blink - malcolm gladwell

“I think that the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgment is one of the great challenges of our time.”

thin-slicing: making snap judgments with our “adaptive unconscious”. quick decisions are just as good, if not better, than decisions made after serious pondering.

“adaptive unconscious” - “does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient matter.”

• sometimes, reasoning your intuition could lead to incorrect conclusions; we make these snap judgments more often than you may think, and often invent rationalizations afterward (even though they are not true)

• first impression matters.

• you can get more info about a person from looking at their room for thirty minutes, than getting to know them for half a year.

“you can learn as much – or more – from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.”

practice practice practice. become an expert. an untrained intuition leads to ineffective thin-slicing. it may draw wrong parallels with similar experiences. even improv actors practice their unscripted scenes.

market research doesn’t necessarily indicate true consumer behavior – take the aeron chair, for instance. sometimes, experts have a better intuition. (see: coca-cola vs pepsi story, the kenna guy on radio)

rid yourself of prejudice: experience new things. you aren’t a bad person for defaulting to biased views, simply inexperienced (think a model, trained on skewed data). (see: race iat (implicit association test))

condition your mind. reading more about women in power, for instance, will help dispel harmful stereotypes about powerless women.

be confident in your judgment.

filter out irrelevant detail (quality absolutely beats quantity)- what makes a good trombone player isn’t the gender, nor stature – it’s the sound (there’s a story about how a female trombone player excelled in blind auditions, when women weren’t expected to handle such a masculine instrument).

• also: van riper – you can have a wide variety of decision-making tools in war, but sometimes it’s better to make snap judgments from only the most relevant detail.

• the heart condition chart - using a simple decision tree considering 3 factors rather than in-depth tests.

“Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”

thin-slicing can go wrong: think about president harding, one of the worst presidents, but elected for his appearance (the warren harding error)

“effectively (temporarily) autistic”

priming: words can influence behavior (i.e. using positive words -> positive response, angry words -> angry response)

• take control of your priming. we’re always being subconsciously primed by our surroundings, culture.

‘The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious – from behind a locked door inside of our brain – but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control’.

in some situations, when split second decisions are unwise, make sure you optimize your position so that you avoid these situations as much as possible (i.e. police discourage/ban high-speed chases to avoid the primal violence/high that could lead to police brutality)