Blink

This is my third by Malcolm Gladwell, and it was fantastic, better in some ways than the other two. As I've said before, there's good reason he's such a wildly successful non-fiction writer - no one can string together intriguing stories to make a point better than him.

Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Noble Prize for Economics, said in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that Gladwell's Blink was able to distinguish when to trust immediate responses, and when not to. I can't think of a better endorsement. If you want to better understand how the mind works and when you trust your knee-jerk immediate responses, not to mention implicit bias at work everywhere, read this book. It is wonderful!

In particular, he looks at implicit bias in race and gender interactions and closes by describing a police shooting along with the revolution in classical music by adding a screen for auditions. His conclusions seem commonplace now (it is a 12 year old book!), but his argument felt reasoned and unbiased. I plan on reading others of his. ( )

It was interesting, but I felt like I didn't learn enough to apply much of it. Maybe I spaced my reading out to far. Maybe I didn't pay close enough attention. ( )

The thesis is that intuition is much quicker at arriving at a correct decision than logic is, and may even be more accurate. However, it also get into how intuition can lead a person astray. (because of the prejudices based on stereotypes.)

The book goes into marketing success & failures. Finally on page 179 he gets into something different, something that explains an essential feature: "The first impression of experts are different. ... it is really only experts who are reliably able to account for their reactions." (p 179)

"Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret -- and decode -- what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions. It's a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to the a sense of how their mind works." (p 183)

"Much of our understanding of mind reading comes from two remarkable scientists, a teacher and his pupil: Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. Tomkins was the teacher. ... and was the author of Affect Imagery, consciousness, a four-volume work so den`se that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant." (p197-198)

"Ekman and Friesen decided, then and there, to create a taxonomy of facial expressions." (p 201)

"Ekman and Friesen ultimately assembled all these combinations and the rules for Reading and interpreting them -- into the Facial Action Coding System, of FACS, and wrote them up in a five- hundred page document. It is a strangely riveting work..." (p 204)

Section "3. The Naked Face" in chapter 6 "... he makes an even bolder claim... and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind." (p 206)

"What we discovered is that expression alone is sufficient to create marked change in the autonomic nervous system." (p 206)

I expected the book to end with a few chapters on actions that a person can take to improve their use of intuitive (subconscious) decision making, but it didn't. The closest it came was to say that recognition of facial emotional expression was greatly improved by watching a (half hour?) video training course.

It did have a chapter about policemen making errors of judgement that are cured by slowing down, and claming that we are more likely to make such errors when adrenalin speeds up the HR to 170, and when we only have an extremely short time to make a judgement. As I recall, he put the optimal HR somewhere around 140 or perhaps a bit lower. ( ) ( )

We saw Malcolm Gladwell when he came to give a talk at U dub. It was a fascinating talk, and this is a fascinating book.

3.5 *

This is Malcolm Gladwell's second book after [b:The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|2612|The Tipping Point How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference|Malcolm Gladwell|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473396980s/2612.jpg|2124255] and the second book of his I read in the space of a couple of weeks. Unsurprisingly, there are similarities in Gladwell's approach to his themes. He starts with an arresting anecdote, which he uses to introduce his subject. Then, after setting out the elements of his thesis, he addresses them one by one in the ensuing chapters, illustrating his points with intriguing examples, stories and references to psychological experiments.

In many ways, Gladwell's second book is even more ambitious than "The Tipping-Point". In the latter work, he sought to explain "cultural/social epidemics" or what makes a particular idea or product suddenly popular. In this book, he not only tries to explain what goes on in our minds when we make "snap judgments", but, as declared in the introduction "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".

After reading the introduction, one would surely be forgiven for expecting this to be a "self-help book", a guide to harnessing the power of "thin slicing" or "making a little knowledge going a long way". The problem is that the book is nothing of the sort. Its initial message seems to be that "snap judgments" are great: art experts recognise forgeries when all evidence points to the contrary, a particular psychologist is able to predict the longevity of a marriage just by watching moments of a conversation between a couple - the list of such amazing examples just goes on. However, most of the book is then spent describing what can go wrong with snap judgments. And an awful lot can go wrong, apparently. Unconscious bias affects even the fairest of subjects, stress can turn us momentarily "autistic", some matters just cannot be assessed through "first impressions". The conclusion seems to be that there are no magic solutions to these shortcomings - except becoming experts in our respective fields, being conscious of our unconscious bias (and consciously trying to overcome it) and training to either avoid or get used to stressful situations.

There's no denying Gladwell's flowing and entertaining style and I will treasure some of the insights contained in the book (I was particularly struck by the evidence for "unconscious bias"). However, at the end of this read I felt somewhat let down.

Thinking without thinking? Think again... ( )