Has anyone read the latest by the author of The Tipping Point. It’s called Blink. I just finished it and I thought it was fascinating with a really profound thesis. Anybody else? Criticism?
I didn’t actually read it. I just glanced at a few pages and made an intuitive snap judgment that what he describes is an interesting phenomenon but it probably cannot be harnessed or taught.
Haven’t read it, but several months ago I attended a lecture he gave where he read the excerpt about Red Team v. Blue Team. Fascinating case study, but it was really more about failures in the chain of command and the need to trust people at the scene instead of overruling them from a distant location.
The people on location always have a better grasp of what’s going on.
I almost missed this because the name Gladwell didn’t catch my attention without Malcolm in front of it. Can you give a short view of what his thesis is in this one? I generally like his style, but I’ve only read excerpts or magazine articles of his and never his full books.
His thesis is that the extremely fast (snap) judgements that our unconcious minds make can be very good judgements, even when made about very complex subjects. Often, he argues, our intuitive judgements are more accurate that our deliberated judgements. Furthermore, this sort of spontaneous judgement is a skill that he feels can be trained.
He offers some very interesting examples. One study involved two decks of cards. Each card either gave the participant money or took money away. One deck was high risk, although it paid out big, it also took lots of money and paid out rarely. The other deck was low risk–small constant payouts. Participants’ heart rates, palm sweatiness, etc. were monitored. After only 10 cards, participants showed a stress response when they drew from the high risk deck, but it took 70 cards for them to be able to verbalize what was going on. The arguments goes that their unconcious judgement about the high risk deck was right, and was right much sooner than their concious judgement.
He offers a plethora of such studies and a few very interesting anecdotes. Many of which involve judgements about considerably more complex issues than probability.
I’ll have to check it out. I’ve noticed this often happens with me in strategy games (I play a lot of online Diplomacy). Most times if I go more or less with my “gut”, then I’ll do well. If I overanalyze I often find that I’ve missed something. One would expect the opposite to occur.
Is there any hypothesis on the “why” of this?
Yes. I don’t have the book in front of me because I already lent it to a friend, but IIRC, Gladwell argues that deliberative judgements suffer from two main problems: first, there is too much information–it is difficult to conciously decide which information is vital when (we’re easily fooled by overthinking and rationalization); second, a lot of information is hidden from concious deliberation (many facial expressions, for example, are not something that most of us conciously process but certainly do unconciously process).
It’s something like the way an autistic person senses the world compared to a non-autistic person. The autistic person will often take in all the information in an environment or situation and be unable to discern which parts of it are important or relevant. A non-autistic person will generally zero in on the relevant information and ignore the rest. This is something like how our concious minds make judgements compared to our unconcious minds; the latter zeros in on the relevant information much more efficiently and easily.
I read the book on a recent (incredibly long) layover–not my best read for comprehension situation, so I may have missed stuff.
I think the “why” is that when we analyze situations, we too often get bogged down in irrelevant information. An example was given of doctors trying to diagnose whether individuals showing up at an ER were having heart attacks or not. The relevant factors include the physical symptoms present. Irrelevant factors include the individual’s general risk factors (overweight, high stress job, age, gender, etc.). Those irrelevant factors suggest that the person has a higher risk of having a heart attack at some point–but don’t matter so much in the evaluation of whether or not they’re having a heart attack right now.
The book also described situations where making a snap judgement was absolutely the wrong thing to do (an example of a police shooting was used).
It did include some interesting anecdotes and studies. Also, the author’s theories behind why the police shooting went as bad as it did made the book worth reading by itself.
Where the book failed (at least for me reading it in the airport) is that it didn’t give a clear explanation of when you should trust your snap judgements and when you shouldn’t. I was kind of left with the idea that when snap judgements are good they’re very, very good, and when they’re bad they’re horrid. Doesn’t help me much.
Damn and blast! I made the snap decision to post without hitting preview and missed the fact that Zhao had already explained the “why” better than I did.
I think Gladwell is saying that while there are situations where snap judgements fail, this kind of failure can be overcome through training and experience (hence his example of the cop that didn’t shoot the perp because he was experienced enough to be relaxed and trained enough to have cover so he could take that extra second).
Snap judgements seem to fail when there is unconcious bias involved, the goal is to eliminate that possibility (for example, by having symphony auditioners perform behind a screen). But I think you’re right that it isn’t clear exactly when one ought to use deliberative judgement versus snap judgement. To be fair, I think the point of this book is simply to convince you that snap judgements can be just as good or better than deliberation. I suppose the next step is figuring out when and where they ought to be used to the exclusion of deliberation.
I’m reading ‘Blink’ now. Malcolm Gladwell has been one of my favorite authors for years. I would read some article in The New Yorker, and just enjoy it so much. Eventually I figured out that they were all written by the same guy.
I went to his presentation at Town Hall Seattle last month, and he gave an excellent talk from the book. He focused on the Diallo shooting – somber stuff, but really powerful. I got both books there, and had them autographed.
This week the same lecture series (here) is presenting Roger Penrose, author of ‘Laws of the Universe’. I read his book ‘The Emperor’s new Mind’ some years ago, and I’m looking forward to this talk.
I’m waiting for paperback (and enough spare time to read for leisure!), but I loved The Tipping Point.
I haven’t read Blink yet – it’s on my library holds list – but Slate featured an interesting discussion between Gladwell and James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. They talk about the implications of both books. Definitely worth reading.