Speed Thinking: A Review of 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell

Published in the New Scientist: 12 February 2005 issue 2486

Paul Marsden on how to seize the moment

Suffering from information overload? Well here’s the cure. You need to ‘thin-slice’. Thin-slicing is a neat cognitive trick that involves taking a narrow slice of data, just what you can capture in the blink of an eye, and letting your intuition do the work for you. This is the prescription of Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, the new popular psychology book from Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the cult business bestseller, The Tipping Point.

Blink introduces us to the power of thin-slicing by way of example. Take the ‘Love Lab’ at Washington University, where psychologist John Gottman has been thin-slicing the way couples interact since the early 1980s. In no more than 15 minutes of mere observation, Gottman can predict with 90% accuracy whether a couple will be together in 15 years. Or consider how an art expert recently ‘thin-sliced’ a 2500 year-old Greek statue in the blink of an eye and was able to tell it was a fake. Or the retired soldier whose thin-slicing intuition can outwit the super-computers of the US Armed Forces.

But the great thing about thin-slicing, argues Gladwell, is that we can all do it, especially when it come to thin-slicing each other. Evolution has honed our social intelligence, allowing us ‘read’ people accurately based on fleeting first impressions – which is why the current trend of speed dating might actually be a good idea. In fact, we don’t even need to actually meet our potential future partners in the flesh; just a quick peek in their bedrooms is enough to accurately guess their key personality traits.

Blink draws from cognitive psychology to explain how our powers of thin-slicing intuition have nothing to do with the supernatural, and everything to do with our naturally evolved ‘adaptive unconsciousness’. Our conscious mind is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg and what we feel as intuition is really the result of unconscious rapid cognition, fast and frugal information processing that goes on subliminally. Thin-slicing harnesses this powerful adaptive unconsciousness, allowing us to make smart decisions based on minimal information and minimal deliberation.

Ironically, Blink only falters in its convincing argument when we thin-slice it, taking it as an unqualified celebration of intuition over critical thinking. In fact, it is nothing of the kind, and Gladwell illustrates how reacting intuitively to a situation can have disastrous consequences. For example, he recounts how an undercover police team recently thin-sliced an ambiguous situation in the Bronx, panicked and shot an innocent man 41 times.   The problem with thin-slicing, Gladwell correctly explains, is that it uses contextual cues, internal stereotypes and even prejudice to tell us what to do.

So, to thin-slice or not to thin-slice, that is the question. Unfortunately, Blink does not provide us with a clear answer. Gladwell hints that ultimately we should only rely on thin-slicing when our intuition has been honed by experience and training. But, he goes on to suggest, this is not as onerous as it might seem; a mere 30 minutes of training with the experts back at the Love Lab will have you predicting with 80% accuracy, and in the blink of an eye, whether couples will remain together. However, the joy of Blink is not in the final message that listening to experts instead of our own untrained intuition is a good idea, but in the intellectual adventure Gladwell takes us on to get there. Doing what he does best, Gladwell accompanies us on an exhilarating roller-coaster ride through the latest highlights of cognitive psychology, making the science of mind exciting and relevant to all those who have one. ‘Blink’ deserves to be the success that it will certainly become.

Dr Paul Marsden is a research psychologist at the London School of Economics

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