Drunk & Retired

In finished reading Blink the other night. Here’re some of my notes/ideas from it:

The Big Idea

The “point” of the book seems summed up towards the end by this sentence:

If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. (pg. 253)

By “rapid cognition,” Gladwell means what we might call a “gut instinct. That unconscious decision making that happens in the blink of an eye.

The first part of the book introduced this idea, and proves that using your split second thinking — instead of studied, reasoned out rational thinking — works well in many cases. The point being, you shouldn’t throw out your guy thinking in and be a head-thinking 24/7.

Thinking Too Much

“As they received more information,” Oskamp concluded, “their certainty about their own decisions became entirely out of proportion to the actual correctness of those decisions.” (pg. 139-140)

Indeed, many of the stories in Blink illustrate that it’s possible to think too much and completely derail your real desires and thoughts. In several examples, two groups of experts in some field (doctors, or psychologists as in the above quote) are asked to analyze a problem/person and figure out what’s wrong. The first group is given a very limited set of data and only a few minutes to decide. The second group is given unlimited data and unlimited time.

Counterintuitively, the group with less data is usually just as successful as the group with more data. I’m conflating several different stories in the book together, but the point in each was: getting more data doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll make better decisions.

Another good example of this, when it comes to process and large scale decision making, was the story of the US military’s recent war games. They picked a retired general, Van Ripper, to head up the “enemy” force. The military had drawn up all sorts of strategy and process: the kind of thing where if you wanted to launch cruise missiles, you had to go through a 10 point check list to ensure that you were doing a quality launch.

Van Ripper, on the other hand, threw out all the procedures and formalized plans. His team did a lot of upfront planning, but once they started the war games, the emphasised rapid thinking and decision making without reasoning out every single move in a meeting or by going through a checklist.

As you can guess, Van Ripper kicked the military’s ass. They actually had to change the rules of the game to beat him. Instead of admitting that their methods were too overloaded, they changed the rules!

In this instance again, the point isn’t that complete gut-think is what’s called for. The point is that you can get lost in a pile of too much information and loose the game to someone who takes more of a middle path.

Training Your Gut

This seems to make a strong case for gut-think. The problem is, you have to train your gut to think. Out of the box, so to speak, we’re not as good as gut-thinking as we could be. But, as we gain experience, training our “rapid cognition” facilities, that rapid cognition gets better and better.

The best example in the book is about Dr. John Gottman’s couples studies, and how he’s trained himself and his students to be experts at “thin-slicing.” Thin slicing is the idea of taking extremely small samples of something — like a video of a couple talking — and drawing big conclusions — this couple will last, or they’ll break up.

Gottman has been video taping couples talking with each other for a long time. He’s watched countless hours of the tape. Over this long span of time, he’s trained himself how to spot, in even just a few seconds, tell-tale signs that a couple is not doing well. Ironically, it took him years to learn how to effectively make judgements that take seconds. Apparently, he’s very good at it though.

The point being: you can train yourself to be a good thin-slicer, but there’s probably a lot of upfront study involved. Once you get that training under your belt, it’ll be well worth it.

Priming the Mind

The last interesting thing I’ll mention is the idea of priming. The unconscious mind is extremely susceptible to being “primed,” or quickly conditioned, to think, and cause you to act, in specific ways.

One of the studies/stories to back up this idea involves a peculiar psychological test. Students are asked to to an office at the end of a hallway, and take several tests where they’re shown a list of words, and are asked to arrange them in sentences as quickly as possible. The list of words seem totally unrelated.

There’re two groups of words, of course, and thus two groups of students. The first group doesn’t exhibit any sort of change after finishing the test and walking down the hall. The second group, however, walks noticeably slower back down the hallway.

Most of the words show to the second, slower group had something to do with being old: retirement, Florida, elderly, etc. Their minds, the psychologists concluded, had been primed by those words to act old. Thus, when they walked back down the hall, they slowly shuffled down it like they’d imagine an old person would.

That sounds crazy, but it’s just one of several stories along those lines.

Then, there’s discriminatory priming. Until recently, whenever classical musicians would audition, it’d be out in the open: the conductors, or hiring panels, could see the person in plain site. People were very overt about the idea that “women can’t play classical music,” esp. “manly” instruments like the trombone or french horn. And, when women would audition, they just didn’t sound as good as the men. So, there weren’t that many women in orchestras.

Eventually, the use of a screen (between the hiring panel and thee musician) to hide the identity of the person auditioning became wide-spread. Almost instantly, the number of women who were accepted increased significantly. Indeed, in two cases related in the book, the review panel was shocked to find that the person they liked the best was a women. In one case, they actually knew the women (she was a common substitute) and had determined that she wasn’t good enough. In both cases, the women hadn’t practiced more or gotten better: the use of the screen had simply forced the review panels to focus only on the music, and not let their minds get primed by the gender of the person auditioning.

Overall: Read It

Those are just a few of the ideas and stories from the book. There’s more, of course. If you’re looking for a good non-fiction book that covers a wide array of topics and has a lot of thought-provoking ideas, I’d get yourself a copy of Blink and start reading it.

I’d say it’s definitely a must for anyone doing things like marketing, sales, product management, design, innovation, strategy, and other people- and/or idea-oriented things. I’m sure teachers would find it interesting too.

Blink is really a book about using and tending to your ability to think with your gut in addition to your mind, the second of which tends to be the mode of “thinking” we use 90% of the time. Just one or the other isn’t going to cut it: you need both.