus get stuck at 20. B-(
two sides (Score:2, Interesting)
I started playing with an open question in mathematics a while back (the "twin prime conjecture"). Within the first month of working on it, I had arrived at quite a few interesting conclusions related to the problem and come up with some new and unique (to me) ways of looking at it.
I've spent the past four years proving that several of those initial observations were correct. Repeatedly.
The "gut reactions" that I had in that first month got me a long ways into the problem. Taking the time to prove the various results took me a long ways further: it got me less interested in the problem (a long-term form of ADD?), it vetted out many of my mistaken reactions (there were plenty of these), showed me how strong a couple of the initial month's ideas are, and allowed me to see the broader scope of the problem and the related ideas I came up with.
But that's the thing in mathematics: with any given problem, you try what you know about (gut reactions); if that doesn't work and you decide to keep working at it, you may have an incredibly difficult process to work through to find the solution (if one exists), but that part of the process is valuable in itself for when you might be faced with a similar problem in the future.
Same for "gut reactions" in real life... just like I didn't rush out and publish my twin primes findings right away, it's usually not a good idea to make irreversible decisions right away. You just keep the gut reactions in mind as you move forward and make decisions based on the reconciliation of your initial reactions with long-term knowledge of the subject.
Re:Van Riper (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure you do! Just look at Iran! (in two years).
Re:A question [possibly addressed by the book] (Score:3, Interesting)
I do a significant amount of research in an effort to predict certain kinds of market trends and behaviors but what bothers me is that he [often] gets the same results without that work.
I suspect that this is somewhat like playing chess, which has alot to do with pattern recognition. You're working out the brute-force method (more tactical, but you can't see really deep that way), but he's doing it based upon strategic thinking. It's sort of like being able to glance at the board, and see that you'll be able to promote a pawn in a few moves, but the computer has to check every permutation before it can "see" the same.
Then again, maybe I've got my head up my ass.
Re:Van Riper (Score:3, Interesting)
So, do think the military brass are a bunch of cry babies. The generation running the ship now are very good at using initial simulations to decide what is realistic and what needs to be fixed.