Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown
January, 2005
Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, opens with a story about a statue, the art community and a lot of money. Several years ago, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was presented with a new discovery: a fabulously preserved, seven-foot tall statue, a tremendous find, easily worth the $10 million they eventually paid for it. We're told that the curator's first reaction when he saw the statue was "fresh," an odd first impression of a statue over 2,000 years old.
I could stop right here, because you've probably guessed the rest of the story, that it turned out to be a fake. You're right, it was. After months of research, the Getty bought the statue. But once art critics started looking at it, more and more said that upon their initial glance, they were repulsed, as something wasn't quite right. After further debate and investigation, it turned out that it was a forgery made in the 1980s.
So how did you know that was going to happen? That is part of the principle of Blink that Gladwell is trying to explain to his readers: the power of "Thinking without Thinking," that there is a part of our brains which often does a majority of processing for us, much faster than we can realize it's happening. Blink, Gladwell says, is about first impressions, those first two critical seconds after we see something and our brains starts making decisions.
Gladwell, as a staff writer for the New Yorker, is lively and entertaining to read. He's nimble on the page, jumping from one idea to another with absolute ease. Gladwell tells us about "thin-slicing," the process by which our brain takes a small piece of initial information, makes a series of conclusions based on it and applies it to an exceptionally broad range of topics.
For instance, by watching a fifteen minute exchange of any couple, a researcher has learned to be able to predict whether or not they will have a successful marriage with astonishing accuracy. Or how students who watched a two second silent clip of a teacher in class could give the teacher nearly the exact same ratings as students who had sat through an entire term in his class.
Blink is chock-full of fascinating anecdotes about the way our brain works, how we associate race, Pentagon war games, New Coke, Trivial Pursuit and the New York City police officers, who jumped to conclusions and ended up shooting and killing Amadou Diallo. It is here that Gladwell starts to delve into the potential dark side of "thin-slicing," of what happens when those little predictions go awry.
When I read the introduction and the story about the Getty, my "thin-slice" opinion was "interesting, but light," and after I finished the book, my thoughts were the same. So, I guess on one hand, Gladwell is right about first impressions, but in the end, the book seemed unsatisfying, like a rice crispy treat instead of a sandwich. It seems that Gladwell isn't saying anything new, but he's done a terrific job of connecting everything together and presenting it in a compelling way.
One interesting example of how "thin-slicing" works is when gamblers playing a card game. They are presented with four decks, two red and two blue. The gambler doesn't know that the blue give steady moderate pay-outs, while the red give tremendous wins as well as tremendous losses. It takes most people about eighty cards before they will say with conviction what's going on. Yet, when researchers monitored the players, they would start to show physical signs of nervousness when reaching for the red deck in as few as ten of fifteen cards, but still wouldn't say anything until about the eightieth card.
Gladwell points to this as evidence that we're "thin-slicing" all the time, and we don't even know it. To me it sounds like pattern recognition: we get a hunch after 15 pieces of information, but to make a snap judgment without a little more experience might save us time, or prove us totally wrong. This doesn't seem exceptionally revolutionary to me, but it is interesting.
I'd recommend Blink as a beach read, but I have a little trouble endorsing a book that emphasizes the possibility that snap judgments can be as good or better than thought out, logical ones. In this day and age of the faster, the new and the now, Gladwell's answers seem a little too convenient.
That said, Blink is full of fascinating stories and interesting ideas, none of which will change the world, but few of which might help you see the world and your own mind a little differently.
