How much can you learn about something or someone in the blink of an eye?
According to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink,” the answer is far more than you would ever think. I’ll do my best to avoid rhyming for the rest of this post, but no promises.
Gladwell writes about many different studies and situation in which people rely on their first impression. The result is that a lot of times it appears that your first inkling, that very first feeling you get when you look at someone, can often be right.
One of his examples is a study of teacher effectiveness. Researchers compared evaluations from students after a semester of class with people who only saw short clips of the same teacher. Those short clips were just 10 seconds long, then cut to five and eventually two seconds — all without sound. In the end, those evaluating the teacher based on a two second clip without sound came up with virtually the same results as those who took an entire semester course.
It is that kind of first impression that can be very useful in helping us move through our lives. If something feels wrong, there’s a good chance there is a problem. What Gladwell says is that in many of those experiences you don’t can’t express why you feel the way you do because that information is buried in your subconscious.
Sometimes it takes time for the active part of your brain to catch up and be able to make sense of what your body instinctively already figured out.
Another extension of that thought is the idea of “priming,” which involves cueing someone to an action without them realizing they are being affected in that way.
One study Gladwell brings up here involves subjects who have to walk down a long hallway to reach a testing room. There they are giving sets of five words — three of which can be put together to make a simple sentence. They are asked to do so as quickly as possible. What they don’t know is that one word in each group are designed to make them feel old (Florida, gray, lonely). Then they compare how quickly the subjects walk down the hallway afterwards, and found they walk much more slowly.
The implications of priming could have some of the most practical value of the things Gladwell brings up in the book. He also writes about a study similar to one I read a few years ago in which minority students were asked to list their race before taking a test, with a control group taking the test without the classification.
The outcomes of these tests have all shown that when students are asked to list their race, they tend to perform as a stereotypical student of that race. Black students score much lower overall, Asian students score higher on math, etc. Those in the control groups don’t show those changes in performance, which are dramatic differences.
Gladwell writes that this book is much less of a call-to-action type of read than his first. I wrote about “The Tipping Point” last year, which breaks down society into different groups of people needed to take an idea/product/etc. from slow adoption to prevalence in our society.
If we are to give attention to one idea in “Blink” it has to be the effects of priming. Standardized tests exist for the purpose of comparing a large set of students on what is supposed to be an equal playing field. But there exist very real implications if we have priming questions that so grossly distort the performance of many test-takers.
One of the reasons there are boxes for race on national tests are to collect the data necessary to evaluate how scores change over time within and among certain groups. Take away those questions, and we lose the data. But with so many studies showing that those boxes can have such an adverse effect on the outcomes of the test, do we need to continue collecting what we know is compromised data?
“Blink” also opens a Pandora’s box of feeling manipulated by corporate America. As I begin to catch up with the rest of the world on the show “Mad Men,” there are lots of parallels about how seemingly simple things have a huge effect on how a product sells. Change a bottle, the color of the shirt the mascot is wearing on the label, and you have a chunk of market share.
Gladwell talks about the Pepsi Challenge, in which soda drinkers were blindfolded and given sips of Pepsi and Coke and asked to pick which one they prefer. The result was a big win for Pepsi, as far as the Challenge went. When it came to sales, Pepsi still lagged. Gladwell interviewed a former Pepsi executive who said that type of sip test brings a “blink” judgment, one that will always be won by the sweeter product. Over time, however, tests in which people have the product in their home for a week or a month are far more effective in determining future sales.
If you’re interested in how our judgment can help make decisions before our brains even know what’s going on, definitely dive into this one. I don’t think you can go wrong with Gladwell’s style and the interesting ways he looks at the way we react to our world. That said, if you’re new to Gladwell I think “The Tipping Point” is about 1 percent better.
