"Critical thinker" is the highest compliment for most of us.  We like to imagine that when we make decisions, we gather information, consider all the facts, and reach a reasoned, informed decision.  Mr. Gladwell's new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, challenges us with the notion that, for the most part, that just ain't true.  Blink claims that most of our decisions are made in by our unconscious minds in a few seconds; in the blink of an eye--and that is not necessarily a bad thing...

Surely That Can't Be True?

At one point in Gladwell's book he describes an experiment where a group of college students are shown a lengthy video of a college professor teaching a class.  After the video they are required to rate the teacher's effectiveness with a teacher evaluation form.

Shorten the video to five minutes, and bring in another group of college students, and researchers were surprised to find that with only five minutes of viewing time, the new students conclusions almost matched perfectly the previous students.

With successive groups of students and successively shorter and shorter videos, the scientists conducting the study learned that students could form a fairly accurate and largely consistent assessment of a professor with as little as 3 seconds of viewing time... even if you turn off the sound!

Apparently college students don't need much time to size up their professor, and even with only a few seconds, they are capable of doing so accurately.

How?

We think of our mind in the singular, but really we have two minds.  Our conscious mind, wherein everything we think of as thinking happens, and our unconscious mind.  When you have something you describe as a "gut feeling" or "instinct", it is generally coming from your unconscious mind.

Malcolm Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as a big computer that gathers large quantities of information very rapidly, and evaluates it just as quickly, makes decisions, and then passes those decisions on to the conscious mind in a manner which consciously is hard to describe--gut feelings, instinct.

If you pass a stranger on the street and with no words spoken come away feeling "I don't like that guy", you might not be able to explain why.  Explaining things logically is the purview of the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind doesn't work that way.  It takes in an extremely large quantity of information, a quantity that would overwhelm your conscious mind which is trying to do the important work of being conscious and making you who you are, and comes to a conclusion extremely rapidly.

The unconscious mind is unfettered by social taboos or perhaps, even logic.  From the way Gladwell describes it, it reminds me of a neural net.  Neural nets program themselves, through training.  In the end there's no easy to read software code that describes precisely how a neural net will behave.  The neural net simply attempts to achieve a favorable response based on all the information made available to it.  Whether or not the information is something we would consider relevant is frankly, irrelevant.

When you pass that stranger on the street and come away feeling uneasy about him, that uneasy feeling is your unconscious mind expressing itself to your conscious.  You may have just seen an older guy with a heavy coat and a scraggly beard.  Your unconscious gathers far more information that you might not have even considered: the color of his skin, eyes, clothing; his expression; the time of day; the weather; how he was carrying himself; other people in the area; details of the location; and so forth.  Over time forming such decisions with feedback, the unconscious decides for itself what are the important details, and that decision may not always be logical--just the one that seems to yield the right results.

We rely on our unconscious heavily, especially for split-second decision-making in life or death situations.  Interviews with police officers in the moments where they actually have to draw and use their weapons to save their lives reveal incredibly detailed accounts that sound surreal (as in, "Honestly, all I could see was his head, it was like I had tunnel vision.")  That sense of the surreal comes from the fact that in extremely intense situations, the conscious mind relies more and more on the unconscious, to the point where if the unconscious decides to focus on the hand holding the weapon, the data deemed irrelevant is thrown away and the conscious experience becomes dreamlike--in slow motion.

Thin-Slicing

Because we need our unconscious to function quickly, to perform its evaluation as rapidly as possible, it must necessarily do so with an extremely thin slice of experience.   Our unconscious mind becomes very good at drawing conclusions from brief moments of experience precisely because that is exactly what we need it to do.  Studies and evidence show that it can be very accurate at doing so.  Gladwell encourages us to learn to recognize the strengths of our unconscious split-second decision making process, and not think of it as somehow a "lesser" process.  The evidence indicates, decisions and conclusions we reach instantaneously are often as accurate as those we reach through careful deliberation.

In fact, they can even be more accurate than what we think of as the proper way to form an opinion or make a decision.  Gladwell provides examples where experts who focussed heavily on details and analysis ended up doing far worse than experts who sized up a situation and gave their first impression.  Once such story describes a kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a nude youth) purchased by the Getty Museum after a year of painstaking analysis.  Shortly after its purchase, a number of respected art experts declared it a fake after only a moment's viewing.  Asked to explain why, their answers are the sort our conscious minds don't like ("something just seemed wrong about it").

We cannot explain how our unconscious mind reaches decisions. The manner in which it does so is hidden from us behind, as Gladwell puts it, a locked door.

The locked door metaphor implies our unconscious is trying to hide something from the conscious, but personally I don't believe that to be the case.  In my opinion the unconscious mind isn't designed to explain itself, that is not its function.  Its function is to perform a split second analysis and render a solution in a manner that the conscious mind can use.  If the unconscious mind had to explain itself, it would become more like the conscious mind, and probably less able to evaluate complex situations quickly.

It is probably just as well, as the manner in which the unconscious reaches decisions might be disturbing or bizarre to the conscious mind. Your conscious mind may well believe in equality, diversity, and racial acceptance, but your unconscious mind may say "people of ethnic group X are dangerous".

