BLINK

LESSONS​

 

When you become an expert in something, you train your brain to automatically look for certain signs (allowing you to make accurate snap judgements).

 

• Some sculpture experts (of Greek/Roman mythological figures) could tell within a matter of seconds that something was off about a piece that the Getty was interested in buying (even though they couldn’t put their finger on what was off).

 

“When Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving and Georgios Dontas -- and all the others -- looked at the kouros and felt an ‘intuitive repulsion,’ they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of looking -- in a single glance -- they were able to understand more about the essence of the state than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds” (8).

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• An experienced firefighter knows when a seemingly-routine kitchen fire call turns out to be more than meets the eye.

 

“The firemen retreated back through the archway into the living room, and there, suddenly, the lieutenant thought to himself, There’s something wrong. He turned to his men. ‘Let’s get out, now!’ he said, and moments after they did, the floor on which they had been standing collapsed. The fire, it turned out, had been in the basement… In retrospect, all those anomalies make perfect sense. The fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time, though, the lieutenant made none of those connections consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked door of his unconscious. This is a beautiful example of thin-slicing in action. The fireman’s internal computer effortlessly and instantly found a pattern in the chaos. But surely the most striking fact about that day is how close it all came to disaster. Had the lieutenant stopped and discussed the situation with his men, had he said to them, let’s talk this over and try to figure out what’s going on, had he done, in other words, what we often think leaders are supposed to do to solve difficult problems, he might have destroyed his ability to jump to the insight that saved their lives” (122-124).

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• An experienced police officer knows when it is the absolute last minute to shoot. 

 

When a seasoned officer was chasing a 14-year-old boy, he could tell that the boy was fishing for a gun in his pants. But he could also tell that the boy was frightened. Because the boy was so young, the officer was very reluctant to shoot. So he “mind-read” the boy up until the boy got out his gun and dropped it. The officer took the boy into custody (without any need to fire any shots).

 

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You can usually learn a lot through “thin-slicing” (that is, analyzing a short experience of something).

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• You can learn a lot about someone (e.g., levels of organization, self-discipline, anxiety, insecurity, and independence) by looking through their dorm room.

 

• John Gottman can tell a lot about a couple’s probability for a happy marriage by just observing a 15-minute conversation! He does this by looking for micro-expressions and “the Four Horsemen”: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

 

“In order to ‘know’ a couple, we feel as though we have to observe them over many weeks and months and see them in every state -- happy, tired, angry, irritated, delighted, having a nervous breakdown, and so on… But John Gottman has proven that we don’t have to do that at all. Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand couples -- just like Bill and Sue -- into that small room in his ‘love lab’ near the University of Washington… If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent” (20-22).

 

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Priming can affect our behavior.

 

As discovered by John Bargh, suppose you take a “quiz” of 10 different five-word sets and you’re asked to unscramble them into grammatically-correct four-word sets as fast as you can. Because you’re focusing on trying to make sentences, you might not pick up on the theme of the words. 

 

• If sprinkled with words like “worried”, “Florida”, “old”, “lonely”, “gray”, “bingo”, and “wrinkle”, then you’ll move more slowly after the quiz. 

 

• If sprinkled with words like “bold”, “aggressive”, and “bother”, then you’re more likely to interrupt people after the quiz. 

 

• If sprinkled with words like “patient”, “respectful”, and “polite”, then you’re more likely to not interrupt people after the quiz.

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In another study, people answered more trivia questions correctly if they spent the 10 minutes prior to the game by thinking about what it would be like to be a professor (and thus entering a “smart” frame of mind) as opposed to thinking about sports drama.

 

In another study, it was found that before taking a test, people in minority groups (like African-Americans) have worse performance when they are asked to select their ethnicity group as one of the first questions. This action reminds them of stereotypes, causing them to think that they may not be smart enough.

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Our implicit biases (about a person’s character based on their looks) affects our expectations of them, the way we treat them, and the opportunities we give them (such as offering a job).

 

• Warren Harding was one of the worst US presidents (since he wasn’t very smart or qualified), but he had the looks that “fit” the expected Presidential profile.

 

“Many people who looked at Warren Harding saw how extraordinarily handsome and distinguished-looking he was and jumped to the immediate -- and entirely unwarranted -- conclusion that he was a man of courage and intelligence and integrity. They didn’t dig below the surface. The way he looked carried so many powerful connotations that it stopped the normal process of thinking dead in its tracks. The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition. It is at the root a good deal of prejudice and discrimination”.

