Gladwell refers to our brain's ability to make these impromptu decision as thin slicing, a term from psychologist John Gottman at the University of Washington, who has done extensive research on married couples by studying their facial expressions. Gottman relies on the work of Drs. Tomkins and Ekman, who discovered that our personal interactions are laced with microexpressions that expose our true feelings. They painstakingly codified the basic microexpressions and their combinations while divining their true meaning. Microexpressions are just one portal into thin slicing and helps us to understand our unconscious analytics machinery.
As noted in On Intelligence, one of the principal functions of our brain is to identify patterns in the stream of information fed to it from our primary sensory organs -- sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell -- and our secondary senses -- balance, acceleration, temperature, kinestheics, pain, time, and more! This pattern-matching capability operates in fractions of a second, below the conscious level. We form opinions on matters and often are unable to understand how we arrived at them. blink helps us become better at figuring that out!
Some examples of thin slicing from blink:
- A kouros statue from the 6th century B.C. was sold to the Getty museum in New York for $10M over the objections of several art experts that the statue was a fake. Fourteen months of investigation and scientific research on the statue preceded the sale, but some time afterward, it was confirmed that the kouros was indeed the result of an elaborate hoax. It just didn't "look right" to the experts -- but why?
- Vic Braden, one of the world's top tennis coaches, inadvertently realized that he could predict when a professional tennis player was about to double fault in a match, male or female, live or on TV, known or unknown to him! His accuracy was uncanny: typically 19/20 or 20/20 correct predictions. For years he tried to uncover the source of his uncanny ability, but was unable to understand how he did it. It was driving him crazy, literally keeping him up at night! Through the use of high-speed video analysis, he was able to uncover his brain's ability to thin slice the visual input.
- Warren Harding was discovered by Harry Dougherty, a brilliant political analyst, in 1899 and shepherded him to the White House as the 29th President of the United States. By all accounts, Harding was the perfect candidate: tall, handsome, athletic, and confident. Harding died in office and by all acounts, may have been the worst candidate to ever hold that high office. Experts and non-experts alike failed to make the right decision! This was a case of thin slicing gone wrong!
- Paul Van Riper retired from a very successful career as an officer in the Marine Corps. Van Riper was chosen by JFCOM to lead the opposition forces in a war gaming exercise known as the Millennium Challenge. Millennium Challenge was designed to provide the Pentagon with experience in fighting wars in the new millennium -- the unconventional warfare of the future, driven by technology and information, modeling and simulation of every conceivable military, economic, political, societal, cultural, and institutional possibility. Acronyms for new techniques were rampant. Hundreds of military personnel participated in the exercise over several weeks, pitting the new technology against a battle-hardened field commander who relied on instinct and training for the split second decisions needed in combat. In the end, sixteen U.S. ships lay at the bottom of the Persian Gulf; had this been a real war, 20,000 American troops would have died before firing a shot. Van Riper's seasoned decision-making process allowed his intuition or right brain to function unimpeded in the heat of battle while the overly analytical approach adopted by the Pentagon obstructed this process.
Gladwell studied a number of experts of various stripes, all of which were very interesting. One of my favorites sets of experts were Gail Civille and Judy Heylmun -- professional tasters for the food industry. They could not only identify the ingredients in packaged food, but could often identify the particular factory in which it was manufactured! They used a fifteen point scale to identify over ninety attributes of appearance, flavor, and texture. What's commercially interesting, and interesting to the premise of this book, is the Degree of Difference (DOD) ten-point scale that indicates how different one product is from another, even within the same category of food such as potato chips. The significance is that the buying public will not be able to discern the difference between products if their DOD is low; hence buying decisions will be driven by packaging and brand -- don't bother trying to improve the taste! The key to their blink-ability is that they can understand the conscious basis for their impressions, and recognize the difference between those formed by someone of their expertise vs. those of ordinary people -- very important to the advertising industry.
Overall, the book is outstanding, both entertaining and exceptionally informative. You may need to reread it to get the full benefit, focusing on the meaning behind the cryptic chapter titles, which help to uncover several sub-themes that recur through the book. You will be rewarded with a better understanding of how the majority of our opinions are formed and the basis for most of our actions -- decisions we reach in a blink. You will hopefully learn to question those reactions that need further investigation and better understand the importance of honing your experiences to blink better in the future. Advertising executive, political hopeful, or just an average Joe, you need to read blink!
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