There are 2 levels of decision making – conscious and unconscious. Conscious decision making takes time and effort to analyze, think, and compare to make a cautious, logical, and definitive decision, while unconscious decision making are made in a split of second by just using the intuition, and it’s hard to recognize where it comes from. Blink is about understanding the power of the unconscious when it comes to making decisions.
A small detail of an entire situation can be enough to make a precise decision, also referred as ‘the theory of thin slices’ in the book – it’s one of the characteristics that makes the unconscious so dazzling. For example, in a experiment setting Dr Gottman asks couples to discuss something they disagree for 15 minutes, after analyzing each other’s reactions in a conversation and finding clues, he is able to predict correctly 90% of the time if a couple will be together for a long period of time. The ‘theory of thin slices’ are also explained when an art expert is able to know within seconds when looking at a kouros’s hand that the kouros is a replica, while the museum team has taken 14 months of research to prove it was original. Small clues in a 15 minutes conversation, a kouros’s hand are 2 examples of ‘thin slices’ of how the unconscious find patterns in situations and behaviors to make snap judgments.
These moments of thin slices are tough to understand logically where they comes from, because the body sends weird signals. For example scientists lined up 4 decks of cards – 2 blues and 2 reds in a gambling setting. The blues cards made money, the red cards lost money. After turning 10 cards the gambler’s hand started to sweat, but it took 40 cards so he could understand the pattern to choose the money making cards. George Soros, a billionaire using the stock market, often changed his positions on the market because his back started killing him. Besides sweat glands, and back pain, faster heart rate, stomach feeling wrong, curious ringing in the ear, being struck by momentary depression can be other signals of the unconscious working mysteriously.
The problem with thin slicing is that it doesn’t dig below the surface, sometimes leading us astray. The unconscious crunches all the date it can from experiences we’ve had, such as people we’ve met, books we’ve read, places we’ve been, movies we’ve watched, lessons we’ve learned, and so on and it forms an opinion. Sometimes our opinion can be bias, specially when it comes to gender and race. The book calls it ‘the Warren Harding error,’ because Warren Harding was one of the worse presidents in the USA history, however his looks (white, tall, and strong) and demeanor suggested that he would be a great president. Also in a research setting, it was noticed that women and black people are offered higher prices while buying the same car than a white man, reinforcing the idea that woman and black people are unconsciously labeled as ‘suckers.’ You’ll be surprised to know that you probably also have this disturbing unconscious programming. See it for yourself: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
The best to way to have unconscious decision making working in our favor is to engage in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice. When experts make decisions under pressure, they don’t logically and systematically compare all available options, it would take too long, they just know what is right (most of the time) intuitively. The book talks about a person that has been around tennis his whole life (first as a player, now as a coach) that can predict when a player would hit a double fault precisely 16 out of 17x. There are also sportsmen examples of being on the zone, where they don’t hear the fans, the games feels to be in slow motion, and things just happen right.
Whenever we have something we care about, that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. This doesn’t mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience our reactions are invariable wrong, means they are shallow. For example, while every single music expert thought a new musician called Kenna was going to be a big hit, when they put his songs to test, they surprisingly got a feedback below expectations. The same is true with tasting food and drinks, the book shows examples of average people not knowing the different between the taste in Coke and Pepsi, margarine and butter, different brands of brandy, and so on. In a matter of fact, experiments showed that the way the product was displayed payed a more important role in average people’s opinion about the product than the actual taste, like finding that ice creams sold in round containers sells more than the ones in square containers. Of course, food and drink experts have a more esoteric and complex taste buds being able to differentiate real tastes rather than being fooled by designs.
Unconscious decision making is one of the most complex and fascinating abilities of human beings. No doubt it played a major role helping humans to survive and reproduce over time. In today’s age it’s still very useful, and perhaps it’s importance has been dimmed by the easy access to unlimited information to make any type of decision. Blink is a mind refresher that reminds us of our innate ability that allow us to do great things. The lesson is clear – the more we engage in highly repetitive activity and structured practice, the more likely we will be able to make precise quick decisions. As we are a product of our past experiences, we must be wary of flaws that are embedded in our culture fabric, such as having negative associations with black people. The challenge Blink proposes is to see people, things, and situations for who they really are. The solution is to control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place so then we can control rapid cognition. Many things will change, such as “the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted,’ and so on.
