Introduction

In this confusing world today, it's hard to believe in anything or to make a decision. What seems
real at first might later turn out to be not, and what appears irrational might eventually be proven
right. In many cases, when making a decision, we aren't sure if we should believe in logical
thinking or unconscious and snap judgments. Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) in order to give us knowledge of the world within
ourselves and little pieces of advice on how to improve and when to believe in unconscious
thinking.

This book is perfect for

● psychologists whose work involves studying inner-thinking

● anyone interested in the field of our unconscious mind

Who is the author?

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has
published five books on sociology, psychology, and social psychology, all of which were on
The New York Times Best Seller list. His first famous work, Blink: The Power of Thinking
Without Thinking (2005) successfully revolutionizes the way we understand the world within.

Lessons in a nutshell

Nowadays, we are often suffering from marketing information overload, research and survey
data, etc. Sometimes logical thinking leads us to a conclusion that's opposite to the one we don't
know why we come up within the blink of an eye. That's because everyone has two minds
instead of one, one's conscious, and the other's unconscious. This book defines what snap
decisions are, describe how they take place and deals with the question on when to follow them.

In this summary, you'll find out

● the value of snap judgments

 ● when to rely on hunches
● how to improve snap judgments

Chapters

1. Behind snappily deciding, there's a system called thin-slicing.

2. Unconscious thinking takes place behind a locked door.
3. We link ideas much faster if they are associated already in our mind.
4. The equal role of logical and intuitive thinking.
5. The first impressions of thin-slicing experts are very powerful.
6. Mind-reading is a delicate art.
7. All the essence of thinking in the blink of an eye.

1. Behind snappily deciding, there's a system called thin-slicing.

Our brain often reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it's reaching
conclusions. For example, experts can claim a statue that seems ancient is fresh just after two
seconds of glance without knowing any scientific research. That's because we make snap
decisions by thin-slicing.

Thin-slicing is defined as our unconscious ability to find patterns in situations and behavior
based on very narrow windows of experience. Many studies have been carried out on thin-
slicing to figure out how it works.

A psychologist named Samuel Gosling has proven that judging people's personalities is an
excellent example of how surprisingly effective thin-slicing can be. He began his experiment
by doing a personality workup on eighty college students. He asked them to finish Big Five
Inventory, a multi-item questionnaire that measures participants across five dimensions:
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new
experiences. He had those eighty students' best friends to answer first, and then he asked
complete strangers to do the questionnaire just by showing them a photo of each student's dorm
room.
Not surprisingly, the close friends described participants quite accurately because of having a
thick slice of experience, and that translates to a real sense of who their friends are. What's
surprising is the result of the strangers. They did worse than the close friends in terms of
measuring extraversion and estimating agreeableness. However, on the remaining three traits
of the Big Five, the dorm room visitors came out on top. They were much better at measuring
conscientiousness and predicting both the students' emotional stability and their openness to
new experiences.

For instance, a very close friend of a football line-man who weighs 275 pounds finds it hard
to believe that he could have a lively and discerning intellect. That’s because it's not easy at
all for our conscious mind to get past the stereotype of the dumb jock. However, a stranger who
only gets to see a photo of his dorm room wouldn't have the same difficulty since all they know
is his bookshelf or the art on his walls.

The experiment mentioned above is just an example of how correct conclusions from narrow
windows of experience could be. The truth is that when in need of making decisions, we don't
always have enough time to get to know something or someone. Therefore, in those cases, it's
a must to rely on impression in a blink, which is made based on thin slices of experience.

Quote: "We're old hands at thin-slicing."

2. Unconscious thinking takes place behind a locked door.

Snap judgments and rapid cognition always take place behind a locked door, which we are not
very good at dealing with. We often think we're stupid when our mind seems blocked and
blank; however, we are always thinking and trying to link information. Many scientists and
psychologists have proven this right.

The psychologist Norman R. F. Maier once did an experiment on how people unconsciously
trying to solve a problem. He hung two long ropes from the ceiling of a room filled with
different tools, objects, and furniture. The strings were so far apart that if you held one, you
couldn't grab hold of the other. Everyone in the room was asked to tie the ends of those two
ropes together in all possible ways.
There were four ways to finish the task. Most people quickly came up with the first three. Tying
something like an extension cord to the end of one rope so that it became long enough to reach
the other was a choice. Another was stretching one string as far as possible toward the other,
anchoring it to something like a chair, then go and get the second rope. Apart from those two
choices, they could grab one rope in one hand and use an implement, such as a long pole, to
pull the other string toward them.

