Another interesting book from Gladwell, and as usual contains a feast of fascinating psychological insights. However, in this particular case, there is a dark side to these cognitive titbits,and while he does qualify his recommendations in light of this, there are questions raised as well as answered. This food for thought requires some chewing...
The power of blink
The focus of the book is what I am could be labelled 'blink thinking' - the rapid cognition which 'we' do automatically, but also unconciously. The stuff that happens in a blink of an eye, but fittingly which we also don't see or even realise.
The classic example of this is what is known as 'thin slicing' - extracting a wealth of information and judgment from a very thin segment of experience. That this can be a surprisingly powerful technique is clear from the many examples Gladwell provides. For instance there is the the marriage counseller John Gottmann, who can predict, after just an hour of conversation, with 95% accuracy whether a married couple will be still together in 15 years; or there is the fact that people who rate a professor's teaching ability based on just a few seconds of video clip reach similar conclusions to those of students who experienced an entire semester of classes.
It seems that in many such cases, there is a behavioural 'signature' which is always present, carries great significance, and which we are remarkably adept at (subconsciously) picking up on, even with minimal exposure to it. This is of course impressive, but does make sense, in that pattern recognition is a major feature of our mental apparatus and we are constantly finding out new ways in which it excels. While we might like to think the prowess of the human mind is in rationality and logical ability, as the field of Artificial Intelligence shows, the real challenge in replicating human behaviour lies not in implementing such calculations, but in recreating our power to identify and process patterns, even in such a seemingly 'simple' area as vision. Furthermore, as social creatures, it also makes sense that we have specialized pattern identification powers in this area as well. However Gladwell also shows how such social observations are not just interesting in their own right, but may lead to seemingly unconnected consequences. For example a study showed that the chances of a doctor being sued could be more reliably estimated from 'thin slicing' conversations with patients than by analyzing how many actual mistakes he/she made. It turns out a doctor who used a patronizing or dominant tone in conversatio would be more likely to be sued than one who actually made more medical mistakes. Again, in retrospect this can be seen to make sense, since suing is in a way a legal expression of what is at root a moral reaction - the feeling of being wronged and apportioning blame, so it is understandable that the patient's personal relationship with the doctor plays a major role; however, it does highlight how our social and emotional subconscious reactions may underlie what might be assumed to be rational areas of action. As a side note it is also perhaps comforting that the statistics bear this emotional influence out, since it shows the majority of lawsuits are then actually based on real feelings of indignation, not just an opportunistic chance to make a quick buck, which would be the case if people sued whenever the doctor made a mistake.
Manpulating Blink, and manipulating us
The story starts to get into darker territory though, when Gladwell shows us how this powerful subconcious mechanism can be influenced, and also (more disturbingly) how it can then influence our conscious, 'chosen', behaviour.
There are of course many examples these days of 'priming', whereby situational elements can be used to tilt the balance between one unconcious interpretation and another. What is unnerving about the example Gladwell gives though is how the effects can be seen to percolate into other areas which we would like to think are sacrosanct. So, for example, having people think about either being a professor or being a hooligan had a marked impact on their ability to answer general knowledge questions. One can literally put oneself into a 'smart' frame of mind by imagining being a smart person - or not, as the case may be. Much as we like to think of ourselves as our own person, this raises the issue of how identifying with someone else can change such subtle elements of our character. While the study seemed to focus on the positive effects of imagining a professor, one can assume there would be similar negative effects brought to the fore when taking on the role of a hooligan. Such 'social' mental states affecting us social creatures is one thing, but,perhaps more surprisingly, there are also examples of seemingly trivial physical factors playing a detectable, mental role. So for example in one study subjects found a cartoon more or less funny, depending on whether they held a pen between their lips, or between their teeth. This particular result is linked to the feedback-loop that is now being thought to exist between our emotions and our physical manifestations of them - in this case smiling (which is inhibited by a pen between the lips, but forced by a pen between the teeth).
