Blink
As is my custom upon finishing mind-blowing books, I'm going to write about Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, which is my most recent literary undertaking.
Like The Tipping Point, which I wrote about over the summer, Blink is very thought-provoking and, to say the least, utterly shocking in ways. Gladwell is a master at taking seemingly inexaminable subjects and connecting them to the human psyche. Of course, he's not really the psychologist doing all the studies, but he can connect multiple seemingly unrelated subjects and cross-examine them. For example, Gladwell discusses an expert's ability to break down video footage of married couples talking and decide, with stunning accuracy, whether that couple will stay together for 15 years. The man does this based solely on facial expressions and phrasing. Gladwell compares this trained ability to a tennis coach who has the distinct ability to know when a player is going to double fault--before the player even swings the racquet.
This is just one example, and it's a fairly easy connection to make at first. But Gladwell takes minor examples like these and connects them to major social occurrences. He discusses the breakdown of the mighty U.S. army's tactics when put up against a long-retired war hero in a simulated war game. He discusses the split-second reactions of four New York police officers who accidentally killed a non-threatening, anonymous man. He takes all these situations and links them together through his theories on the human psyche. And in the process, he reveals some stunning mental characteristics.
How are all these events connected? Through a couple of Gladwell's buzzword concepts, including what he calls "thin-slicing." Thin-slicing is basically an extension of a first impression. We take a situation, and within a matter of seconds we analyze a situation unconsciously. That's where all our impulses stem from, from the Pepsi Challenge to racial stereotyping. In some ways, it's a bad thing, of course. But in many ways, it's what makes our brains so powerful, like a human supercomputer. Without thin-slicing, we'd spend too much time thinking about things. An example Gladwell uses is of a group of firefighters who enter a house to put out a simple kitchen fire. The kitchen is at the back of the house, so the firefighters bring the hose in through the house to extinguish the relatively small fire. But after trying to put it out for a bit, it refuses to die. A small fire in a kitchen should die very quickly. But, realizing something's not right, the captain urges all the men to get out of the house as soon as possible. He didn't know exactly what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. As soon as they got out of the house, the floor on which they stood collapsed. As it turns out, the fire was in the basement, below the kitchen, and it was anything but a small fire. If the captain hadn't thin-sliced, the fire would have consumed them all.
The book has tons of great narratives like that, and they all show you what the thinking process is really like, in a very interesting way. I thin-slice every time I listen to new music, and since I'd consider myself something of a music expert (and a modest one, at that) I have faith that I'll be able to judge a song in a relatively short time, or judge an album after just a few songs. Expertise matters with thin-slicing. Brett Favre is a gun-slinger-style quarterback, but he was so good in the NFL for so long because he came prepared. He was an expert at quarterbacking and had a feel for the moment. He took chances, but they never really hurt him in his better years because he was ready for those pressure situations. Take away his offensive line, his run game, and reliable targets, and he's throwing 20+ interceptions a year. But in the right system, with the right tools, he was a great quarterback. Brett Favre, in his prime, was a master thin-slicer.
One of the most interesting parts of the book, to me, was the discussion of a survey conducted on Harvard's web site. Basically what the test does is gauge a person's immediate reaction to the goodness or badness of different demographics. For example, my curiosity was piqued and I tested myself on heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. I'm fairly progressive, supportive of gay rights, and I've never had a problem with gay people. But at the same time, I know I'm built to be somewhat homophobic coming from an Irish Catholic family and having gone to an all-boys' Catholic high school. But I was still surprised when the test told me I had a moderate automatic preference towards heterosexuals (which placed me between "strong" and "slight" preferences towards heterosexuals). I fell somewhere between the 29th and 53rd percentile of people preferring heterosexuals to homosexuals based on snap judgments, which sort of surprised me. If you're interested, they've got other tests too (race, age, disability, weight). Here's the link.
There isn't a whole lot of the book I find interesting to write about, but a lot of it makes for very interesting discussion, as I've found already. More than likely, if you get into an extended conversation with me over the next month, you'll hear me talk about this book in some way, shape, or form. I've already done it a number of times and I just got the book earlier this week. It's a very impactful, very thought-provoking book, and it's also a good page-turner. I highly recommend it.
