Blink

Summary

Introduction: The Statue That Didn’t Look Right

What this book is about

• in 1983 a man sold an Ancient Greek sculpture to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Leading up to the sale, the Getty took 14 months to analyze it and concluded it to be real
• a few experts, within the first few seconds of seeing the sculpture, immediately sensed something off with it. Years later it was found out that the sculpture is in fact a modern forgery
• those experts in just a few seconds understood more about the sculpture than a whole team of experts (The Getty) who studied it for 14 months
• Blink, this book, is about those first few seconds

’Fast and frugal’ thinking

• study a group of people were asked to play a gambling game involving four decks of cards - two red, two blue. Each card either wins you money or loses you money. The participants do NOT know anything beyond that, they have to figure it out themselves and try to win as much money as they can
  • what they didn’t know was that the red decks could either cause you to win BIG or lose BIG
  • the question was: how long would it take for the participants to notice this?
  • the scientists found out that on average, after about 50 cards, that’s when the participants started to develop a hunch about the strategy. At this point they still didn’t know exactly why.
  • At 80 cards, the participants could articulate why exactly the red deck should be avoided, i.e. they figured out the game
  • the interesting this about this study was that the participants were hooked up to a machine that assesses the amount of sweat on their palms
    • sweat in the palms is a response to temperature and stress
  • the finding: the participants started to generate stress responses after only 10 cards
    • at this point, their behaviour started to unconsciously change as well. They started to unknowingly favour the blue cards
  • in other words: the participants figured out the game BEFORE they realized they figured out the game
    • they began making adjustments long before they realized what adjustments they should be making
• we have two different strategies in use:
  • the conscious strategy. This is logical and definitive
    • the problem? It takes us 80 cards to get there because it’s slow and takes a lot of information to get there
  • the fast & frugal strategy. This operates below the surface of consciousness
    • it’s very quick. It takes us 10 cards to get there.
    • this is the strategy the experts took when they immediately saw something wrong with the sculpture
• for the experts who immediately saw something wrong, their brain instantly ran through some calculations and BEFORE conscious thought too place, they felt something
  • this feeling could be sweat on the palms, or a thought coming to mind instantly, or ‘intuitive repulsion’, etc
  • the latter two were what some of the experts said they felt when they saw the Greek sculpture

Adaptive Unconscious

• the part of our brain that handles these first few seconds (fast and frugal) is called the adaptive unconscious
• this is something humans rely on and has allowed us to survive as a species
  • ex: you’re walking on the road and suddenly a truck is a few feet away from you at high speeds. You don’t have time to think, you have to act fast
• the role of this component of our brain is to process LOTS of information QUICKLY and QUIETELY
• think of the adaptive unconscious as a plane on auto-pilot
  • you are the plane. When you’re in a control, you are the pilot. The auto-pilot feature is your adaptive unconscious
• study a psychologist gave three 10-second clips of a teacher teaching to a group of students who’ve never met the teacher. They had no difficulty giving a rating. Even with a two-second clip, the ratings were basically the same
  • furthermore, when the psychologist asked a group of students who actually had the teacher for an entire semester, the rating were almost the same as the first group of students who were only looking at a 10 or two second clip
  • so whether or not you see the teacher for two seconds or for four months, you’re rating will be the same
  • this is the adaptive unconscious at work

Think Before you Act?

• we commonly hear the phrase ‘think before you act’ in various forms. We are often told and taught that thinking, gathering as much info as possible, then making a decision, is the best form of decision making
  • is this really the case?
• one of the goals of this book is to convince the reader that decisions made very quickly can be just as good as those made slowly and deliberately
• at the same time, we need to understand why sometimes our instincts (the first two seconds) fails or misleads us
  • going back to the Getty, why didn’t the Getty experts notice anything? Why did their instincts kick in?
  • the Getty was a young museum. They wanted to build a world class collection so they desperately wanted the statue to be real. So their instincts were blinded
• in other words, our adaptive unconscious has to compete with other interests, emotions, and sentiments
• just like deliberate thinking, we can teach and train our own adaptive unconscious to make it better