We like to think such things are personal mental qualities and experiences, not something which can be manipulated by something as trivial as biting on a pen, but more and more research shows how misconceived this might be. This is a fascinating area, and I've read recently quite a few articles on the subject - for example in this sciam article frowning one's brow while working on a problem makes one think in an analytic manner, whereas puffing out one's cheeks has the opposite effect. While to make things even more bizarre, this article shows how daydreaming about love puts one in a creative frame of mind, whereas thinking about sex makes one more analytical!
Normally priming is I think associated with loading a judgment balance, pre-placing facts into our mind which then tip the scales faster in one direction than another, but it is I think a different, darker, ballgame if it influences not just 'what' goes into our decision, but 'how' that decision is made - how creatively or analytically, how smartly or how humourously.
Unknown unknowns
This is all quite surprising and disturbing, because by and large our subconscious processes are not just impenetrable to us, but we don't even know what we don't know. As often is the case absence of evidence is I think assumed to be evidence of absence : we don't feel our decisions to be moulded in this way, so assume they are not. This then is particularly deterimental when combined with our need to have a consistent narrative for our actions, to rationalize them, even after the event. When it comes to explaining our behaviour, our nature abhors a vacuum, so when the governing factors occur under our radar, we invent irrelevant reasons and justifications. We then not only confuse ourselves, but when confronted with this confusion we don't try to correct it, rather to bolster it.
An example Gladwell gives is asking both normal people and expert food tasters to rate jams. If just asked to give gut feelings, both groups produce roughly similar results. But if the non-experts are also asked to explain their decisions, then their preferences change and get all mixed up relative to the experts and even inconsistent relative to themselves. Trying to figure out why we like something ends up disturbing the what we think we like as well! Releated is the example of how, if we are shown a face, and later have to pick it out of a line up, we normally do quite well; however, if in between we are asked to describe that face, then we become much worse at actually identifying it later. Apart from being a useful tip on how to confuse a witness if ever accused of a crime, this raises an important issue : consideration can confuse! What seems actually to be happening is that if asked to explain/describe our choices/experiences, then we replace the automatic reaction with conciously (re-)constructed information, and in these sort of domains, that might not be appropriate, and hence something gets lost. The cliche of a picture painting a thousand words might apply here, since we are trying to convert a complex pattern into conscious 'words', and fail miserably.
If this was just about recognizing faces and choosing jams, then this wouldn't much cause for concern. However our instinctive social evaluations are also being shown to play a role in more serious areas, like prejudice. The most unnerving example of this is the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT. I think its instructive for everyone to try out this test, especially the racial version, and a good example is available online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit. This test measures how fast we are at pairing two items, for example in the race test between a black/white face and a postive/negative word. The premise of this test is that we pair things faster when we already associate them together, and any change in response time indicates a conflict between rational choice and implicit association. So for example if someone takes longer to pair a black face with a positive term, then this is claimed to reveal implicit negative associations with black people.
I remember when I tried that test a while back, I was shocked to see I had a variation in response time, but thankfully (for my pride, but alas not for society) I am not alone in this (and hence not a closet racist!) since even Gladwell himself wasn't as implicitly fair minded as he thought he would be.
What this shows is regardless of our conscious attitudes to things like racial equality, we also have unconscious attitudes which, while not playing the major role, colour our initial impressions and interpretations, and these first reactions can be corrosive.
This chillingly reveals how prone we can be to stereotyping at a deep level, and this can of course be detrimental not just via unfair negative biases, but through misplaced positive ones as well. Gladwell gives an example of the latter in the 'Warren Harding Error' whereby in one election, a lot of US voters seem basically to have wrongly assumed a distinguished and intelligent looking candidate would make a distinguished and intelligent president. A similar bias probably explains why business leaders tend to be significantly taller than average, since we seem to automatically associate physical stature with leadership ability. We might dismiss such biases consciously, but they lurk on under the surface.