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• Blind auditions (like “The Voice”) are necessary to unbiasedly listen to talent alone. 

 

Otherwise, we can get biased by how attractive someone is, how well they are dressed, how straight their posture is, etc. However, these factors are important to actually sell concert tickets.

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• Orchestras (especially in Europe) used to be biased towards male players. If they saw a female auditioning, they made a snap judgment that she was too weak or too untalented.

 

“The world of classical music -- particularly in its European home -- was until very recently the preserve of white men. Women, it was believed, simply could not play like men. They didn’t have the strength, the attitude, or the resilience for certain kinds of pieces. Their lips were different. Their lungs were less powerful. Their hands were smaller. That did not seem like prejudice” (248-249).

 

However, when the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra held a blind audition (since one of the auditioners was the son of someone in the orchestra), a surprise happened. As soon as Abbie Conant finished playing, the judges announced that they wanted her to join the orchestra. They were shocked when she stepped in front of the screen (since they were expecting a man, and also since she had filled in as a substitute before and they didn’t realize that she was so talented).

 

The orchestra tried to unfairly demote her to second chair and pay her less than he male colleagues (but she won both cases in court). Abbie’s talent was unbiasedly demonstrated behind the screen, and she proved her above-average lung capacity at a hospital (and the nurse even asked her if she was an athlete).

 

“Once Celibidache and the rest of the committee saw her in the flesh, all those long-held prejudices began to compete with the winning first impression they had of her performance” (247).

 

Once more orchestras started implementing blind auditions, more women started being hired.

 

“In some places, rules were put in place forbidding the judges from speaking among themselves during auditions, so that one person’s opinion would not cloud the view of another. Musicians were identified not by name but by number. Screens were erected between the committee and the auditioner, and if the person auditioning cleared his or her throat or made any kind of identifiable sound -- if they were wearing heels, for example and stepped on a part of the floor that wasn’t carpeted -- they were ushered out and given a new number. And as these new rules were put in place around the country, an extraordinary thing happened: orchestras began to hire women” (250-251).

 

“Orchestras now hire better musicians, and better musicians mean better music. And how did we get better music? Not by rethinking the entire classical music enterprise or building new concert halls or pumping in millions of new dollars, but by paying attention to the tiniest detail, the first two seconds of the audition” (253-254).

 

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We can measure our implicit bias with the Implicit Association Test (IAT). 

 

For example, if the left category is where we group words or images for either “male” and “career” and right category is where we group words or images for “female” and “family”, it’s probably faster for us to sort than if left was “male” and “family” and right was “female” and “career” (because we already have a primary association of men providing for the household while women stay home to cook, clean, and care for the kids).

 

The longer it takes for us to sort, the more we are working against primary associations.

 

If you take it on the computer (using “e” and “i” to sort items), your responses are tracked to the millisecond.

 

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implict

 

We have stated beliefs (saying that we’re not racist or that men/women are equal) that we consciously choose to say, but the IAT tests our beliefs on the unconscious level. The results speak for themself.

 

“The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we’ve had, the people we’ve met, the lessons we’ve learned, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion. And that’s what’s coming out in the IAT. The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values” (85).

 

“The IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes. It’s also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. If you have a strongly pro-white pattern of associations, for example, there is evidence that that will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you’re behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward a little less, turn away slightly from him or her, close your body a bit, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less, hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more, laugh at jokes a bit less. Does it matter? Of course it does. Suppose the conversation is a job interview. And suppose the applicant is a black man. He’s going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that may well make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, and a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may well get a gut feeling that the applicant doesn’t really have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe that he doesn’t really want the job. What this unconscious first impression will do, in other words, is throw the interview hopelessly off course” (85-86).

 

“I polled about half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list -- the list of the largest corporations in the United States -- asking each company questions about its CEO. Overwhelmingly, the heads of big companies are, as I’m sure comes as no surprise to anyone, white men, which undoubtedly reflects some kind of implicit bias. But they are also almost all tall… Of the tens of millions of American men below five foot six, a grand total of ten in my sample have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African AMerican. (The grand exception to all of these trends is American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who is both on the short side -- five foot nine -- and black. He must be a remarkable man to have overcome two Warren Harding errors.)” (86-87).