However, very few found the fourth solution, which was swinging a rope back and forth like a
pendulum then grab hold of the other string. Not until Maier showed them a subtle hint did
they know what to do. His subjects were sitting there doing nothing for ten minutes, and
obviously, many of them felt that they were failing an important test, that they were stupid.
However, they were actually doing something; they just didn't know that they were. While their
conscious mind was blocked, their unconscious was scanning the room, sifting through
possibilities, processing every conceivable clue. The second it found the answer, it instantly
guided them, silently and surely, to the solution.

Quote: "Everyone had not one mind but two, and all the while their conscious mind was
blocked, their unconscious was sifting through possibilities and processing every conceivable
clue."

3. We link ideas much faster if they are associated already in our mind.

After the first two chapters, many of us might start to think snap decisions are always more
accurate than those made after careful analysis. But that’s not true. The truth is that unconscious
associations can corrupt rapid judgments, even in matters of life and death. The 29th president
of the United States is a great example of how dangerous decisions made based on unconscious
associations and rapid judgments could be.

This theory is proven right by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) developed by Greenwald,
Banaji, and Nosek. IAT helps them to prove that we make connections much faster between
pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between those that are unfamiliar
to us. When people are given simple words like Peggy, Lisa, Bob, and John, they have no
difficulty in deciding whether each name belongs to the male or female category. However,
when the two categories are Male or Family and Female or Career, it takes them more time to
think although the given words are still simple and familiar such as entrepreneur and
employment. That's because most of us have much stronger mental associations between men
and career-oriented concepts than we do with women and ideas related to careers.

Not only showing slight gender discrimination, but people who do the test also show that they
unconsciously prefer white to black, although that preference conflicts with their conscious
belief and attitude. Unconscious associations are powerful predictors of spontaneous actions.
Many of our actions, choices, and decisions are actually much less rational than we think.

In contrast with Warren Harding, Bob Golomb, the successful sales director of a Nissan
dealership, owes his success mainly to not judging based on the first appearance. Research
indicates that gender and skin color can strongly affect the prices offered to potential buyers.
And that rapid judgment of skin color and gender can lead many people astray.

The good news is that although snap judgments and rapid cognition are not in the realm of
conscious awareness, they could still be improved. First impressions are shaped by the existing
experience of a person and the environment around him/her; therefore, by changing the
environment to have different backgrounds, wrong snap judgments and rapid cognition can be
improved.

Quote: "We can alter the way we thin-slice—by changing the experiences that comprise those
impressions."

4. The equal role of logical and intuitive thinking.

There have been conflicts between logical thinking and instinctive thinking, even among
experts like scientists and psychologists. Some of highly support making decisions based on
logical and reasonable analysis, while some others hold a firm belief that unconscious thinking
leads to better decisions. Let’s look at several experiments to see who’s right and who’s wrong
!

Paul "Rip" Van Riper was a student of war, with clear ideas about how his men ought to conduct
themselves in combat. In 2002 when he had retired, he was approached by a group of senior
Pentagon officials who were in the earliest stages of planning for a war game. They needed
help from the man who was known as the Vietnam War hero.

In that game, Millennium Challenge '02, Paul played the part of rogue commander. This game
was created so as to test military strategies. There have been conflicts between even military
experts about whether wars can be predicted and controlled based on logic evidence. Many
believed that a rational approach and new technologies could dispel many of the unknowns of
war. However, Van Riper believed wars were unable for us to predict.

Sources of Power, a work of Gary Klein shows that decisions made under pressure are based
on experience much more than logical thinking of possible outcomes. Van Riper drew on that
work. During the war game, he chose strategies contrary to reasonable predictions and won the
team who relied on computerized analysis.

Contrary to Gary Klein's study, Cook County Hospital's Emergency Department relied on the
research of Lee Goldman. He came up with an algorithm designed to determine the right
treatment for people who suffered from chest pain. The therapy came out of algorithm was way
more accurate than the one came from experienced physicians, supporting the belief that too
much information could impede decision-making.

It’s believed that to make the right decisions, we need to rely on a balance between deliberate
and instinctive thinking. Logical and intuitive decision-making are both valuable; the key is to
know when to believe in which. He also argues that snap judgments are frugal to make snap
decisions, but to be a smart decision-maker, we need to edit those quick and unconscious
conclusions.

Quote: "Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and
instinctive thinking."

5. The first impressions of thin-slicing experts.

The rock musician known as Kenna instinctively appealed to music experts right after they met
him. He looked so much like a rock star with his height, handsomeness, shaved head and
goatee. However, he lacked a rock star’s swagger and braggadocio and staginess. But that
didn’t matter to the people in music business who he met through a friend. They all thought he
would be a superstar. Just as Harry Daugherty, they made the Warren Harding error. Consumer
research proved instinctive thinking of experts was wrong in this case, Kenna was nowhere
near a famous rock star. It means that snap decisions made out of quick judgments can be faulty
sometimes.