Conscious counter actions
But there's some light at the end of our tunnel vision. As Gladwell points out "just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control". While it's true that we can't control the first impressions which are shaped by our experiences and environment, we can however change those external factors (change some of our experiences etc.) so as to foster and reinforce the more preferrable impressions.
Taking the Race IAT again and again doesn't change our performance, no matter how much we consciously will ourselves to be 'fair'. What does change our performance though, is thinking beforehand of examples of black people we know of and respect - for example famous figures like Nelson Mandella or Martin Luther King. This is of course basically priming, which might seem somehow manipulative, and to some extent it is, but only in so far as it is needed to counteract the pre-existing priming effects of our society being awash with negative stereotyping. If we remind ourselves of how the stereotypes don't hold true, then we prevent ourselves from falling back on them as automatic default assumptions.
The change in IAT results shows how this can be effective, and the changes can also be shown at a biological level. I unfortunately can't find the study anymore, but I remember reading of a brain scan experiment which showed how the amygdala (very much involved in fear and threat perception) would automatically light up when a subject was shown a foreign face. However the study seemed also to suggest that priming the subject to think of the person as an individual (this is a postman, father etc.), and I guess somehow identify with them, reduced this activation. So there is definitely some hope and comfort to be taken from this all. We may not be able to change our hard wired circuits to react to an 'other' (which can be configured by ignorance or by culture) but we can de-tune the inputs to those circuits to prevent them firing.
Sadly, this ability to prime our reactions also shows the lie in the cliche "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me". Name calling, stereotypes and even 'mere' jokes, all help tune these circuits in the wrong way. An example of the tangible and serious consequences of this is seen in a study by Albert Bandura in 'which students delivered much higher electric shocks to another group of participants merely if they had overheard someone saying that those students from the other college seemed like "animals" ' (see http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2032). Names may not break bones, but they break moral barriers, which opens the door to evil acts. Similarly this is why we should never tolerate villifying or objectifying rhetoric from politicians and others, because even 'free speech' is never free from effect. Despite how it reinforces and inflames those who are that way inclined anyway, it also sets the tone of debate and has a priming effect even on those who think they can just rationally discard it.
So as Gladwell points out "to really be a fair minded person, it is not enough to rationally act that way, but we also need to develop the related automatic mindset, by exposure to counter-examples to stereotypes". Put bluntly, we can't trust ourselves to act as we'd like to, unless we train for it.
And of course there are other types of 'priming that we need to be careful of. Gladwell discusses how simply being overstimulated can lead us to act in blinkered, blink-dominated ways. As a real life example of preventive measures against it, he points out how many police forces have now banned high speed chases. Not just due to the danger of 'collateral damage' during the chase, but mainly to avoid the over/misguided reactions of officers that can often arise after such exhileration (many riots over police brutality were actually triggered by events following a car chase).
Accept blink yes, but...
Overall, I think Gladwell makes a persuasive and interesting case for the power of 'blink'. His examples are illuminating, and he delivers an important lesson: there is more to our actions and even choices than we think, and we ignore this at our peril. Furthermore it's an especially important point that outside of awareness does not mean outside of control. It's one thing to make the spirit willing but we also can, and must, train the flesh not to be weak.
What makes me feel uncomfortable though is he seems to me a little over-enthusiastic about this unconscious power. He gives several examples of how blink thinking is better than trying to rationally decide, trying to list pros and cons etc., which can lead to what he terms 'paralysis through analysis'. While flashes of insight are of course always necessary, and I agree we should always try to leave some room for it in our deliberations, I also think that he sometimes risks encouraging too much reliance on 'intuition'. So, for example, in a story about Cook Country ER, he explains how doctors were taking too much information into account when trying to decide which people complaining of chest pains might really be on the verge of having a heart attack, and should be allocated scarce hospital beds, and which should be sent home. It turns out that there were just a few simple variables which were most predictive, and these weren't being spotted in the wealth of analysis undertaken. The implication is: too much needless thought.
