PDF Summary:Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

We usually think of snap judgments as lazy, superficial, and probably wrong. But are they really? In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that snap judgments can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully. Blink delves into how and why we make the gut decisions we do, when it’s unsafe to trust our guts, and what we can do to make all our snap judgments smarter, less biased, and more efficient.

In this guide, we add some structure to Gladwell’s arguments and update the research he draws on, looking at how snap judgments might work in the brain. We also give you some additional strategies for maximizing the accuracy of your snap judgments.

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Snap Judgments Are a Mystery

A further problem with snap judgments is that we don’t have a good understanding of how they work.

As Gladwell points out, we’re often unable to explain why or how we arrive at a snap judgment, even if that judgment is correct. We know something, but we don’t know how we know it, and that’s frustrating. It’s hard to trust something that you can’t explain.

Because most of us don’t feel comfortable if we don’t know exactly what made us arrive at a particular snap judgment, we tend to rationalize, or invent inaccurate explanations for our actions or thoughts.. But instead of helping us to uncover the truth, rationalizing often takes us further away from it. We don’t lie on purpose, though: We actually believe the lies that our conscious minds construct to explain the decisions of the unconscious mind.

Do Rationalizations Come from the Left Hemisphere?

Rationalizations could be a way for us to “cover up” faulty communication between brain hemispheres. Research with split-brain patients may offer some clues about how it works. Split-brain patients are people who have had their corpus callosum—the tract of nerve fibers that connects the left and right hemispheres—severed to treat severe epilepsy.

In a split-brain patient, the two hemispheres are cut off from one another. Michael Gazzaniga and colleagues investigated what happens when there’s different input to the two hemispheres of split-brain patients, for example if the right hemisphere is shown one picture and the left is shown a different picture. In split-brain patients, the hemisphere in which language is located (the left for most people) can’t access information presented to the right hemisphere. These patients can correctly identify both of the pictures they’ve been shown, but they can only explain their choice of the picture shown to the left hemisphere. So they make up a reason for their choice of the other picture that seems logical but is actually incorrect—much as we do when we rationalize.

There are two problems with rationalizing our snap judgments:

Problem #1: Rationalizing leads to inaccurate explanations of our decisions.

Gladwell discusses the Problem of the Two Ropes to demonstrate how far our rational explanations can veer from the truth. In a 1931 study, psychologist Norman Maier hung two ropes from the ceiling in a room that also contained various items of furniture and other tools. The ropes were far enough apart that if you held one rope in your hand, you couldn’t reach the other. He asked volunteers to come up with as many ways to tie the two ropes together as they could. There were three obvious solutions using the furniture and tools provided, which most people figured out fairly easily. There was also a fourth, non-obvious solution: set one of the ropes swinging, go stand next to the other, and grab the swinging rope before tying them together.

If a volunteer was having trouble producing this fourth solution, the psychologist walked across the room and casually bumped into one of the ropes, causing it to swing. The move was so subtle that volunteers’ unconscious minds picked up on the suggestion while their conscious minds didn’t. After that, most people came up with the fourth solution.

• When asked to explain how they came up with the fourth solution, volunteers said, for example, that the solution came to them when they thought of monkeys swinging in trees, they recalled something from a physics lesson, or the idea just popped into their head.

These people weren’t lying. They were just automatically producing explanations that their conscious brains found most plausible. They had no idea the psychologist had given them the answer when he bumped the rope.

Does a “Time Out” Improve Our Problem-Solving Ability?

Psychologists call the type of problem that Maier investigated an “insight problem”: a problem for which a solution presents itself seemingly out of nowhere. It’s often recommended that we take some time away from the problem to “incubate” the solution, but is this good advice? Scientists are divided on whether an incubation period is helpful. A 2011 meta-analysis of studies published between 1964 and 2007 on incubation periods and problem-solving found that the picture is complex. Incubation periods do seem to help for problems requiring divergent thinking, but less for problems with pre-set solutions. There’s also evidence that lengthening the incubation period can help in producing high-quality solutions, as can filling the incubation period with cognitively easy tasks rather than resting completely.

Problem #2: Rationalizing leads to worse decision-making and performance.

Gladwell points out that language is the primary tool of the rational mind. Using language (and therefore activating our rational minds) when a task is better completed by the unconscious mind can snuff out insights.

Think about any stranger you saw today, maybe the barista who made your morning coffee. Suppose someone asked you to describe the barista in as much detail as possible, including facial features, hair color, clothing, and jewelry.