 

“You can take the Race IAT or the Career IAT as many times as you want and try as hard as you can to respond faster to the more problematic categories, and it won’t make a whit of difference. But, believe it or not, if, before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series of pictures about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would change. Suddenly it won’t seem so hard to associate positive things with black people. ‘I had a student who used to take the IAT everyday,’ Banaji says. ‘It was the first thing he did, and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went. Then this one day, he got a positive association with blacks. And he said, “That’s odd. I’ve never gotten that before,” because we’ve all tried to change our IAT score and we couldn’t. But he’s a track-and-field guy, and what he realized is that he’d spent the morning watching the Olympics’” (97).

 

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Sometimes, we can drown in data and allow red herrings to cause us to second-guess our instincts.

 

 “Extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues” (137).

 

• Some teachers are sneaky by throwing in a bunch of extra information in test questions (to see if you actually know what information to focus on).

 

• Some doctors get so caught up in a patient’s lifestyle and medical history that they could have a hard time accurately predicting which patients with chest pain are in need for ICU admittance and which ones can be sent home. They can’t admit everyone (since the hospital doesn’t have enough resources to support that), but it would be unfortunate to deny help to someone in need. Even if it’s counter-intuitive, doctors can actually usually have more accurate predictions by following the Goldman algorithm.

 

• Shoppers tend to have a harder time making decisions (and end up feeling less satisfied) the more choices they have.

 

“[Sheena Iyengar] set up a tasting booth with a variety of exotic gourmet jams at the upscale grocery store Draegar’s in Menlo Park, California. Sometimes the booth had six different jams, and sometimes Iyengar had twenty-four different jams on display. She wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs. But Iyengar found the opposite to be true. Thirty percent of those who stopped by the six-choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3 percent of those who stopped by the bigger booth bought anything. Why is that? Because buying jam is a snap decision. You say to yourself, instinctively, I want that one. And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgements can be made in a snap because they are frugal” (143).

 

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People can misinterpret their own feelings.

 

• The Pepsi Challenge (where people took blind sips of Coke and Pepsi) resulted in Pepsi being the clear winner. This is because when people only take a sip of something, they usually prefer the sweeter option (whereas the opposite is true if people drink a whole bottle of something). So Pepsi never dominated the soft drink industry, and Coke’s debut of “the New Coke” failed.

 

• If you pour the same coffee in two different cups (a plain white cup and a Starbucks cup), people will rate the Starbucks cup higher (since they have positive associations with brand imagery).

 

• While Cheskin researched how to boost margarine sales (since margarine used to be nearly not as popular as butter), he realized that he could pass margarine off as butter by coloring it yellow (since it’s usually white).

 

“Cheskin believed that most of us don’t make a distinction -- on an unconscious level -- between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined” (160).

 

“Cheskin told his client to call their product Imperial Margarine, so they could put an impressive-looking crown on the package. As he had learned at the luncheon, the color was critical: he told them the margarine had to be yellow. Then he told them to wrap it in foil, because in those days foil was associated with high quality. And sure enough, if they gave someone two identical pieces of bread -- one buttered with white margarine and the other buttered with foil-wrapped yellow Imperial Margarine -- the second piece of bread won hands-down in taste tests every time” (161).

 

• If you add more yellow and less green on 7-UP packaging, people will think there’s more lemon flavoring than lime flavoring.

 

• If you serve peaches in a glass container, they taste “better” than if you ate them straight out of the tin can.

 

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Revolutionary ideas can be challenging (since people have to go against what they’re used to), but bad is still bad regardless.

 

• People originally gave Herman Miller’s Aeron Chair low aesthetic scores (since it was made of mesh, had a wiry frame, looked like something out of Robocop, and deviated from the usual cushioned and upholstered chairs at that time). Once people warmed up to the idea, people began rating the chair higher and higher (and companies started imitating its design).

 

“What once was ugly has become beautiful… Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different’” (172-174).

 

• A universally ugly car is ugly no matter what.

 

“The Edsel, the Ford Motor Company’s famous flop from the 1950s, failed because people thought it looked funny. But two or three years later, every other car maker didn’t suddenly start making cars that looked like the Edsel, the way everyone started copying the Aeron. The Edsel started out ugly, and it’s still ugly. By the same token, there are movies that people hate when they see them for the first time, and they still hate them, two or three years later. A bad movie is always a bad movie. The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird” (173).

 

• All in the Family aired on CBS only because a couple higher-ups liked it. The Mary Tyler Moore show only aired on CBS because by the time it was tested for ratings, it was already scheduled for broadcast.

