Takeaways from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

Do you ever get that feeling? In a few minutes of interacting with someone, you can’t understand why you dislike them. Was it how they pronounced Milo? Or did wearing sunglasses indoors make them a douche? Or maybe it’s how they walked in like they owned the place. Either way, you cannot seem to put your finger on it immediately. After all, you just met this person. Malcolm Gladwell writes all about this in Blink. A ‘blink’ moment is tricky to describe. It is the split-second instinctive response that your brain sends based on previous experiences. Here are some of my takeaways.

Blink decisions can be better than deliberate ones

Gladwell spent the first third of the book on this. Our gut feeling about that stranger can be misleading and blinding. We all know not to “judge a book by its cover”. However, there are many cases where gaining more information is not helpful. In these cases, our blink decision is sufficient.

One riveting story involved the challenges doctors faced in a downtown Chicago hospital on a shoestring budget in the 1990s. Patients with chest pains took up precious beds, though few of them actually had a heart attack. Conclusively diagnosing a heart attack can take hours that doctors do not have. There are too many daily patients for this to be feasible. This begets the question, ‘Can doctors make better judgments of who is actually having a heart attack?’ At the time, doctors would err on the side of caution and admit too many patients, but still send home between 2-8% of people who actually have a heart attack.

The problem was that doctors were collecting too much information! I expected that getting all the patient’s data could only help more. This is exactly what the doctors did. They ask the patient various questions. Do they have diabetes? How old are they? Have they had a heart attack before? And much more. However, a different approach using only three critical questions performed 70% better overall and beat the doctor’s approach on critical cases by 89% to 95% The actual questions are unremarkable and involve medical jargon. The takeaway is that having less information can actually lead to better decision-making. Gladwell calls this thin-slicing.

We’re paying attention to too many things when focusing on fewer things is better.

There were two additional examples of thin-slicing. The first is from researchers at the University of Washington. In just ‘an hour of a husband and wife talking, [they] can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later.’ That is a chilling fact. The other example is a surprisingly effective way of understanding a person’s personality. Basically, it is more effective to spend half an hour looking around a person’s house than to spend a lot of time with the person (even up to being a close friend!). Gladwell is a compelling storyteller, so check out the book for more detailed and riveting narrations of these Blink stories.

But Blink decisions can also be horribly wrong.

The Warren Harding error applies when we think two factors, such as height and leadership, are related in people when they actually bear no correlation. This phenomenon was named after a  handsome and charming man, Warren Harding, who historians agree was one of the worst presidents in American history. People erroneously correlated his charisma with actual leadership ability. In fact, Gladwell shared a study that finds that 

“An inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary.”

There is even an extended discussion on, and example of, Implicit Association Tests (IAT) that can reveal biases like a positive association between height and leadership. This is a case where our blink response does not promote our stated values like equality. Can we then influence this blink response?

Control your blink response

Yes, we can, by paying attention to what we value. Gladwell advises that we expose ourselves to whatever embodies our stated values. One experiment asked two groups of homeowners if they would accept a large ugly sign erected on their lawn that read “Drive carefully”. Group B said yes 76% more times than Group A did. The difference is that Group B had previously agreed to put a small ‘Be a safe driver’ sign in their window 2 weeks earlier. What we pay attention to changes us. Touting a safety sign in your window makes you pay more attention to the idea, which subconsciously influences you. 

So is this entire article a convoluted ad for my write-up on Attention? No. It is about Malcolm Gladwell’s book on making your blink (unconscious) responses work in your favor and align with what you believe. 

An equally skilled six feet tall person should not make, on average, $5,525 more annually than someone who is five feet five tall

Wondering why this is on substack?

I might write about my thoughts on migrating to substack. I was previously using Wix and then considered switching. The comparison was not overwhelming, but switching to substack was only going to be a matter of time. I picked sooner rather than later. It’s also fitting since it has been three months of my blogging on Deep Dives. I plan to write on more challenging but interesting topics. Expect some Tech, Business, and Psychology. Alright, that’s enough. Subscribe now for more.