Maddenation
Blink
I was interested in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, as soon as I heard about it. It’s about snap judgments being better than we think; often excellent, but difficult to explain. It’s about judging a book by its cover and being right. It’s about using your gut to make decisions and not having to do your homework. Well, maybe that last point is taking it a bit too far.
The book is a great collection of anecdotes that make you say, “Hmm, that’s interesting.” For example, Gladwell begins with a story about art critics and scientists trying to determine the authenticity of Kouros, nude statues of youthful males from antiquity. In one case, the Getty museum paid a great deal for a kouros that many experts determined was a fake seconds after laying eyes on it. How they did it is unclear, and probably their conclusion isn’t fully accepted, but Gladwell uses this as an example of how years of careful study care train the mind to make complex decisions and judgments extremely rapidly.
Another example (kind of scary) is a professor who made video tapes of young couples and then trained his graduate students to determine with great precision, after a few minutes viewing the tapes, whether or not they would still be married (or together) 15 years hence. Other examples are compelling. Gladwell mentions birders who can often identify a rare bird with a quick glance. A tennis coach can tell when a player is about to commit a double fault, but doesn’t know how he knows. All of this is called “thin slicing,” wherein the mind takes a brief “slice” of a larger event and makes an immediate and sometimes remarkably astute judgment about the whole. But there are problems.
Gladwell, in his attempt to synthesize and understand his own data, presents counter examples that seem to blow his conclusions out of the water. For example, he cites a doctor in a Chicago hospital (I think the one on which the series ER is based) who created a simple computer program that did better in diagnosing potential heart attack victims than individual doctors, even when the doctors ordered and evaluated more tests. He also points out numerous examples of consumer products or hit TV shows that nobody though would be good, but developed over time. He also discussed the “Pepsi challenge” in which Pepsi consistently beat Coke in taste tests, causing Coke to develop (and later withdraw) “New coke,” a sweeter version of the classic beverage. Apparently the answer is quite simple. People prefer sweetness in the short sips that comprise the taste test, but if they drink the whole can (or several) over a longer period of time, they prefer Coke. So Coke lost the taste tests, but kept it’s market share. In cases like this, I expected Gladwell to introduce people who “knew” the answer right away by applying their “thin slicing” skills, but this didn’t happen. Apparently thin slicing only works some of the time, for unknown reasons.
Gladwell also discusses other disturbing cases in depth, like the Amadou Diallo case (also now a Bruce Springsteen song) out of New York where a handful of police officers fired 41 shots into and around a young black man because they thought he was armed and dangerous. The truth was (as near as we can tell, given Amadou’s death) he was probably just scared and confused. The police officers, who are trained to make quick decisions about using deadly force, didn’t recognize the “signs” that would have told them Diallo was not a threat. Again, maybe some officers could have correctly “read” Diallo’s expressions and body language and avoided the tragedy, but these guys didn’t. Somehow I don’t believe reading Gladwell’s book would have helped them.
Later in the book, Gladwell contradicts his earlier thesis by saying that people “need time” to recognize the clues they need to make good judgments. So much for the “blink” response. So much for his “theory.” Overall, the book is an interesting read because of the examples he has dug up. Like so many other books being hyped these days, it doesn’t deliver when it comes to correctly analyzing and explaining the phenomenon it’s describing.
Dad • Reviews • 06/12/05 • 0 comments
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