The Goals of This Book

1. to convince the reader that decisions made very quickly can be just as good as those made slowly and deliberately
2. to determine when we should trust our instincts and when we should be wary of them
3. to convince the reader that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled

A New Way to Analyze the World

• we often only rely on our long and deliberate thinking in our day-to-day lives, but we should learn to use our fast thinking too
• rather than relying on the big picture, we should learn to analyze the small details more
• there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis
• the Getty’s curator of antiquities said “I always considered scientific opinion more objective than esthetic judgments. Now I realize I was wrong.” - p. 17

Chapter 1 - The Theory of Think Slices: How a Little But of Knowledge Goes a Long Way

Thin Slicing

• study Gottman, a psychologist, brought together couples in his ‘love lab’ and hooked them up to many sensors. He found that just be observing a 15 minute conversation between the two he can predict with 90% accuracy whether or not the couple will still be married 15 years later
  • these sensors analyze emotions, stress reactions, sweat production, etc, then all of that gets inputted into complex equations
• thin-slicing = the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experience
• so how does Gottman’s study actually work?
  • all marriages have distinctive signatures, like DNA. These signatures come from all the detailed emotional information you can observe from the couple interacting

Paying Attention to What Matters

• Gottman showed these marriage tapes to dozens of martial councilors, therapists, psychologists, and even Gladwell himself. He told them to predict if the couples remain together 15 years later. The prediction success rate was only 53%, just slightly above chance. In other words, you’ll get a comparable score by flipping a coin
  • Gladwell said that it seemed easy but once you start guessing it’s actually hard because there’s so much going on in the short 3 minute clip. So many emotions, etc
• Gottman on the other hand was extremely good at predicting. What made him different?
  • he was good at removing the noise and only focusing on the important signs
• Gottman focused on “The Four Horseman”
  • defensiveness
  • stonewalling
  • criticism
  • contempt < the worst one
• contempt = speaking from a superior plane, often an insult
  • “you’re a bitch. You’re scum.”
  • it’s hierarchical
• women are more critical, while men are more likely to stonewall.
  • they are equally likely to exhibit signs of contempt
• if you can measure contempt, then you don’t need to analyze all the other little details of the relationship
• what Gottman does here is basically thin-slicing
  • this is how our unconscious works. We’re ignoring the fluff and focusing on what really matters. This is how we can make these rapid decisions. This is the feeling of getting a ‘hunch’

The Bedroom

• study psychologist Samuel Gosling performed an experiment where he made a group of college students fill out a Big 5 Personality test for their closest friends, to see how accurate someone’s close friend can guess their personality
  • the results? They were decently spot on. This is expected. Your close friends have a “thick slice” of experience with you, of course they’d know you quite well
• Gosling then took complete strangers and allowed them to observe the students’ dorm rooms for 15 minutes, then also fill out the same Big 5 Personality test about the occupant of the dorm room
  • the results? the strangers were not as good at predicting extraversion or agreeableness. This makes sense because you can observe these two traits best by actually meeting the person
  • but on the other 3 traits, the strangers did BETTER than the close friends
• how does this make any sense?
  • dorm rooms can tell you a lot about a person, that much is obvious, but the bigger point is what you DON’T see
  • when Gladwell and the others tried to predict if the couples were still married, they were doing horrible because they had information overload, i.e. too much noise. But Gottman was excellent at predicting because he was thin-slicing
  • with Gosling’s experiment, the strangers only had access to a dorm room. They didn’t meet the people face-to-face so all the confusing, irrelevant pieces of information were not there, therefore their judgment was less tainted. The strangers were also thin-slicing

Medical Malpractice

• another example of thin-slicing in practice
• study psychologist Nalini Ambady listened to a series of recordings of conversations between surgeons and their patients. Half of them have been sued twice, the other half never sued. Nalini took the recordings and removed the high-frequency sounds that allow us to hear words. What was left was a garble that preserves intonation, pitch, and rhythm, but without the words/content
  • Nalini then took a bunch of people to judge these sound recordings for warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and predict who got sued
  • the results? You can accurately predict who got sued.
  • Nalini found it all boiled down to one thing: dominance
  • if the doctors voice sounded dominant, they were more likely to be sued
• why is this? It comes down to respect. The simplest way to communicate respect is by tone of voice. The most corrosive tone of voice a doctor could have is a dominant one.
  • the tone of voice was the doctor’s unique ‘signature’, just like Gottman found with the marriages

A Unique Gift?

