The great thing about vacations is that you can read a book in a day without the constant interruptions of computers and telephones. Bali is a great place to get away from it all and I read Blink in about 10 hours. It’s a great book and here are a few of the insights I found.
- Decisions made very quickly can be just as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately
- Learn how to trust your instincts and when to be wary of them
- Snap judgements can be educated and controlled.
Thin Slices
Gladwell crams his book with examples and he introduces an idea of “thin slices” - small periods of time that can accurately forecast future outcomes. The example of John Gottman and his work with married couples was interesting. Gottman would predict with a 95% accuracy if a couple would be together 15 years later by analysing two hours of video tape of them having a conversation. Even when the video clip was shortened to 15 minutes, Gottman still had a very high prediction rate.
Snap Decisions
Gladwell found that experts (and people in general) cannot explain what they are doing accurately. He quotes a tennis coach Mr Maier as saying that “people are ignorant of things that affect their judgment but rarely feel ignorant”. Gladwell recommends we learn to say “I don’t know” more often.
Priming
No surprise to anyone who has studied NLP: words affect behaviour. And the shorter the time to make a decision, the harder it is for us to control our “associations” with words ie our prejudices. Not only do words affect us but also size, shape, color, sex and appearance. This explains why companies invest so much in packaging and naming products. To take one of the tests mentioned in the book see here.
Gladwell gives fascinating studies around this on improv comedy, the Pepsi Challenge and mind reading. A study from Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman found that the face has 43 action units which control 10,000 possible facial expressions of which 3,000 are meaningful. This study was used by John Gottman when he watched the videos of his married couples talking. He found that certain (almost unnoticeable) expressions can convey contempt, criticism and disgust which was often at the root of unhappy couples.
Gladwell also cities an example of how when we run out of time to make a decision (often under pressure), we become “mind-blind”. This leads to us missing important visual clues - much like autistic people - which results in wrong conclusions. One way to overcome this is to slow down our heart beat. Take a few good breathes before we act on our impulses.
This is another easy-to-read book and it’s worth a skim through if you have not already read it. See more at Malcolm Gladwell’s blog here.
Latest Comments
RSS