Like The Tipping Point, which I wrote about over the summer, Blink is very thought-provoking and, to say the least, utterly shocking in ways. Gladwell is a master at taking seemingly inexaminable subjects and connecting them to the human psyche. Of course, he's not really the psychologist doing all the studies, but he can connect multiple seemingly unrelated subjects and cross-examine them. For example, Gladwell discusses an expert's ability to break down video footage of married couples talking and decide, with stunning accuracy, whether that couple will stay together for 15 years. The man does this based solely on facial expressions and phrasing. Gladwell compares this trained ability to a tennis coach who has the distinct ability to know when a player is going to double fault--before the player even swings the racquet.
This is just one example, and it's a fairly easy connection to make at first. But Gladwell takes minor examples like these and connects them to major social occurrences. He discusses the breakdown of the mighty U.S. army's tactics when put up against a long-retired war hero in a simulated war game. He discusses the split-second reactions of four New York police officers who accidentally killed a non-threatening, anonymous man. He takes all these situations and links them together through his theories on the human psyche. And in the process, he reveals some stunning mental characteristics.
How are all these events connected? Through a couple of Gladwell's buzzword concepts, including what he calls "thin-slicing." Thin-slicing is basically an extension of a first impression. We take a situation, and within a matter of seconds we analyze a situation unconsciously. That's where all our impulses stem from, from the Pepsi Challenge to racial stereotyping. In some ways, it's a bad thing, of course. But in many ways, it's what makes our brains so powerful, like a human supercomputer. Without thin-slicing, we'd spend too much time thinking about things. An example Gladwell uses is of a group of firefighters who enter a house to put out a simple kitchen fire. The kitchen is at the back of the house, so the firefighters bring the hose in through the house to extinguish the relatively small fire. But after trying to put it out for a bit, it refuses to die. A small fire in a kitchen should die very quickly. But, realizing something's not right, the captain urges all the men to get out of the house as soon as possible. He didn't know exactly what was wrong, but he knew something was wrong. As soon as they got out of the house, the floor on which they stood collapsed. As it turns out, the fire was in the basement, below the kitchen, and it was anything but a small fire. If the captain hadn't thin-sliced, the fire would have consumed them all.
The book has tons of great narratives like that, and they all show you what the thinking process is really like, in a very interesting way. I thin-slice every time I listen to new music, and since I'd consider myself something of a music expert (and a modest one, at that) I have faith that I'll be able to judge a song in a relatively short time, or judge an album after just a few songs. Expertise matters with thin-slicing. Brett Favre is a gun-slinger-style quarterback, but he was so good in the NFL for so long because he came prepared. He was an expert at quarterbacking and had a feel for the moment. He took chances, but they never really hurt him in his better years because he was ready for those pressure situations. Take away his offensive line, his run game, and reliable targets, and he's throwing 20+ interceptions a year. But in the right system, with the right tools, he was a great quarterback. Brett Favre, in his prime, was a master thin-slicer.
One of the most interesting parts of the book, to me, was the discussion of a survey conducted on Harvard's web site. Basically what the test does is gauge a person's immediate reaction to the goodness or badness of different demographics. For example, my curiosity was piqued and I tested myself on heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. I'm fairly progressive, supportive of gay rights, and I've never had a problem with gay people. But at the same time, I know I'm built to be somewhat homophobic coming from an Irish Catholic family and having gone to an all-boys' Catholic high school. But I was still surprised when the test told me I had a moderate automatic preference towards heterosexuals (which placed me between "strong" and "slight" preferences towards heterosexuals). I fell somewhere between the 29th and 53rd percentile of people preferring heterosexuals to homosexuals based on snap judgments, which sort of surprised me. If you're interested, they've got other tests too (race, age, disability, weight). Here's the link.
There isn't a whole lot of the book I find interesting to write about, but a lot of it makes for very interesting discussion, as I've found already. More than likely, if you get into an extended conversation with me over the next month, you'll hear me talk about this book in some way, shape, or form. I've already done it a number of times and I just got the book earlier this week. It's a very impactful, very thought-provoking book, and it's also a good page-turner. I highly recommend it.
posted by Kevin A. Doran at 5:03 AM
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