One classic example of how quick judgments can be faulty is Coke’s change to be like Pepsi.
After doing some surveys, Coke got the result that most customers preferred the taste of Pepsi.
Therefore, they changed Coke's taste by making it more like Pepsi. They thought customers
would like that idea. But they were not. Not at all. It turned out that people didn't decide which
cola brand to consume based on the first sip. In this case, thin-slicing failed because it provided
an incomplete context.

Most consumers were found to combine package and product on the unconscious level, as
illustrated by the success of margarine packaged in foil paper. It means that first impression
could be manipulated. It's called sensation transference.

Sometimes, bad and different are mistaken. For instance, television shows like All in the
Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show produced shock, but not necessarily dislike. Or
Coke's taste wasn't bad; it was just different from that of Pepsi. However, brands and market
researchers failed to discern the distinction.

That's because the first impressions of novices are nowhere near the first impressions of
experts. Only experts can enter and interpret the "locked room" of the unconscious but not
disrupting the impression. When novices try to explain their reactions, they tend to adjust their
reactions to align with reasons, which usually disrupts the impression. Only experts are
introspective about their impressions without impeding them. Novice impressions are not
entirely wrong; they're just hard to explain and easy to be disrupted.

Quote: "Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that
room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret
and decode what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions."

6. Mind-reading is a delicate art.

The case of Amadou Diallo, an innocent young man who was shot to death because police
officers misjudged his motivations illustrated that there could be errors in judgments made by
rapid cognitions. Those errors may result from the failure to infer cues that lead to actions,
stress, and time pressure.

When studying facial expressions, scientist Paul Ekman found out that the face "is not just a
signal of what is going on inside our mind," "it is what is going on inside our mind." Together
with Silvan Tomkins, he theorized that a standard set of rules control facial expressions, even
in different cultures. He created a taxonomy of facial expressions, including a variety of
combinations and the rules for interpreting them. This taxonomy is known as the Facial Action
Coding System (FACS).

They came to the conclusion that humans have no conscious control over several particular
aspects of facial expression. This contributes to our ability to "mind read" others, which is, in
essence, the process of thin-slicing others. Discerning patterns from a small amount of data
such as facial expressions, in this case, allows an individual to infer the inner state of another
human being. That's why autistic individuals cannot mind read; they have difficulty in
interpreting nonverbal cues such as gesture and facial expression.

The author argues that temporary mind-blindness is one of the reasons why sometimes first
impressions turn out to be inaccurate. It usually happens when we're in extreme stress like time
pressure when our body shuts down some sources of information and stops relying on logical
thinking and, instead, trusting an unconscious framework like stereotypes and prejudices. The
good news is that mind-reading can be much improved by cultivation.

Quote: "Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by

the muscles of the face."

7. All the essence of thinking in the blink of an eye.

For a long time, we have believed that the more important and complex the decision is, the
more time should be spent on considering. However, Malcolm Gladwell argues that hunches
and snap judgments can lead to way more accurate decisions than careful deliberation does.
That means snap thinking values. A lot of scientific studies have proven his claim. Samuel
Gosling's research showed that people who just saw a picture of a college student's dorm room
made better predictions about his/her emotional stability and openness to new ideas than that
student's close friends. Narrow windows of experience worked more effectively than a huge
amount of information in this case. It shows the power of thin-slicing.

Unconscious thinking process happens behind a locked door, which we are unable to see
through, which means we cannot articulate the thinking processes underlying our hunches. But
that doesn't mean snap judgments are random. Thin-slicing is the brain's ability to process
relevant information rapidly. They are remarkably reliable and valuable in successful decision-
making.

Despite praising the value of snap judgments, the author emphasizes that successful decision-
making requires both conscious and unconscious thinking. The way to know whether we
should believe logical or seemingly mysterious thought is to focus on crucial information.
Under the pressure of time, we usually rely on established associations like stereotypes instead
of sensory data.

Since first impressions, what is behind snap judgments are shaped by experience and
environment, they are in human control. Thin-slicing, the ability to discern patterns in a narrow
window of experience could be effectively improved by limiting the huge amount of input to
the most relevant data. Moreover, scientists found out that thin-slicing is mediated by
associations, which are the links between ideas at an unconscious level. And since experiences
shape those associations, first impressions can be formed through training.

Quote: "Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the
subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious."

Epilogue

There are many books on unconscious thinking; however, Blink: The Power of Thinking
Without Thinking (2005) revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Unconscious
thinking can be very powerful if we know how to do it right. The key is to improve thin-slicing
by cultivating mind-reading and adapting to a suitable environment to develop the right
impressions. By relying on a balance between logical and instinctive thinking, we will be much
less confused when making a decision and more likely to make it right.