If Snap Decisions Are So Good, What About Racism?

What we think of as instinct and gut feelings comes from how our unconscious minds are trained through experience.  If your only experience with African Americans is what you see on the news and other forms of entertainment, your unconscious mind will use that information when you encounter an African American in real life. People often say that there are messages embedded in popular media--your unconscious sees those messages and they become part of your "big computer".

When you walk into the auto dealership to buy a car, a salesman must size you up very quickly and determine if you are the sort of person he will be able to charge more for. Salesmen are always looking to "spot the sucker". In an experiment done on car salesmen, it was determined that all other things being equal, a car salesman is more likely to come down on price for a white male than he will for a white female, black male, or black female. This does not imply that car salesmen are all sexists and racists. What it *does* imply is that the unconscious mind is making a decision for the car salesman in a way that the evidence demonstrates is patently flawed. The young black lady might be shrewd, thrifty, and mechanically inclined. The big burly white man might know nothing about cars and just want to pay the sticker price and get out of there. The unconscious mind does not shy away from using any piece of data in forming a decision. Consciously we may realize that all those dramas we see on television are not reliable information. The unconscious doesn't make such distinctions and it will use that information to guide your conscious behavior. If you watch a cartoon where an apple pie explodes when cut, the next time you encounter an apple pie, you may be slightly slower to cut it. You don't consciously think of the cartoon, and if you did you'd likely smile, but your unconscious has filed away the information that sometimes apple pies explode when cut, and you may be few milliseconds slower to make that cut.

Clearly not all split decisions can be relied upon so readily as deliberate ones. So how do we tell the difference? Gladwell says that instinct comes from experience, if you have no experience in a particular matter, you can't trust your instincts and your unconscious will make shallow decisions for you. One thing one can do is expose oneself to more experience... get to know people from other ethnic groups. Your unconscious mind can be trained. I am a birdwatcher. I can identify birds sometimes with only a split second of viewing. I can do this because years spent birdwatching have filled my unconscious mind with information which can be used to identify birds. As far as my unconscious is concerned, one of the major differences between deciding if a bird is type A or type B might be the kind of bush it is sitting in, heck even how far away I am standing from the bird might be considered relevant information. Who knows? It's not necessarily logical, it's just what works.

Gladwell encourages us to think about Doctor Martin Luther King, for example, before we go someplace where we might encounter African Americans. It may sound crazy, but again the evidence bears the suggestion out. Take two groups of students and separate them. Tell one group to spend five minutes thinking about what it means to be a professor. Tell the other group to spend five minutes thinking about what it means to be a soccer hooligan. Then give them identical tests. The "professor" group will do better, every time.

Implicit Association

Just because our unconscious is behind a locked door doesn't mean we can't figure out to some degree what biases that it may have. One way is to take an Implicit Association Test (IAT). An IAT test asks you to classify items into two categories. For example, you would be given a list of words and asked to separate them into the categories BAD and GOOD. Words like Happy, Lovely, Wonderful go in the good column, and then words like Awful, Nasty, Evil go into the bad column. Easy. Then comes stage two where you are shown a series of faces which you must categorize as white or black. Also easy, we can all pretty much tell the difference in skin tone. Then the test pairs the last two sets of categories together and asks you to categorize the things you see as "White or Good" or "Black or Bad" and you are shown a mix of words and faces to categorize. Finally in the last stage the categories are reversed and you are asked to use the categories "White or Bad" and "Black or Good" and you are again shown a mix of words and faces to categorize. If you try taking such a test, you might be surprised to find that you have more trouble putting bad things in the white column and good things in the black column. A computer times how long it takes you do make your decisions (down to the millesecond) and after you have performed a number of categorizations, makes a determination as to what sort of unconscious bias you have. You might not like the results. You may find that although you strongly believe that racism is evil and wrong, you have an unconscious bias that favors one race over another. It doesn't mean you are a racist, it simply means that your unconscious mind is using flawed information to make decisions when it comes to race.

And thankfully you can try to correct it, by supplying positive experience for your unconscious mind to process. Gladwell writes of one researcher who took a race-IAT every day and found to his dismay that he consistently favored whites to blacks. Then one day his scores suddenly flattened and showed no preference either way. It occurred to him that just before he took the test he had been watching the Olympic games where various black athletes were being presented positively and with the same respect as white athletes.

If you like you can try taking one of these tests yourself, just keep in mind that you may not like the results.

Decision Made in the Blink of an Eye

One of the hosts of the WBUR program "Here and Now" interviewed Malcolm Gladwell about Blink the other day. I was immediately interested, but I only heard the first 15 seconds of the interview before I had to get out of my car because I had arrived at the doctor's office. In 15 seconds, I made the decision to buy the book and try it out, it sounded like something I might enjoy, even though I don't really read a lot of books about human behavior. You might say I had a gut feeling. Well that feeling was right. I enjoyed the book immensely, and now plan to read Gladwell's previous acclaimed work The Tipping Point.

If you're curious about how your mind works, and find reading about interesting case studies exposing behaviors we don't recognize in ourselves, then this book is definitely for you. I really enjoyed it.