Review: Blink!
Noting how much I enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s TED conference speech on Howard Moscowitz and his marketing discoveries, my parents got me a copy of Blink, in which Gladwell examines the human capacity to make good snap judgments. I finished it this morning, and it was a very good read.
Gladwell begins with a remarkable tale about the Met buying an ancient statue. It’s condition was so good as to arouse suspicions about its authenticity, so the museum employed a battery of tests to check. Authenticity validated, the Met bought the statue, and proceeded to invite art experts to study its artistic and historical merits. Contrary to the lab experts’ findings, the art experts instantly decided the statue was a fake. Further investigation proved them correct. What really catches Gladwell’s attention, however, is the way that the art experts couldn’t identify just what had led them to their independent and unanimous conclusion; it just “didn’t feel right.” Only after they’d made up their minds did they begin looking for specific tell-tales, and when they did, they selected different tell-tales. Something was going on that made unreasoned, snap decisions more reliable than exacting analysis.
Blink studies this phenomenon. Gladwell goes on to describe a series of situations in which it appears, some anecdotal, some measured in psychology experiments. Some, like one man’s ability to predict a marriage’s success or failure after watching twenty minutes of a married couple’s conversation, are surprising; others, like the disasters of a military planning room that place too much trust in calculated battle plans, are old stories whose lessons we continue to forget.
But just about the point where you’re ready to chuck reasoning entirely and shoot from the hip for the rest of your life, Gladwell turns around and describes situations in which intuition can be deeply, dangerously wrong, as was the snap decision by the police officers who shot Amadou Diallo, or the instantaneous estimate a car salesman makes of a customer’s shopping acumen. Although we can make surprisingly accurate decisions on the basis of very few variables, they have to be the right variables, and which variables are useful and which are misleading is a question that often defies our intuition, or our built-in survival instincts. This turnaround distinguishes Gladwell from the business and marketing gurus with whom he shares book store shelf space. Gladwell has the wisdom and honesty to examine the ways his thesis can go wrong, instead of selling it as a cure-all.
He concludes with several lessons to be learned from good and bad snap decisions:
1. Good snap decisions are grounded in long experience. We have to prepare to be spontaneous, learning ahead of time which variables are the right ones to pay attention to.
2. Good snap decisions depend on a favorable environment. If we are anxious, survival reflexes can override mature intuition; if we try to explain our decision afterwards, incomplete reason can override a sound decision; if we are exposed to the wrong variables as well as the right ones, we can take in the wrong cues. We should take pains to create environments conducive to good intuitive decisions.
3. Snap decisions operate best on a collection of many variables, whose values and relative weights are hard to estimate in the available time. When we have the luxury of a complete analysis, we should take advantage of it.
As someone interested in how we think, I found the book fascinating. I would have enjoyed a heavier volume, with even more examples, but that isn’t his purpose. Rather than seeking to prove intuition is better than reason, he merely wishes to raise the possibility that our intuition is far, far better than years of education may have led us to believe. Although his claim could be built on a few cherry-picked anecdotal cases in which intuition surprisingly overcomes reason, drawn from a sea of cases in which reason works just as we would expect, his attention to how the process can go wrong suggests he is playing as fair as he can. An additional perspective on the same phenomenon would be very welcome. While waiting for it to arrive, treat yourself to this one.