Quick synopsis:

An entertaining look at a fascinating mechanism of the human mind– rapid cognition– and how it works (and doesn’t work) in the real world. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought about how people think, pop-science afficionados, Malcolm Gladwell fans, and lovers of entertaining writing… in short, just about everyone.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a fascinating look at the science of “rapid cognition”– those snap judgments that get right at the truth of the question or situation with seemingly no evidence or contemplation. Some examples that Gladwell gives:

  • A tennis coach who can watch players toss the ball into the air and unerringly predict whether the serve will be fair or not
  • An art historian who correctly intuits that a sculpture is a fake despite the same sculpture having been authenticated after months of study by museum experts
  • A behavioral expert who watches 15 minutes of videotaped conversation between couples and predicts with 90% accuracy who will stay together and who will be divorced five years later

Deep in our subconscious is a cognitive machine that can be led astray by thinking too much or– as Gladwell convincingly shows– trying too hard to explain our choices. Impulse and instinct can be powerful tools, borne of our natural ability to “thin slice” and recognize patterns in our environment, events, and people based on remarkably thin slices of experience.

This isn’t a textbook or a scientific treatise, but an engaging account of thin slicing and pattern recognition as it happens in the real world, and high level overviews of fascinating experiments. A few more examples:

  • Students are given 10 sentences to unscramble, believing that their verbal ability it being tested. Seeded in the word lists, but not part of the meaning of the completed sentences, are words that connote old age: Florida, gray, bingo, wrinkle. Students unscrambling the sentences walk out of the room more slowly than students unscrambling sentences without those words. They actually act old.
  • Given far less resources, technology, and armament in a war simulation, a Marine Corps General playing the part of a rogue nation soundly defeats the American military apparatus by relying on intuition and instant decision-making.

But the pressure to discount our instincts and look before we leap and avoid judging a book by its cover aren’t to be wholly discounted. Thin-slicing can come at a distinct cost if the instant cognition we are counting on goes awry or is influenced by our environment. The Amadou Diallo shooting– a young black man shot 43 times as he tried to show his wallet– is an example of the tragic result of thin-slicing gone wrong with police officers, an occupation in which their very lives can rely on the thin-slicing but who are at the same time can’t help but be deluged with the kind of influences (images and situations) which are detrimental to successful thin-slicing.

Gladwell doesn’t shy away from this at all, but presents persuasive (and sometimes mind-boggling) studies showing how environmental cues warp our abilities:

  • Simply being asked to identify their race on a standardized test resulted in a 50% decrease in test scores for blacks
  • Warren Harding is elected president purely on the basis of appearing presidential
  • Being short is as much of a handicap to achieving corporate success as being African American or female

Even trying to explain one’s choices can interfere. People asked to pick out photos they’ve seen for brief amounts of time before fail significantly more often if they are asked to first describe the pictures they have seen. The flash of insight that allows us to see faces and make quick decisions are surprisingly fragile, subject to being lost as they are passed from one hemisphere of our brain to the other. As Gladwell puts it:

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”

It seems clear from the research that these destructive forces can — to some degree– be countered in apparently obvious ways (sensitivity training, exposure to positive images) and our ability to thin-slice can likewise be improved with training. How much? What about people who are remarkably non-visual without being autistic? How do we know when to trust our gut and when to step back and use cautioned, reasoned analysis?

I don’t know and Gladwell doesn’t either. There’s no easy and no single answer. It took me a few days to realize that my disappointment at the end of the book was because of that fundamental irresolvability, not through any weakness in Gladwell’s writing. Blink isn’t a book that aims to provide a prescription for living… it isn’t “Rapid Cognition in 24 hours” but a witty and entertaining foray into the still largely unknown workings of the human brain.

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