But in such a situation could one really ever recommend the approach of not taking everything into consideration? The whole point is no one really knew what mattered, so they tried to factor in everything that might. It turns out this wasn't necessary, but only after a lengthy computer analysis of statistics. Human blink thinking wouldn't have ever reached this conclusion, and it would in my view be wrong to trust it, even if we thought it might. Our powers of pattern recognition are amazing, but such mechanisms have no corrective/evaluative feedback - hunches may be right, but it's irresponsible to take serious action based on them, since if we can't identify the grounds for our conclusions, we can't judge how shaky the foundations are. Being hard wired to see patterns means we might also see them where they aren't. Burying ourselves in data might stop us seeing the wood for the trees, but it also stops us seeing the crop circles.
What is true however is that, due to our inherent confirmation bias, more information might raise our confidence, but not our accuracy. Gladwell gives an example of psychologists reviewing a case history becoming more and more convinced of their (wrong) diagnoses the more they learned about the subject. This is something we for sure need to be aware of, but it would be ludicrous to reject more information just because of this risk!
And I think this argument is relevant in the other examples he gives - the successful 'spontaneous' wargame strategy, the higher success rate in problem solving tests if subjects didn't try to explain their ideas and so on. In such cases there are for sure times when blink thinking might come out on top, but the point is if we can't be sure it will, the we have to take the less successful but more responsible conscious path. This wisdom is embedded in our culture - don't act without thinking, don't be impetuous, look before you leap etc. And this is I think the reason why we can be shown so much about blink, because we grow up learning to overcome it, and as things like the race IAT show, for good reason. It's also not just about being pragmatic - there is a sense that we only truly 'own' an action if we consciously decide to take it. We would be much more scathing of someone who thought through an evil action in detail, than of someone who acted in a moment of madness.
Gladwell does actually touch on this notion of ownership, and who we feel ourselves to be, when he points out that a round package actually will make us rate ice cream as tasting better than it would in a square package. He correctly points out that it's hard to really justify why we would consider this as less relevant to the 'taste', to the experience of the ice cream, than, say, bigger chocolate chips. There is indeed a hard truth that we aren't the simple rational beings we think we are, and while this is an area worthy of much more discussion, I think it still doesn't take away from the value of trying to be such beings. Rational deliberation might not be the approach that always produces the best action but will consistently produce the most defensible ones. So while recognizing the need to factor in our gut reactions, I would be very wary of over-reliance, even if this reduces the advantage that can sometimes be gained from them.
Finally, while it probably isn't a major factor, it does I think merit saying that the very fact that this powerful mechanism is unconscious means we need to be careful in saying what really arose from it alone. So, in the opening example about the statue that 'didn't look right', all the experts said they felt misgivings from the start - from their first 'gut reactions'. But this is them recalling these 'gut' events later, and surely then there is at least some risk that the very rationalizing impulse Gladwell criticizes elsewhere, was also playing a role here?
Daniel Dennett and others have discussed conscious awareness as being something that might be retrospectively applied, and involve 'filling in' as the current situation requires. So for example we might suddenly tune in to a conversation when our name is heard, and be aware of the the entire preceding sentance, but in fact what was said before our name popped up would have not been in our consciousness otherwise. I.e. It seems to have been almost pulled into our consciousness afterwards, and only once we realized it was about us . I suspect there is room for something similar happening with these recalled first impressions : there might have been various subconcious ideas bubbling away, which were only later, perhaps with the overlay and product of some conscious thinking, then woven into the final narrative. I'm not trying to discount the fact that these experts probably did have gut pattern recognition which picked up on something being wrong, but to be consistent we also need to allow for the possibiliy of some element of 'storytelling' being present here as well.
So, overall another fascinating book, but one I think which requires some caveats and qualifications before taking fully on board. Like it or not, we need to acknowledge and appreciate blink thinking in our lives. However we need to harnass and tame it, not let it carry us away.
Links to related Scientific American articles
Does falling in love make us more creative?
How fantasies effect focus
Rapid thinking makes people happy
Of two minds when making a decision?
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