If you had to pick this person out of a lineup, you’d do much worse after describing him or her than before. The act of describing erases the image from your mind by pulling it forward from the unconscious to the conscious.

This is verbal overshadowing. Instead of remembering what you saw, you’re remembering your description, which, due to the limits of language, will always be less accurate than your visual memory. When you explain yourself, you override the complex experience that you’re explaining. (Shortform note: Verbal overshadowing doesn’t only apply to faces. It also affects other visual memories, as well as our memories of tastes and sounds.)

The Real-World Implications of Verbal Overshadowing

There haven’t been enough studies on the implications of verbal overshadowing for the field of criminal justice. However, it seems logical that reporting a crime or providing eyewitness testimony could impair victims’ and witnesses’ memories and make their testimony less reliable. Mitigating verbal overshadowing isn’t easy, but there might be one way to diminish its effects. A 2008 study found that verbal overshadowing impacts older adults less than younger ones, in part because older adults have “higher verbal expertise.” This suggests that improving your verbal skills could lessen your susceptibility to verbal overshadowing.

How to Counter the Problems Caused By Rationalization

You have two options to stop rationalization from getting in the way of good decisions.

Gladwell’s Option #1: Don’t try to explain your snap decisions. Honor the mysteries of the unconscious mind and admit that you don’t always have the answers, even those pertaining to your own choices. Once you’ve created a story to explain an unconscious decision, that story is hard to shake. We believe the stories we tell ourselves and others.

(Shortform note: Gladwell’s suggestion that you avoid explaining your decisions is easier said than done, and Blink doesn’t offer further advice. However, Daniel Kahneman does offer strategies for countering the “narrative fallacy,” or the tendency to explain random or irrational events with coherent stories. First, apply your explanation to other outcomes. If it can explain more than one distinct outcome, it’s probably flimsy. Second, be wary of highly consistent patterns in your own narratives and those of others. This should alert you to cherry-picking of examples or buried information.)

Gladwell’s Option #2: Attempt to enhance your conscious perception through technology or recording techniques that slow down the flow of information. For example, use slow-motion videos for sports technique analysis. This allows your conscious mind to catch up to your unconscious, giving you a chance to double-check your unconscious judgments.

(Shortform note: This idea underlies the increasing use of slow-motion replays in sports umpiring. In the past, umpires had to make fast calls based only on what they saw in real time. Slow-motion replays allow for a more fine-grained analysis of exactly what happened—and there’s evidence that they can materially change umpires’ decision-making processes, leading them to penalize fouls more harshly.)

Why We Don’t Always Know What We Like

How do we determine our own preferences? It turns out that thin-slicing also applies when deciding what we like and don’t like.

Our preferences might seem fairly context-independent. But, as Gladwell notes, thin-slicing can go awry when it comes to knowing what we like. There are three reasons for this: sensation transference, unfamiliarity, and lack of expertise.

Reason #1: Sensation Transference

In sensation transference, aspects of the environment we’re in influence our perception of a particular object. This phenomenon is commonly applied in marketing.

For example, we have trouble distinguishing between a product and its packaging. Changing things like the color of the food or its packaging, the weight of the packaging, or the location of the product image on the packet can influence our assessments of a particular product. We experience the packaging as part of the product, not independent of it. (Shortform note: The influences of packaging on our expectations about product flavor can be very specific. For example, rounded typefaces can lead us to expect sweet flavors, while sharper typefaces lead us to expect sour flavors.)

Reason #2: Unfamiliarity

As Gladwell notes, sometimes we dislike something for no other reason than that it’s unfamiliar. We taste, hear, or watch something different and the unconscious mind automatically registers it as bad.

Thin-slicing fails when the unconscious mind has no previous experiences with which to compare the new experience.

Familiarity and the Mere Exposure Effect

Our dislike of things that are unfamiliar can be partly explained by what’s known as the “mere exposure effect.” The mere exposure effect occurs when we start to like things just because we’ve been exposed to them before. It’s a surprisingly robust effect that’s been observed across cultures, for both subliminally and consciously processed stimuli, and even prenatally (for example, newborn babies show a preference for voices, stories, and music that they heard frequently while in utero). The flip side of this effect, of course, is that the less exposure we’ve had to something, the less likely we are to respond positively to it.

Reason #3: Lack of Expertise

A third reason Gladwell gives for the failure of thin-slicing judgments is that we lack relevant expertise. Experts aren’t fooled by a product’s packaging and they aren’t put off by unfamiliarity. Experts have the training to know what they like and the vocabulary to explain it.

