Blink by M.Gladwell Analysis - Book Report/Review Example

Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant second book (his first, also a huge bestseller is, The Tipping Point) offers insights about the fascinating moments in life we do, but cannot explain, how we survive and succeed amid stressful situations, and how we can make snap judgments in moments of crises. As Gladwell blurbs, Blink is about recognizing, “the power to think without thinking.” True enough, the book discusses how we humans were able to make decisions without the tedious burdens of SWOT or BCA analysis way back in history. Gladwell begins the book by pointing out the oft stated misconception that, “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.” This is why we automatically give more credit to bureaucratic decisions made rather than fast and frugal ones. Perhaps, he surmises, it is because we are often told to, “look before you leap, “ or that, “haste makes waste, ” or not to, “judge a book by its cover,” and to “stop and think”. But really, do we get our expected outcomes when we “think twice” or “mull it over” some more? The answer to that, can all be found in Blink. According to author Malcolm Gladwell, decisions made very quickly are every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. This is possible through what Dr. Timothy D. Wilson describes as our adaptive unconscious through the process of rapid cognition (fast way of thinking or processing of information). Gladwell further states that, snap judgments are just as reliable as our conscious decisions… sometimes even better. Instinct or intuition, as we commonly call it is that nagging feeling we get, telling us what is right or what we should do. Rapid cognition is how we explain why our instincts are almost always right. Take for instance Gladwell’s Getty example. The museum was about to make a very expensive purchase, when an expert--relying on his instincts, proclaims that the statue is a fake even though all the tests disagree. Later, it was proven that indeed, the statue was a fake, but how did the expert know it spot on? “It just didn’t feel right,” he said. That is the doing of our adaptive unconscious. “The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high level sophisticated thinking to the unconscious,” as Dr. Wilson says in his book Strangers to Ourselves. Our everyday decision making processes depend on our two minds: the conscious and unconscious, and we toggle back and forth between them according to the situation. The theory of thin-slicing is the best way to explain how our adaptive unconscious works. Gladwell defines thin-slicing as, “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.” More importantly, Gladwell’s discussion on thin-slicing is central to the core of Blink because it teaches us that everyone’s got this ability, we’re just not aware of it. To explain further, we can look at our brains as a supercomputer that stores vast amounts of experience in terms of data. Thin-slicing works as a program that can identify data through small “bytes” of information whenever it encounters a familiar order of syntax. It’s like the random processing that happens in the RAM of a computer. Seemingly, our brains do the exact same thing. Often enough, our experience predetermines our behavior upon a stimuli, because we only work with the data available in our memories. We can actually do stuff, like driving, without even thinking--like we’re in autopilot. However, there is a possibility of changing predicted behavior, and that is because we think about what we wouldn’t normally do then. Useful to understanding more about thin-slicing are the researches made by John Gottman and his colleagues in their studies in predicting the possibility of divorce among young couples by dissecting at least three minutes of interaction. Their surprising and interesting findings are written in the book, The Mathematics of Divorce. To uncover its secrets, psychologist and mathematician John Gottman and several of his students, deconstructed a video footage of their subjects and from the ‘slices’ made equations that predict future behavior of the subjects. This is particularly interesting because what the experiment illustrates is that we can interpret through verbals and nonverbals the likely outcome of any marriage. Since the methodology includes ‘coding’ of different sets of actions, they have found patterns that tend to indicate the couples’ marital standing in the future. From the interactions that they had thin-sliced, signs of divorce tended to unfold, and thus, they were able to derive the formula of long lasting marriage. In Chapter 2: The Locked Door, Secret Life of Snap Decisions, the mysteries of rapid cognition are unraveled by introducing us to the concept of priming, which refers to subtle triggers that influence our behavior without our awareness of such changes. This is something similar to the A-B split where the author says, “our conscious mind thinks differently than our unconscious mind.” Priming refers to subtle triggers that influence our behavior without our awareness of such changes. This can be done by inserting slight suggestions into messages, the environment and such to manipulate behavior. As an example, Gladwell offers the case of Italy, where to reduce the occurrence of vandalism in subway trains, they played classical music. This change brought on the passengers of the train an aura of ‘refinement’, thus preventing them to even think about vandalism. Perhaps the ambient sounds too helped, because everyone knows that classical music makes one fall asleep. However, not all is good and well. Blink also warns us to be wary of trusting our