• is thin-slicing some sort of exotic gift? Not at all. It’s actually central to human existence
• we all thin-slice. “first impressions” are a form of thin-slicing.
• many professions have a term to describe this concept of thin-slicing
  • in basketball they said he has “court sense” for a player who can understand what’s happening on the court very well
  • in the military they said brilliant generals possess “coup d’oeil” which means “power of the glance”. This is the ability to immediately see and make sense of the battlefield.
• these are things you can’t immediately make sense of, but they simply make sense for you. It’s a hunch. It’s an instinct.
• study a group of psychologists did a follow up to Gottman’s divorce study. They took a group of non-experts and told them to predict if the couples will stay together, except this time the psychologists gave the non-experts a list of emotions to look for specifically.
  • this time, they predicted with 80% accuracy.
  • why? Because now they can implement thin-slicing accurately. They can remove the fluff and focus on what matters.
• to learn what matters takes time. This is why only the BEST general have “power of the glance”. They know what to look for because they have TONS of experience. That’s why they can effectively thin-slice
  • this is why people who have been in a field for a long time develop some sort of instincts about it. For example, a very experienced doctor can know what is wrong with someone without gathering ALL the details.

Chapter 2 - The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions

• it’s possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that. Sometimes we’re better off that way
  • the Getty rejected the opinions of those experts who felt something was wrong with the sculpture because they couldn’t explain why they felt that way. The instead chose to go with the ‘evidence’. But they ended up being wrong

The Power of Words: Priming

• study psychologist Bargh did an experiment where he gave two groups of students a scrambled sentence test. These tests entail unscrambling a series of words to create a real sentence. One group’s sentences contained aggressive words, the other contained polite words. After finishing, the students were instructed to go down the hall and ask the professor for the next assignment. When they arrived, the professor was busy with another student.
  • the purpose of this experiment was to see how long the students would wait before interrupting the professor
  • the aggressive group interrupted on average 5 minutes after arriving
  • the polite group almost NEVER interrupted. To be exact, 82% of them never interrupted. The experiment ended after 10 minutes so who knows how long they’d be standing there
  • this just shows how much of an effect words have on our unconscious
• study Dutch researchers brought two groups of students to answer 42 difficult questions. One group was asked to take 5 minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor, the other grouped was asked to think about soccer hooligans
  • the first group got 55%, the second group got 42%
  • what’s the difference? The first group were in a ‘smart’ frame-of-mind
  • the difference between 42 and 55 is quite significant, it’s the difference between passing and failing
• study psychologists Steele and Aronson brought together black college students. They had to write the Graduate School entrance exam, but for those who had to identify their race beforehand, they got HALF of the questions right
  • this shows that just by identifying your race as black, all the negative stereotypes associated with Blacks and academic achievement come into play
• the interesting thing about this is how mysterious these priming experiments truly are
  • no one knows they’re being primed. When asked to explain it afterwards, they literally cannot. Their explanations are just random. They literally cannot consult their memories.
• at the same time, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The fact that you don’t realize the priming just means that your consciousness is allowing you to focus on the task at hand, rather than look for subtle clues for priming
• study neurologist Damasio brought together a group of patients that had damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a place in the brain that does decision making and judgement. These people are very rational and intelligent, but they lack judgement. They don’t have that “mental valet” that frees them up to concentrate on what really matters
  • they were instructed to do the gambling experiment (the blue and red decks)
  • most of the patients, just like regular people, figure out the red decks are bad, but at no time did the patients get sweaty palms, nor did they get a hunch the blue deck was better, nor did they ever adjust their strategy even AFTER they figured out the game
  • they knew intellectually what was right and wrong to do, but their actions/behaviour was not adjusted accordingly
  • this is the behaviour of addicts: they can articular what’s wrong with their behaviour but don’t act to change it
  • the patients were lacking that mental valet that pushes them in the right direction
  • the point here is that sometimes we’re better off letting our minds make some decisions behind the locked door, i.e. without us really knowing

