The basic premise of this book is that people make decisions in two different ways - logical conscious decisions using all of the information available, and 'thin slicing' which is mainly a subconscious process akin to intuition. It then goes on to suggest that we generally underestimate the quality of this intuitive decision making and that by learning to trust it and harness it we can be more successful and make better decisions in our lives.
The first few chapters are quite evangelical about this rapid instinctive decision making, and I nearly stopped reading this book becuase of that, although I am glad I stuck with it. For example, Gladwell describes this experiment as proof of how good instinctive, subconscious decisions are: There are 2 decks of cards, red and blue, and each card chosen either wins or loses a certain sum of money. Participants are asked to pick cards to try to win as much money as possible. Unknown to them the blue deck has small wins, but even smaller loses, and the red deck has some big wins, but some even bigger loses. Long before participants where able to consciously state a preference for the blue deck (which would win them more money) and explain why, they started to show a stress response to the red deck and without even realizing that they were doing it they chose more cards from the blue deck. This happened after around 10 cards had been picked, and is supposed to show how good the subconscious decision making is. But it fails to recognise that this experiment is set up in favor of this conclusion, and if the 'best' deck were alternated from red to blue every 10 cards or so, then the participants intuition would consistently lead them to choose from the worst deck, because by the time the tendency for one had formed it would already be the wrong one.
As the book goes on, however, it does become more balanced and objective, discussing in what context each kind of decision making is best and how to hraness them both to their full potential. There are also many fascinating examples, such as the fact that if you want to predict which doctors will, at some point in their career, be sued for malpractice then walking past the door of their consulting room and overhearing a muffled snippet of conversation with a patient provides a vastly superior basis for making this predictionthan studying all of their qualifications, statistics for patient outcomes, percentage of incorrect diagnoses, and so on.. This is because people just don't sue doctors whotalk to them in a friendly tone of voice, but they do sue doctors who are brusque or who use a superior tone of voice.
It really does turn into a fascinating read, and their are useful tips and tools which you can use, especially if you are in business / management or a position which involves high pressure decision making (or if you are a doctor who doesn't want to be sued!), but you do have to take it with a pinch of salt in places.
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Posted in Non Fiction by Factoid 417 days ago (http://www.amazon.com)Who Voted for this Story
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