fall 2005 - Blink

Nov. 23 2005
Notes on Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Intro Adaptive unconscious – our brain quickly and quietly processing information we need to function as human beings, rapid cognition, which we tend to be suspicious of because we like to trust our conscious decision making abilities
Our unconscious is powerful but fallible – how then to trust our instincts?

Three premises 1) decisions made quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately 2) what are the conditions that cause our rapid cognition to be wrong 3) snap judgments can be educated and controlled

I. Thin slices – Gottman’s studies of couples on (one hour of) videotape can predict with 95% accuracy if couple will be married in 15 years, some can it as quickly as three minutes (and not while fighting), nonexperts can make this same prediction (same tapes) as accurately as 80%
Two states of marriage 1) positive sentimental override (a buffer) 2) negative sentiment override (four horsemen of problems = defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, contempt with contempt by and far being the worst) criticism is global condemnation of person’s character but with contempt it comes from a “superior” plane, hierarchical, this also predicts how many colds someone gets
Morse code analogy – “fists” the personal signature of someone’s sending, distinctive qualities appear naturally and automatically
Job interviews – personality workup – the Big Five Inventory
1) Extraversion. Are you sociable or retiring? Fun-loving or reserved?
2) Agreeableness. Are you trusting or suspicious? Helpful or uncooperative?
3) Conscientiousness. Are you organized or disorganized? Self-disciplined or weak willed?
4) Emotional Stability. Are you worried or calm? Insecure or secure?
5) Openness to new experiences. Are you imaginative or down-to-earth? Independent or conforming?
Compare thick slice – how a friend would rate you with someone who didn’t know you visiting your dorm room (gives us three clues to someone’s personality 1) identity claims or deliberative expression of how we would like to be seen by the world 2) behavioral residue such as dirty laudry or organized CDs 3) thoughts and feelings regulators or changes we make to our personal spaces to affect the way we feel when we inhabit them
What people tell us about themselves can be confusing, we are often unaware of how we are, don’t ask point blank a couple about their relationship ask them about their pets or such
Doctors – training vs. conversation – studies of transcripts
Not sued doctors spend more than 3 minutes longer with patients (18.3 mins. Vs. 15), also more orienting comments and active listening but no difference in amount or quality of information and not more details about meds or patient condition but how they spoke, treated patients as human beings


II. Snap judgements are extremely fast but unconscious – behind a locked door
Priming experiments – suggest certain ideas using words (polite, rude, aged, think like professor, or to identify race on test, cooperativeness) and tendency of people to act in these ways, not brainwashing because you are not revealing deep personal information or act in drastically inappropriate ways, priming doesn’t work once you become aware of it but we are not aware of it at the time and do not credit it’s effects
Unconscious works like a mental valet taking care of the minor mental details of you life leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand
Explaining yourself – we do not explain our snap judgements accurately, what we say and what we do are different, often provide different answers at different times or meaningless answers – a storytelling problem – explanations for things we don’t have explanations for, we need to be cautious in how we interpret other’s explanations for their instinctual behavior (we rarely say we are ignorant, that we “don’t know”)
Led astray by snap judgments – take rapid cognition seriously – acknowledge it power for better or worse – is a step toward controlling them

Implicit Association Test (IAT)

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

we make connections more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already associated in our minds than between pairs of ideas that are less related in our minds

do it as quickly as possible

don’t skip over words

don’t worry about making mistakes

strong prior association = difference in milliseconds

predictor of how we will act in certain types of spontaneous situations

not aware of bias but will, nonverbally act slightly differently and in such ways that others can perceive this (such as job interview)

study of half of CEOs of Fortune 500 are white males but also in height, generally average almost 3 inches higher than general male population (58% compared to 14.5 as over 6 feet) – it may be that our selection process is less rationale than we think

III. controlling rapid cognition – spontaneity isn’t random, good decision making under fast-moving high-stress situations is a function of training, rules, and rehearsal
as in comic improve – the concept of agreement, have characters accept everything that is happening to them, develop action rather than block it
create conditions for successful spontaneity
watch out for “verbal overshadowing” – use of words and introspection can separate us from our instincts and impede problems that can be solved with a flash of insight. Problems that could be solved with a flash of insight have a different set of rules than other problems. Language can get in the way, sometimes stopping to talk things over gets in the way
Less is more – Lee Goldman’s algorithm for heart patients – simplified what was important to look for. Too much information (which we often intuitively try to seek out especially when challenged or threatened or stressed about what to do). But how to ignore perfectly valid information? Particularly doctors who do not want to follow mundane guidelines, more gratifying to come up with decision on your own. With more information we become more certain of our answers but our answers do not necessarily get better or more consistently correct.
Two lessons here 1) successful decision making relies on balance of deliberative and instinctive thinking 2) in good decision making frugality matters – distill to simplest elements, clear patterns
Snap decisions can be made in a snap but not if you have too many choices (jam experiment – six choices 30% sales, twenty four choices 3% sales)
IV. Louis Cheskin (marketing guru) sensation transference – transferring the impressions or sensations from the packaging to product itself, the product is the package and product combined
Need to thin slice by also looking at the context, hard to do market research on something really different, first impressions don’t really count in these cases
First impressions of experts are different from others, our tastes become more complex and can explain their understanding better, have a vocabulary and rubrics/matrix for assessing things. We cannot look behind the locked door of unconscious but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and training to interpret and decode what is behind snap judgments and first impressions. This changes the nature of first impressions. Outside of our areas of expertise our impression may not be wrong but more likely shallow, hard to explain and easily disrupted. Just because we do a lot of something (drink cola) doesn’t mean we think about it a lot.
V. FAC facial action coding system can teach us how to better read each others faces – the face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind but it is what is going on inside our mind, emotions can start with the face, not just be a residue or secondary billboard for internal feelings, it is an equal partner
Micro expressions not made voluntarily, and inevitably no matter how hard we try to suppress them emotions do leak out and can be read, we don’t actually know what is on our face, in fact, this would make us better at concealing things which may not be a good things at least evolutionary wise. Most of time we read facial expressions easily and accurately so what happens when this breaks down.
We have different parts of brain for facial recognition and object recognition. Autism looks at faces as objects. What if this was also a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Such as under extreme stress – extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, sense that time is slowing down – police that don’t hear gun going off
An optimal state of arousal – Larry Bird seeing the whole court, we can exceed the optimal state and be too aroused, too much feeling of pressure and lose souces of information were we become useless, motor skills slow down as does cognitive processing and vision, blood withdrawn and we become clumsy, arousal can leave us mind-blind
Time is a factor – need “white space” time to react, without time you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction, can cause temporary autism when we run out of time, we can be guided by stereotypes and predijuces, when police officers by themselves (rather than in squad car with a partner) slow things down, less bravado, will not charge in as rapidly or be ambushedand have fewer problems, with partner they speed things up split second syndrome – rush into situation with no time for thought, can go through stress inoculation training with exposure to similar stress situations and over time heart rate goes down
The key to reading faces is practice, deliberate practice – the gift of training and expertise to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience, not a blur but a blink
VI. we can be careless about our powers of rapid cognition, need to take these powers seriously and acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious
If we control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place then we can control it better