Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell
I like the writing style of Malcom Gladwell. With enchanting short real-life stories and fascinating anecdotes, he takes you right into the book, to a different world where you are a student who is observing and studying the behavior of the people in different parts of the world, effortlessly moving to and fro through different periods of time.
INTRODUCTION - The Statue That Didn’t Look Right
- Fast and Frugal
- The Internal Computer
- A Different and Better World
This chapter tells the story of a kouros that was purchased by Paul Getty museum. The museum authorities had certified it as legitimate after over 2 years of research. But during the opening, some art historians and other experts ‘felt’ that it was fake by just looking at it.
In the first two seconds of looking — in a single glance — they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds.
The chapter lays a foundation for what the book is about and is a very engaging introduction to keep you from putting the book down.
ONE - The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way
- The Love Lab
- Marriage and Morse Code
- The Importance of Contempt
- The Secrets of the Bedroom
- Listening to Doctors
- The Power of the Glance
The chapter starts with the story of a couple in their twenties - Bill & Susan - who go to the University of Washington to visit the laboratory of a psychologist named John Gottman. They talk about their dog and Gottman videotapes the conversation for 15 minutes. Gottman and team then assign a SPAFF code to every second of the couple’s interaction. [SPAFF code assigns a number to every emotion - Disgust is 1, contempt is 2, anger is 7, defensiveness is 10 .. and so on]. Gottman has proven that he got 95% success of predicting whether a marriage will endure or not by using 1 hour of video and 90% success by 15 minutes.
To make an accurate prediction about something as serious as the future of a marriage indeed, to make a prediction of any sort — it seems that we would have to gather a lot of information and in as many different contexts as possible. But John Gottman has proven that we don’t have to do that at all.
He goes further to say that of all the emotions in the SPAFF code, he can find out much about a couple by just focusing on what he calls the “Four Horsemen”: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Of these 4, contempt is the most important of them all. Criticism is good in a relationship but contempt is very bad.
..presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.
Then he talks about doctors who get sued vs who don’t and about the research that was done by studying hundreds of recorded conversations between doctors and patients. It is not the doctors with less degrees or qualifications who get sued but mostly the ones that don’t talk much to patients.
He also talks about how some people are able to make judgments with just a glance. Brian Grazer knew that Tom Hanks was a star material at the very first meeting !
TWO - The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions
- Primed for Action
- The Storytelling Problem
The chapter starts with the story of Vic Braden, a top tennis coach who could predict when a player would make a double fault. Double faults are rare but he could almost always predict them. But he was unable to explain how he was able to do it. Gladwell goes on to say that snap judgements happen so fast that our conscious mind cannot grasp all the infomration that was used in that instant to arrive at the judgement. When we try to break the process down to explain, we fail to express clearly the thought process that went behind. He then talks about a priming experiment where when a group of students were ‘primed’ by telling them a set of words like “rude”, “bold”, “disturb” ..etc, their behavior was different from another set of students who were primed with different set of pleasant words. Wow! What we listen to matters so much.
Then he talks about the ‘Speed dating’ experiment done by Iyengar and Fisman from Columbia. When someone said they liked another, the researchers would ask them to explain the reason they cannot. In fact, what the participants said they liked differed from what they actually liked. For e.g, someone said they like people who are intelligent and sincere but they end up choosing someone who is attractive and funny but not particularly sincere or smart at all !
He goes on to say that it happens because people are not able to open the locked door - to access the subconscious that made the snap judgement.
THREE - The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall For Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men
- The Dark Side of Thin Slicing
- Blink in Black and White
- Taking Care of the Customer
- Spotting the Sucker
- Think About Dr. King
This chapter was a bit of a ‘reality check’. Until this point, we are in complete awe of the power of snap judgements, thin slicing ..etc and everything comes crashing down in this chapter. It is like someone saying - “listen to your intuition” and the moment you are prepared to do that, someone says “intuition is bad because we are swayed by our prejudices and what we have been exposed to”. The author then gives a series of word associations with European vs African American and Men vs Women. The exercise was interesting.
He then talks about and extra ordinarily successful salesman named