Why think more about less

BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING

By Malcolm Gladwell

Little Brown, $25.95,

265 pages

REVIEWED BY JON WARD

Powerful men continue to fall prey to packs of bloggers — Dan Rather and Eason Jordan being the most recent — but many in the major media continue to ignore blogs.

Conservative columnist and talk radio host Hugh Hewitt recently wrote that when he mentioned how blogs were tracking Mr. Jordan’s comments that U.S. soldiers were killing journalists to two well-known news anchors, they didn’t know what he was talking about.

But why and how could people whose job it is to be in the know not be paying attention to the hottest trend in media? An editor at a major paper recently answered that question. He said he did not have enough time to read blogs.

We live in an age long on information and short on time. It is a difficult environment in which to make decisions.

Along comes Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and staff writer for The New Yorker. The premise of his new book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” is that we can be better decision-makers by thinking more about less.

“Blink” is a book about the judgments we make in the first two seconds of our encounters with people and things with our “adaptive unconscious.” Mr. Gladwell says we should trust this part of our brain more, and not because it will save us time (though it will do that).

The brain has a “decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information,” Mr. Gladwell writes. “Whenever we’re faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use that second part of our brain.”

“Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately,” he writes. But sometimes, “our instincts betray us.”

“Blink” says that we can train ourselves to have more accurate snap judgments, and more confidence in them, by improving our “thin-slicing — filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.”

We improve our thin-slicing first by thinking about what kind of situations we encounter on a regular basis. Then comes the crucial task — determining the key factors to making quick judgments in those situations. We can pinpoint factors that regularly occur which are also indicators of how we should judge people or situations or objects.

Mr. Gladwell uses the example of John Gottman, a psychology researcher at the University of Washington. Mr. Gottman has devised a coding system for analyzing interaction between couples. Using this system to analyze one hour of videotape, Mr. Gottman has been able to predict, since the 1980s and for more than 3,000 couples, whether a couple will be together in 15 years with 95 percent accuracy.

Using just 15 minutes of tape, Mr. Gottman’s accuracy goes down to a mere 90 percent success rate.

The researcher has identified major trends in relationships that are indicators as to whether a couple will survive. (For all you dying to know, Mr. Gottman says that the biggest sign of trouble is contempt for one’s spouse or lover.) The key to Mr. Gottman’s findings is that he does not ask his research subjects direct questions but rather “comes at the issue sideways.”

“He looks closely at indirect measures of how the couple is doing: the telling traces of emotion that flit across one person’s face; the hint of stress picked up in the sweat glands of the palm; a sudden surge in heart rate; a subtle tone that creeps into an exchange,” Mr. Gladwell writes.

But Mr. Gladwell also writes that we will not always fully understand the way our unconscious works, and we can make it most trustworthy by becoming experts about the thing we want to “thin-slice.”

“Blink” spends a lot of time examining how our instincts can mislead us, and what errors we can avoid in our “thin-slicing.” Many errors in our snap judgment are the result of our prejudices, writes Mr. Gladwell, who is part black. Often we have negative instinctive reactions to things that we are unfamiliar with.

Mr. Gladwell has a simple solution for the white person who struggles with prejudice towards blacks and wants to change that: Get to know more black people. “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.”

Any person with common sense would react to the example of Mr. Gottman’s couples study with skepticism: No normal person has the time to study anything that much. But Mr. Gladwell makes a simpler point. He says we should train our brains to react similar to how we train our bodies to react in athletics, by creating muscle memory.

I asked Cal Ripken once how he was able to make accurate throws so consistently, year after year, with the added stress of playing in front of so many people. The only explanation he could give is that he practiced it until the fluid motion of scooping a ground ball and throwing from shortstop to first base became second nature for his body. He didn’t have to think about it.

The way we can train our brains the same way, Mr. Gladwell says, is by spending time familiarizing ourselves with the key factors in a given situation, and then allowing ourselves to trust our reactions once we are in those situations. Part of this is analytical, but a good part is also experiential.

“How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal,” he writes.

We most regularly “thin-slice” when we are making snap judgments of other people, Mr. Gladwell avers. The last chapter addresses how we try to read other people’s minds by looking for clues on their faces and says that faces are a good source of information.

The last chapter, however, is where it becomes difficult to keep track of Mr. Gladwell’s main point. He is a cogent and skilled writer. He has done plenty of research. He uses good anecdotes that make for a fun read and the book builds momentum, but toward the end I found myself struggling to connect specific points to the main point.

Mr. Gladwell probably could have fixed this simply by reiterating his main points and summarizing more often. But his main point is a fascinating one — look for a person’s character or true personality in the brief snatches of expression that are not presented for public display. It takes practice, but a carefully attentive person can catch them.

Improving my mind-reading skills is an attractive thought. But I don’t want others doing it to me. I’ll have to go practice my poker face.

Jon Ward is a reporter for the metro desk of The Washington Times.