(Shortform note: Any field of expertise incorporates technical vocabulary that allows for finer distinctions, and therefore supports more precise communication, than lay speech. Sometimes becoming an expert involves “unlearning” word associations that we may have formed in more general contexts. For example, physics teachers can help their students to understand concepts by teaching them the physics-specific meaning of key technical words.)

How Can We Improve Our Snap Judgments?

Most of us think we can’t control our instinctive reactions. This assumption is both wrong and defeatist. Gladwell argues that we can improve our instinctive decision-making through deliberate training and by slowing down.

In addition to gaining expertise, Gladwell proposes two strategies for improving our snap decisions: We can rehearse and we can practice mind reading.

Strategy #1: Rehearse

Gladwell suggests that you practice making decisions, especially in environments and circumstances that mimic stressful situations. For example, rehearse your upcoming job interview or presentation in an environment that mirrors the actual event as closely as possible.

(Shortform note: Norman Doidge argues in The Brain That Changes Itself that when you practice something, you’re increasing your brain’s efficiency in executing the task. New tasks are cognition-heavy, recruiting a massive number of neurons across different brain areas. Practice helps our brains determine which networks or neurons are best suited for the task and lock in their responses, freeing up cognitive capacity for more and more challenging versions of the task.)

Strategy #2: Practice Mind Reading

As Gladwell explains, we read people’s minds by gathering information from their faces. We can get better at understanding others, and consequently make more accurate snap judgments about them, by practicing reading people’s facial expressions.

Humans are highly social animals. Our brains are tuned to cues that can help us navigate the complex social world. An important part of this is being able to make good guesses about what’s going on in other people’s minds. (Shortform note: In psychology, this ability to construct a model of someone else’s mind is called “Theory of Mind.” It includes keeping track of the other person’s knowledge—do they have the same information as I do?—as well as guessing at their emotional state.)

In improving mind reading, Gladwell recommends that we use microexpressions as clues to what other people are thinking. Microexpressions are expressions we make unconsciously. They’re almost imperceptible, lasting a fraction of a second. You might be good at broadly controlling the expressions your face makes, but you’ll still make involuntary expressions that betray your true thoughts and feelings.

(Shortform note: The effectiveness of microexpression analysis, especially for lie detection, is controversial. First, lies aren’t always associated with microexpressions: One study found them in only around 20% of participants who had been instructed to mask or neutralize their natural expressions. When microexpressions did occur, they were often inconsistent with the emotion being hidden.)

Additional Advice on Fast Decision-Making

Throughout the book, Gladwell suggests several ways we can make better snap decisions. We should limit the amount of information we consider, avoid rationalizing, and rehearse (particularly in stressful situations). We should also be aware of how unconscious biases—for example, the Warren Harding effect, sensation transference, and the mere exposure effect—get in the way of good snap decisions and do our best to counter these biases. How else can You improve your decisions? You can:

• Be aware of the effects of transient emotions on decision-making. Daniel Goleman points out in Emotional Intelligence that when you’re in a good mood, you tend to make more optimistic decisions; when you’re feeling down, you make more pessimistic decisions.

• Consider the cognitive biases you’re bringing to a decision. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes some common biases in human cognition that relate to our thinking about money. First, we tend to judge outcomes based on a fixed cognitive reference point that feels “neutral” (usually our current situation). Second, we evaluate our finances in relative terms rather than absolute ones (for example, a $100 increase feels much better if you start with $100 than if you start with $900). And third, while gains feel good, losses of the same amount feel disproportionately bad. Be careful of snap decisions that come from these biases, as they may lead you astray.

• Learn to distinguish when snap decisions are appropriate and when they’re not. Some decisions are more suited to a fast approach, while others benefit from a more considered one (as an extreme example, consider choosing which flavor muffin to buy with your morning coffee vs. deciding whether to ask someone to marry you). For muffin decisions, snap away. For marriage decisions, a more conscious process is usually desirable.

• Consider your approach to the decision-making process itself. In The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that there are two main ways that people approach making decisions: They either try to pick the very best option from a large range of options (“maximizers”), or they carry a set of criteria into a decision and choose the first option that acceptably satisfies the criteria (“satisficers”). Maximizing may seem like the best approach, but it turns out that compared to satisficers, maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, more depressed, and more prone to regret. If you’re a maximizer, consider test-driving the satisficer method.