The Storytelling Problem

• humans have a storytelling problem: we make up explanations for things that we cannot really explain
• study researchers Iyengar and Fisman did a speed-dating experiment. They had the participants explain what they’re looking for BEFORE the speed-taking took place, then they answered the same questions the day after, then again a month after
  • Two participants, Mary and John, really liked each other
  • Mary’s ideal man was NOT John. But when she answered the questions the day after, it was John. Then a month later, it was not John again
  • her first answers are her conscious ideal. But the day after the speed-date, she is explaining her unconscious ideal. That information is behind the locked door
• study Braden analyzed what the top baseball players say they do. But when he analyzed their actions, it did NOT match what they say they do
  • all these players could explain their actions with so much confidence but their explanations simply did NOT match what actions they actually did
• study psychologist Norman Maier hung two ropes in a room far apart enough where you cannot reach both at the same time. The room was full of tools. He had participants try to figure out all the different ways to tie the ends of the ropes together
  • the 3 most common methods were determined pretty easily by participants:
    • stretch the rope, anchor it to a chair, then get the second rope
    • use an extension cord
    • grab one rope in your hand then use a long object to pull the other rope towards you
  • the fourth method had people stumped, only a few got it right
    • this method involves swinging one rope like a pendulum then grab the second rope and the first will come to you
  • for the people who couldn’t figure it out, he let them sit on it for 10 minutes, then he gave them a hint by walking towards one rope and casually brushing it so it starts swinging. Then everyone instantly figured it out
  • this is where it get’s crazy: when Maier asked them to explain how they came up with the swinging method, only ONE correctly said that Maier himself came and brushed the rope. All the other people came with with random bullshit like “it just dawned on me”, etc
  • were they lying? Of course not. It’s just that Maier’s hint was so subtle it was only picked up on an unconscious level. It was processed BEHIND the locked door.
• the point is we need to learn to accept our own ignorance sometimes. Saying “I don’t know” is okay.
• another point here is that in any given scenario we have two minds working: our consciousness and unconscious
  • in the rope experiment, our unconscious was working the entire time, looking for any subtle clues it can use. So when the rope was brushed, it instantly picked up on that unconsciously

Chapter 3 - The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall For Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men

The Downsides of Thin-Slicing

• rapid cognition, i.e. thin-slicing, has its downsides too
• Warren Harding, president of the US in the 1920s is a great example. At first glance, he looks like presidential material and most people felt that way. But he was one of the worse presidents ever
  • he was large and tall, handsome, distinguished-looking. These things provide an association in our minds. We instantly think “he’s presidential material”

Implicit Cognitive Bias

• study the “race IAT test” shows you a series of words and images and you have to select if it goes into the European & bad category or Black & good category. This is very difficult for most people to do. If you reverse it (European & good, etc), it’s much easier
  • this shows that most of us have a bias towards preferring white
• it’s for this reason that when we encounter blacks, we may behave slightly differently - p. 86
• among the US population 14% of people are over 6 feet tall. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, this number jumps to 58%
  • again, we have a bias for tall people. We think leader = tall

Solution

• when you do the race IAT test after you see some positive association of blacks (like sprinting in the Olympics where most are black or Nelson Mandela/Martin Luther King JR), you often will have a bias towards blacks
• this shows us we need to expose ourselves to other people, especially minorities, get comfortable with them, familiarize ourselves with the best of their culture, etc

Chapter 4 - Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity

STOPPED WRITING NOTES AT THIS POINT

I lost interest in reading this book and only read it sporadically. Did not write any notes.

Main Idea of the Book

• the idea explored in this book is that of thin-slicing, i.e. quick-thinking or your instincts
• sometimes you have to rely on your gut-feeling because it’s actually more than just a ‘feeling’