Gladwell, Malcolm - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

[oyceter]

I picked this up after reading Scott Westerfeld's So Yesterday, since SY references one of Gladwell's other books.

Blink is a multi-discipline look at what Gladwell calls "thin-slicing," or the ability to make a quick judgment based on relatively little information. He pulls up examples from detecting forgeries in the art world to diagnosing heart attack in the ER. His main point isn't that people should make snap decisions, but that we often have a lot of information in our subconscious that comes out as intuition. Also, he points out that people generally tend to ignore intuition in favor of research.

I think it's an interesting argument, especially when Gladwell starts to get into more details on how our brains process information and how all that stuff floating around in the subconscious can influence the snap judgments we make. I was also wary of the thesis, given that snap judgments also lead to prejudice and typecasting and all that fun stuff.

Thankfully, Gladwell does discuss what happens when thin slicing goes wrong; he talks about an indie musician who gets rave reviews but no radio play thanks to focus group reviews, along with the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by police officers. He also demonstrates how snap judgments and subconscious associations work with racism and sexism. He used tests with the Implicit Association Test a lot, which measures people's reactions times to pairing white faces with positive words and black faces with negative words, and vice versa.

I found it sadly unsurprising that most people choke up more when the association is switched, even if they are not racist. Anyhow, I am now hijacking my book entry to get on my soapbox and say that all these cultural messages really do make a difference, even if you try really hard not to listen to them. He does mention that the association times improve when people are exposed to positive images of black people. Ditto with women and typically "masculine" attributes.

Anyhow, I actually found the parts on race and prejudice and stereotyping to be the most interesting parts of the book, though I do feel somewhat justified in going by my instincts about people now (aka, when someone makes me feel nidgy, it is probably for a reason). On the other hand, Gladwell doesn't really give many tips on how to distinguish between bad thin slicing and good thin slicing, which mostly leaves me floundering around and second-guessing everything, as usual.

Links:
- rilina's review
- yhlee's review
- sanguinuity's review

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The thing I wondered about the implicit association test was whether it tested how racist people really are, or how much racism they've been exposed to: how do you tell the difference between a person who's slow to associate people of a certain race with positive words because they don't think positive things about them, or because even though they personally aren't prejudiced, in the world around them, those people are not associated with positive concepts?

[oyceter]

Yeah, I don't know! I don't think it's a mark of racism per se, but I do think it's a mark of how pervasive racism is in society, so much so that the associations still persist even among people who really try hard not to think those things.