Book Summary: Blink

Our mind is capable of coming to conclusions without even telling us it has. Layered within our cognition is a superpower which makes fast and intuitive decisions. Just blink and you miss it! In this post, we distil the key insights from Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink’.  

Let’s think about thinking for a bit. (Very Meta!) How do we usually think? We see facts, compare them with experience, take our time and decide. It is deliberate… and time consuming. But sometimes life hurls situations at us which we need to deal with immediate reactions. There are also situations where hours upon hours of thinking and studying over a dilemma leads nowhere. We’re faced with a dead end in terms of solutions. That’s when your superpower kicks in.
You see, there is also a part of us that requires far less input and calls the shots instantly. Think about it. What is making you read this right now? Was it a premeditated analysis or a good feeling which came from ‘the spur of the moment’?  This is called the ‘Adaptive Unconscious’. However, it has a catch. This superpower is mostly hidden and it needs some coaxing.
In a world that associates quality with time, we trust conscious decision making. But the cryptic signals that your unconscious sends are also powerful decision-making tools.  Sometimes, do judge the book by its cover.

THIN-SLICING

What makes the unconscious so powerful is its ability to ‘thin-slice’ i.e. find patterns and correlations from very narrow slices of experience. Thin-slicing is everywhere — in sports, hiring, even in making predictions. Tone, Facial Cues, Pauses, and Diction have more impact than Grammatical Syntax. This is an example of thin-slicing. How we interpret things can change our entire behaviour.

Like all things, thin-slicing seeks out relevance and filters everything else. It seeks out the slightest of changes almost instantly and gives us the results. The reason why it is so powerful is because everybody does it. Within all our brains is a magnificent processor which has filtered some of the most important factors of decision-making. And we all use it voluntarily and involuntarily. Especially when logical and analytical tools fail to show us the complete picture, the gut comes in with an entirely different perspective. It helps you become bold.


Gladwell uses the ‘Getty Kouros’ as an example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty_kouros

So far we have talked about the power of going with the gut, but doing this has pitfalls that anyone who relies on this technique should be wary of.

PRIMING AND STORYTELLING

People usually know what their gut says; but it’s a lot more difficult to know why it says something. This tendency can cause us to get affected by things we don’t even perceive actively. This is called Priming.

Not understanding what is behind the locked door can sometimes lead us to believe something and do something completely different. This is why our opinions are more subjective than objective, and makes us prone to fall for narratives. Whatever our get gives us, we mould into a story of our own-which might or might not be accurate. And can lead to narrative bias!

Because our adaptive unconscious is so powerful, when something goes in there; it has a tendency to stick. This can lead to us becoming stereotypical and even discriminating. Be careful of such harmful tendencies and deliberately override them.

HOW TO THIN-SLICE THE RIGHT WAY?

Your unconscious feeds on your experiences. So shape your experiences. Think of it like basketball. You can't predict what situations will arise in a match, but you can still practise shooting, dribbling, and defending!

Remember, there is nothing inherently good or bad about either way of thinking. At the end of the day, it all depends on carving a fine balance to aid better decision making, and being aware of how our mind works.

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