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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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Highlights & Notes

The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It’s slow, and it needs a lot of information. There’s a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it’s really smart, because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates—at least at first—entirely below the surface of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, such as the sweat glands in the palms of our hands. It’s a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions.

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions like this is called the adaptive unconscious,

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. When doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests, and when we are uncertain about what we hear, we ask for a second opinion. And what do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making.

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? Answering that question is the second task of Blink.

The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition.

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.

What this suggests is that it is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.

you can learn as much—or more—from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

It isn’t necessary, then, to know much about how a surgeon operates in order to know his likelihood of being sued. What you need to understand is the relationship between that doctor and his patients.

He instinctively picks up the “giss” of a double fault. He thin-slices some part of the service motion and—blink!—he just knows. But here’s the catch: much to Braden’s frustration, he simply cannot figure out how he knows.

This is the second critical fact about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious.

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way.

Descartes’ Error,

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh’s research with the interrupters, and Maier’s experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”

Part of what it means to take thin-slicing and first impressions seriously is accepting the fact that sometimes we can know more about someone or something in the blink of an eye than we can after months of study. But we also have to acknowledge and understand those circumstances when rapid cognition leads us astray.

If you’d like to try a computerized IAT, you can go to www.implicit.harvard.edu.

Not long ago, researchers who analyzed the data from four large research studies that had followed thousands of people from birth to adulthood calculated that when corrected for such variables as age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth 5,525 more per year. As Timothy Judge, one of the authors of the height-salary study, points out: “If you take this over the course of a 30-year career and compound it, we’re talking about a tall person enjoying literally hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings advantage.” Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions—we can alter the way we thin-slice—by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and—to be frank—terrifying.

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice—perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again—and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. This is the critical lesson of improv, too, and it is also a key to understanding the puzzle of Millennium Challenge: spontaneity isn’t random.

As human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct. We can hold a face in memory, and we can solve a puzzle in a flash. But what Schooler is saying is that all these abilities are incredibly fragile. Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

But what does the Goldman algorithm say? Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon.

What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.

  • @quetzaltwit

There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. Bob Golomb is a great car salesman because he is very good, in the moment, at intuiting the intentions and needs and emotions of his customers. But he is also a great salesman because he understands when to put the brakes on that process: when to consciously resist a particular kind of snap judgment. Cook County’s doctors, similarly, function as well as they do in the day-to-day rush of the ER because Lee Goldman sat down at his computer and over the course of many months painstakingly evaluated every possible piece of information that he could. Deliberate thinking is a wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, the help of a computer, and a clearly defined task, and the fruits of that type of analysis can set the stage for rapid cognition. The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced it to its simplest elements: even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern. Lee Goldman’s research proves that in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

I think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t let us edit.

When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.

So, when marketers ask consumers to give them their reactions to something—to explain whether they liked a song that was just played or a movie they just saw or a politician they just heard—how much trust should be placed in their answers? Finding out what people think of a rock song sounds as if it should be easy. But the truth is that it isn’t, and the people who run focus groups and opinion polls haven’t always been sensitive to this fact. Getting to the bottom of the question of how good Kenna really is requires a more searching exploration of the intricacies of our snap judgments.

The predicted success of New Coke never materialized. But there was an even bigger surprise. The seemingly inexorable rise of Pepsi—which had also been so clearly signaled by market research—never materialized either. For the last twenty years, Coke has gone head-to-head with Pepsi with a product that taste tests say is inferior, and Coke is still the number one soft drink in the world. The story of New Coke, in other words, is a really good illustration of how complicated it is to find out what people really think.

Cheskin believed that most of us don’t make a distinction—on an unconscious level—between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.

If you think about it, though, there really isn’t any practical difference between those two things. We are willing to pay more for ice cream when it tastes better, and putting ice cream in a round container convinces us it tastes better just as surely as making the chips bigger in chocolate chip ice cream does.

But thin-slicing has to be done in context.

But testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.

The first impressions of experts are different. By that I don’t mean that experts like different things than the rest of us—although that is undeniable. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling. When someone says, “I love you,” we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity.

If you were to approach a one-year-old child who sits playing on the floor and do something a little bit puzzling, such as cupping your hands over hers, the child would immediately look up into your eyes. Why? Because what you have done requires explanation, and the child knows that she can find an answer on your face. This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing.

What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

(The difference in the sophistication of those two regions explains why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade forty years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel.)

I think that we become temporarily autistic also in situations when we run out of time.

This is the gift of training and expertise—the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

Because we are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious.

What Chancellorsville tells us, though, is that in the real world—when it comes to fast-moving, high-stakes situations like battlefields (or emergency rooms, or auditions, or late-night shoot-outs in the Bronx)—that kind of formal, conventional analysis doesn’t help that much. Chancellorsville came down to some ineffable, magical decision-making ability that Lee possessed and Hooker did not.

This is the second lesson of Blink: understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated—when we have to juggle many different variables—then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works—and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment—it is our responsibility to act.

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