Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. When

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.

Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience.

The problem of too much information also comes up in studies of why doctors sometimes make the mistake of missing a heart attack entirely—of failing to recognize when someone is on the brink of or in the midst of a major cardiac complication. Physicians, it turns out, are more likely to make this kind of mistake with women and minorities. Why is that? Gender and race are not irrelevant considerations when it comes to heart problems; blacks have a different overall risk profile than whites, and women tend to have heart attacks much later in life than men. The problem arises when the additional information of gender and race is factored into a decision about an individual patient. It serves only to overwhelm the

This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It is picking up on subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone’s mind—and there is almost no other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which, most of the time, we so effortlessly excel.

Neither of these explanations, however, is particularly satisfying. There was no evidence that the four officers in the Diallo case were bad people, or racists, or out to get Diallo. On the other hand, it seems wrong to call the shooting a simple accident, since this wasn’t exactly exemplary police work. The officers made a series of critical misjudgments, beginning with the assumption that a man getting a breath of fresh air outside his own home was a potential criminal.

What Ekman is describing, in a very real sense, is the physiological basis of how we thin-slice other people. We can all mind-read effortlessly and automatically because the clues we need to make sense of someone or some social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us. We may not be able to read faces as brilliantly as someone like Paul Ekman or Silvan Tomkins can, or pick up moments as subtle as Kato Kaelin’s transformation into a snarling dog. But there is enough accessible information on a face to make everyday mind reading possible. When

People with autism find it difficult, if not impossible, to do all of the things that I’ve been describing so far as natural and automatic human processes. They have difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words.

The truth is, though, that it isn’t. Most police officers—well over 90 percent—go their whole career without ever firing at anyone, and those who do describe the experience as so unimaginably stressful that it seems reasonable to ask if firing a gun could be the kind of experience that could cause temporary autism.

Arousal leaves us mind-blind.

“When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” Payne has tried all kinds of techniques to reduce this bias. To try to put

The answer in both cases is no. An officer with a partner is no safer than an officer on his own. Just as important, two-officer teams are more likely to have complaints filed against them. With two officers, encounters with citizens are far more likely to end in an arrest or an injury to whomever they are arresting or a charge of assaulting a police officer. Why? Because when police officers are by themselves, they slow things down, and when they are with someone else, they speed things up. “All cops want two-man cars,” says de Becker. “You have a buddy, someone to talk to. But one-man cars get into less trouble because you reduce bravado. A cop by himself makes an approach that is entirely different. He is not as prone to ambush. He doesn’t

I’ve had this happen to me, and I always feel a bit like I’m being disrespected. Why can’t the officer stand and talk to me face-to-face, like a normal human being? The reason is that it would be virtually impossible for me to pull a gun on the officer if he’s standing behind me. First of all, the officer is shining his flashlight on my lap, so he can see where my hands are and whether I’m going for a gun. And even if I get my hands on the gun, I have to twist almost entirely around in my seat, lean out the window, and fire around the door pillar at the officer (and remember, I’m blinded by his brights)—and all this in his full view.

We have come to confuse information with understanding. I recently ran across