Blink

In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within.

Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?

In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.

Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.

Quotes and thoughts while reading:

Julie Fulkerson lent me a copy of this book - and it fits right in with everything HAF has been talking about, and this long pursuit we have undertaken to better understand implicit bias, and the effect it has on our everyday lives. This book is great at listing the positives and negatives of our unconscious - let's dive in.

"...our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of [a] situation. The first is the one we're most familiar with. It's the conscious strategy. We think about what we've learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive... It's slow, and it needs a lot of information. There's a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly... It has the drawback, however, that it operates - at least at first - entirely below the surface of consciousness. It send its messages through weirdly indirect channels, such as the sweat glands in the palms of our hands. It's a system in which out brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it's reaching conclusions."(p 10) It's the place that implicit bias lives, it's the part of our brain that can process billions of bits of information, and that's in stark contrast to the 40 or so bits of information that we can consciously process. It's the unconscious, and it's incredibly powerful.

There have been studies, where students were shown just two seconds of videotape of a professor starting a lecture, and in those two seconds the students will reach conclusions about "how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher's class for an entire semester."(p 13) "I think that were are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it... The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decision made cautiously and deliberately."(p 14) I have to say that this worries me a bit - but don't be too worried - Gladwell addresses the shortfalls in the second half of the book. Really - don't give up on this book thinking it only extols the greatness of the unconscious - it is critical as well.

"People are in one of two states in a relationship," Gottman went on. "The first is that I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It's like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they'll say, 'Oh, he's just in a crummy mood.' Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing." (p 29-30) I feel like there is a low of truth to this. I think Ian and I found ourselves in this state near the end of living with each other over on Ernest way. It turned into this idea that selfishness as the driving force.

"[Gottman] has figured out that he doesn't need to pay attention to everything that happens... He is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, ht considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble."(p 32) Whew, that speaks volumes to me! I feel like Casandra holds serious contempt for me sometimes, but I didn't have the right word for it. But there it is - contempt. I've also felt this way toward others - but I didn't frame it in those terms. But that's the root - that's the dangerous one.

There were the following interesting questions that popped up:

But the fascinating thing was that people who knew the person in question answered worse than strangers who drew conclusion based on a walk-through the individuals dorm room. The strangers were "more accurate at measuring conscientiousness, and they were much more accurate at predicting both the students' emotional stability and their openness to new experiences... If you want to get a good idea of whether I'd make a good employee, drop by my house one day and take a look around."(p 35 - 36)

Page 54 starts to talk about the power of "priming" an individual with words which changes the outcome in a given scenario. For example - there was a test done on undergraduates where they were primed with words like "aggressiveness, bold, rude, bother, etc." vs. a group that was primed with words like "respect, considerate, patient, etc.". And the results? Both groups of students were assigned the task of talking to a professor - but when they arrived the professor was already in conversation. The first group interrupted after about five minutes, but the second group "never interrupted at all"(p 54-55) That's huge! The testers thought it would be a difference of a couple of milliseconds - but it turned out to be much more significant. There have been further studies that show when you ask someone to identify their race before a standardized test, they do roughly half as well as their counterparts who were not asked about race. That's significant - and in all honesty is something that needs to change immediately.

William Harding presents an interesting case of a man who "looked like a president"(p 74), and because of this look he became one. He had advisers, and people who told him what to say, but in the end it all came down to how he carried himself, and what he looked like. "He was, most historians agree, one of the worst presidents in American history."(p 75) Here is where the book gets into the dark side of thin-slicing(the term Gladwell uses for when you think with your unconscious mind - you thin slice events & situations.)

The first example of how thin slicing can go wrong is presented through the Implicit Bias Test - on it's most basic premise is the fact that your unconscious mind tries to group things into categories, categories that you don't really have control over. So White people could be categorized as good, blacks as bad - and the implicit bias tests tries to eek these things out of you. Where does your mind, by default, put things. And how much longer does it take your conscious mind to break those internal defaults.

"The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values... You don't choose to make positive associations with the dominant group... But you are required to. All around you, that group is being paired with good things. You open the newspaper and you turn on the television, and you can't escape it."(p 85) And I think this is the most distressing part, you can't control it(unless you stop consuming media, turn off your facebook, and don't read the newspaper). The media is this massive machine, that either consciously or unconsciously perpetuates an image. And that image usually aligns with the dominant group.

"In the U.S. population, about 14.5 percent of all men are six feet or taller. Among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, that number is 58 percent. Even more striking, in the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller."(p 87) So, it's not just race that can be a factor, even something as benign as height is an implicit bias that we have.

"If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way - who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites - it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want t meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort."(p 97) Truth! That's it, that's the whole kit and caboodle.

"... allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition."(p 119) This is in the section about the red team vs. blue team. Where the blue team was the US military, and the red team was some alien force, that is trying to take down the US. The above quote is in reference to how the leader of the red team worked, and how his team continued to surprise and befuddle the blue team. For example, the blue team tried to wipe out his communication, by taking down the cell towers and internet. But Paul Van Riper, the leader of the red team, already saw that coming, and uses motorcycle couriers to relay information. The blue team was trapped behind their models, and their numbers, and never really stopped to take a bigger look at the picture and think like their opponent. That's all the red team did. And because Riper let his team work independently, and supported them, they were able to do amazing things. (Does that work for everyone, no, but did it work in this particular group - you bet your butt)

There's also an entire section on how the appearance of a food will change the way it tastes to someone. For example, they were trying to figure out why E & J brandy was selling better than another brand. But it wasn't until they took the E & J and put it in the Christian Brother bottle, and the Christian Brother's into the E & J bottle did they realize that the appearance was the limiting factor. Christian Brothers won hands down when in an E & J bottle. We try to tell ourselves that we don't judge with our eyes, or that we only taste with our nose and mouth - but in reality our eyes contribute more to the way something tastes than we could imagine.

"...the optimal state of "arousal" - in the range in which stress improves performance - is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute.... After 15, bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start to break down... At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive processing... The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain - the part our your brain that is the same as your dog's(all mammals have that part of the brain) - reaches up and hijacks the forebrain." (p 225) This is the sort of thing that leads to police shootings, or other scenarios that are high stress and just would not have turned out that way if you were in a calmer state.

The psychologist Keith Payne, for instance, once sat people down in front of a computer and primed them—just like John Bargh did in the experiments described in chapter 2—by flashing either a black face or a white face on a computer screen. Then Payne showed his subjects either a picture of a gun or a picture of a wrench. The image was on the screen for 200 milliseconds, and everyone was supposed to identify what he or she had just seen on the screen. It was an experiment inspired by the Diallo case. The results were what you might expect. If you are primed with a black face first, you'll identify the gun as a gun a little more quickly than if you are primed with a white face first. Then Payne redid his experiment, only this time he sped it up. Instead of letting people respond at their own pace, he forced them to make a decision within 500 milliseconds—half a second. Now people began to make errors. They were quicker to call a gun a gun when they saw a black face first. But when they saw a black face first, they were also quicker to call a wrench a gun. Under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. They stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype. "When we make a split-second decision," Payne says, "we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe."

In one of the more visceral example of how the unconscious can get in the way we hear about the Vienne Philharmonic, and how they instituted a blind auditioning process. In all honesty, this example instills the most fear in me. I feel like we are telling all these institutions to diversify their staffs, but they aren't ready for it, and what the Philharmonic did is just disgusting. "There were two more rounds of auditions. Conant passed both with flying colors. But once Calibidache and the rest of the committee saw her in the flesh, all those long-held prejudices began to compete with the winning first impression they had of her performance."(p 247) They demoted her to second chair, and when she brought a suit against the Philharmonic, they sent Conant to extensive testing, made her blow through special machines, had blood samples taken, etc. Had this been a male candidate they would have been tickled pink to have such a wonderful musician. But since she was a woman, and blasted their long helf beliefs about what a woman was supposed to be able to do - they had to test her, and prod her, and try to sniff out the phony in her(to which there was none). Eventually it was all resolved, but my goodness what ridiculousness.

I guess my fear is, that you'll get a more diverse person in a position, and then when they make some sort of faux pas (that is really only a faux pas in the dominant group), they'll be chastised. Hopefully I'm wrong, but we shall see.

Another fleeting thought that has been resurfacing time and time again is this idea of "Impostor Syndrome". It's something that Trump definitely doesn't have - but a fair number of people do. I don't think I really have it - sometimes I take a step back and ask myself: Who do you think you are? But I think that's a but different. These are people who think, that because they have no training, they simply can't make a decision based on something, and if you do - then you are an impostor. Maybe it's all down to whether you are an intuitive or sensing person.

At the end of the day I don't really know what to do with this information. I feel like I trust my unconscious a lot - I'm a person who relies on my intuition. I'll take data into consideration - and even go with what the data says when my gut is telling me I shouldn't. But I guess my question I'm, left with is - "How am I dealing with the negative aspects of trusting my intuition? How am I avoiding implicit bias?". In some ways, since I don't perfectly fit into the mold of the dominant group(in most ways but not all) - my intuition has taught me that people aren't always what they appear to be. I look like a white, heterosexual, cisgendered, male -> but I'm not all of those things. Can you guess which one's I'm not? Probably not - so how can I guess all of what you are. That's what my intuition tells me - not to judge too quickly - but if I really want to know someone better - you have to spend time with them - and ask difficult questions. Maybe my goal in life is to avoid the shallows - to dive deeply into the questions and constructs of our time - in the small and big ways that I can.