 

“[All in the Family] was a radical departure from the kind of fare then on television: it was edgy and political, and it tackled social issues that the television of the day avoided” (174).

 

“[The Mary Tyler Moore Show], too, was a departure for television. The main character, Mary Richards, was a young, single woman who was interested not in starting a family -- as practically every previous television heroine had been -- but in advancing her career. CBS ran the first show through the Program Analyzer. The results were devastating. Mary was ‘a loser.’ Her neighbor Rhonda Morgenstern was ‘too abrasive,’ and another of the major female characters on the show, Phyllis Lindstrom, was seen as ‘not believable’” (175).

 

“All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in other words, were the television equivalents of the Aeron chair. Viewers said they hated them. But, as quickly became clear when these sitcoms became two of the most successful programs in television history, viewers didn’t actually hate them. They were just shocked by them” (175).

 

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The human face is a “gold mine” of clues as to how a person is feeling (e.g., embarrassed, angry, flirtatious, lying) and what a person’s intentions are.

 

John Gottman worked with Paul Ekman and Wallace Frieson to catalog every single facial muscle (and the corresponding meaning of that expression) in the Facial Action Coding System (or FACS). This includes the movement of lips, eyes, eyebrows, etc.

 

Computer animators reference this catalog when creating animated films.

 

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If you fake-smile, you can often feel better.

 

However, a fake smile “doesn’t reach the eyes” because it’s hard to tighten the orbicularis oculi (the muscle around the eye) on demand.

 

“[A German team of psychologists] had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pens between their lips -- an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major -- or while holding a pen clenched between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier. These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as a given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may -- or may not -- express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process” (207-208).

 

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If we fail to read facial and body cues, we can find ourselves in frustrating (or even disastrous) consequences.

 

• People with autism see the human face as just another object (that doesn’t give any helpful information to reading situations). If you track an autistic person’s eye movements during a movie, you can see how they don’t look at people’s eyes when they talk, they don’t follow people’s fingers when they point, and they tend to get distracted by surrounding objects (such as a light switch).

 

• Four police officers jumped to conclusions when they saw an immigrant (Amadou Diallo) in a bad New York city at night. They assumed that he must have had a gun if he was by himself and that he was looking to cause trouble. When they approached Amadou, Amadou was frightened (since he saw big, armed men coming towards him, he didn’t speak much English, and he had a stutter), so he understandably ran away. When Amadou went to pull out his wallet, one of the officers mistook the wallet for a gun, so he fired off some shots (which caused the other officers to fire their guns as well). 

 

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In life-or-death situations, our brains limit the information we perceive in order to just focus on the threat. 

 

Optimal arousal is when the heartbeat is between 115-145 beats per minute

 

• Larry Bird played basketball in this range, so at critical moments, the crowd would go quiet and other players moved in slow motion.

 

• Some officers report seeing individual bullets hit a criminal, not hearing their guns go off as they fire, or seeing the enemy approach them in slow-motion. 

 

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If we get too aroused (have a heartbeat greater than 145) in stressful situations, we can freeze up and perform badly.

 

• People may forget that “9-1-1” are the digits to call the emergency helpline, or they may forget to press “Send” to actually make the call.

 

• Singers get stage fright and forget lyrics.

 

• Police officers may panic (so to avoid this, their training includes getting “shot” by plastic capsules and encountering ferocious dogs).

 

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In conclusion, we usually need to combine instinctive judgment with detailed analyses.

“Understanding someone’s statistical performance in a game is only one small part of understanding how good an athlete that person is. There is also the broader issue of ability. How good is he at the myriad of skills and attitudes that it takes to be a successful athlete? How hard does he work? Is he a good teammate? Does he stay out all night drinking and doing drugs, or does he take his job seriously? Is he willing to learn from his coaches? How resilient is he in the face of adversity? When the pressure is greatest and the game is on the line, how well does he perform? Is he someone likely to be better over time or has he already peaked?... Imagine that you were looking at a seventeen-year-old Michael Jordan. He wasn’t the tallest or the biggest basketball player, nor the best jumper. His statistics weren’t the finest in the country. What set Michael Jordan apart from his peers was his attitude and motivation. And those qualities can’t be measured with formal tests and statistics. They can be measured only by exercising judgment, by an expert with long years of experience, drawing on that big database in his or her unconscious and concluding, yes, they have it, or no, they don’t. The very best and most successful basketball teams -- like the best and most successful organizations of any kind -- are the ones that understand how to combine rational analysis with instinctive judgment” (272).

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