instincts too easily. We have to learn when to listen in our rapid cognitions. Gladwell warns us that our unconscious is a powerful force, but it is fallible. We are not always privy to the truth of things and there are times our powers of rapid cognitions go awry. When they do, Gladwell says, “they do so for a very specific and very consistent set of reasons…and those reasons can be identified and understood”. That is why Blink convinces us that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. The Warren Harding Error, Why We Fall for Tall, Dark, Handsome Men, a most interesting chapter, is an exposition as to how our intuitions can lead us astray. Take for example the late President Warren Harding, who was elected only because he looked like he was going to be a good President… only to find out that he would only be a good-looking one. This chapter explains where and how we can go wrong with rapid cognition. By taking into account other researches and experiments such as the noteworthy IAT (Implied Association Test), we find that we are predisposed to certain biases without complete awareness of these biases that exist in our unconscious. What this implies is that in cases where we are pressured (time, for example), our rapid cognition takes over and we find that we say things we don’t mean or we do things we don’t intend to do. This test seem to be a gauge of our experience for it determines a person’s abject reaction to seemingly neutral images. What we learn from this is that our natural reactions to these images can be affected too by our disposition and mood. When we consciously expose ourselves to positive versions of these images, like for example if, in the racial IAT, we are positively inclined towards President Obama, adore Tiger Woods and is a big fan of Oprah, then probably, we’ll tend to be more predisposed to reacting positively of blacks in the test. The succeeding chapters give us three accounts where rapid cognitions were used successfully and when it can run amuck. Here, we encounter the stories of Paul Van Riper and the Millennium challenges, a US military officer; Kenna, a promising musical artist and Amadou Diallo, an immigrant living in the Bronx. During Paul Van Riper’s stint as the Rogue leader, he was able to combat the more technologically advanced team because of his great and wide experience in tactical operations. But most importantly, it’s because of his great military instincts which have been forged by time and experience. That is why he did away with all those clean, coordinated and highly complex ONAs, instead he wanted to create spontaneity, something that the blue (other) team would never expect. And thus, by being ‘unpredictable’ and ‘messy’, they were able to overthrow the blue team despite of being underdogs. Speaking of expectations, the story of Kenna is also an intriguing one. Kenna was supposedly going to be a big success according to the experts in the music industry. He was liked by all the big shots, however when the market testing came back, it brought disappointing results. Kenna didn’t click with the target audience as much as they had hoped. Despite of his genius and talent, people just didn’t seem to buy the act--and the reason for that is because the people weren’t primed by the experts. The music exec (Durst) was hyped up by his friend Danny, and being perhaps influential, he was infected by Kenna’s music. However, people hearing Kenna’s music over the phone were immune to his contagiously good music. It also didn’t help that they cannot see the actual Kenna perform. What this teaches us is that experts are different from non experts. They know good music when they hear it, but most people don’t have that skill and that’s why Kenna failed the market test. Most listeners aren’t experts. Therefore, we cannot appreciate the genius of Kenna as much as the experts do. It’s because our adaptive unconscious are not as attuned as their musical aptitude. These are stories in which Gladwell creatively interweaves other stories and scientific studies to give us an idea on how rapid cognition works in different (but similar) situations. Like the tragic story of Amadou Diallo and the police officers. Officers Caroll, Boss, Murphy and McMellon killed a Diallo because they thought they saw a gun in his hand, when it was a only a wallet after all. The grave mistake the officers made was that they sized up Diallo as someone who is a potentially dangerous criminal, because he seem to have acted like one. This story was included in the book because Gladwell warns us that sometimes things fall into a, “gray area, a middle ground between the deliberate and accidental.” The Diallo shooting was a snap judgement, that’s we should be aware that even though most of the time our instincts are right, in cases like this, it doesn’t hurt to think twice. There are some things that cannot be explained by theories or tests like this Diallo anomaly, but the author seems to be right when he says that, “We pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments.” As human beings we often end to accept the most plausible explanation because we are conservative. We reject explanations that are unfamiliar and new, and accept the familiar and most widely acceptable to society. This way we reduce uncertainty, and achieve consonance in our minds. This is because I know that there are a lot of things unaccounted for, and a lot of data to sort through. I would not want to assume anything, because according to the film, The Silence of the Lambs, “when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.” WORK CITED Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little Brown & Co., 2005. Read More