85 pages • 2 hours read
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
How Fast-and-Frugal Thinking Serves Humans
People can size up a person or situation in seconds and successfully act on that judgment. This instant assessment of people and things—snap judgments, intuition, pattern recognition, simple common sense—is a natural part of the human nervous system, which can do almost instantly what it would take an expert days or weeks to deduce through logic and reasoning.
Somehow, the mind reaches into its vast store of knowledge and experience acquired over many years, and effortlessly pulls out the right answer to a given situation. Instead, when people try to solve a situation by carefully thinking it through, they wind up making bad decisions. Their first instinct, which they ignore, turns out to be the better answer.
This flies in the face of Western philosophy, namely, that the more information people have and the more thinking they do, the better responses will be. In fact, more information often makes judgments worse—not better.
Fast-and-frugal thinking proves especially helpful in cases where a situation is changing quickly—say, during an emergency—or when one must make important decisions in a very short time.
How Fast-and-Frugal Thinking Can Go Wrong
Quick responses sometimes can go amiss. It may be assumed, on meeting someone, that they possess traits believed common to members of their race or sex or age group, when in fact none of those aspects is true. Gladwell calls this the "Warren Harding error."
Quick thinking can break down during emergencies, when the heart races, and fear and excitement take over. At that point, people are on auto-pilot and have no ability to think, much less recognize subtle facial expressions on people encountered during this time. An example of this breakdown is the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo by New York City policemen, who mistook him for a criminal and shot him when he reached for his wallet.
These mistakes arise not from inherent flaws in rapid thinking, but from false biases absorbed from the surroundings—the Warren Harding error—or from strong emotions that disrupt the ability to coolly and accurately respond in real time to the world. This makes people “mind blind,” much like a person with autism who can’t read faces and must calculate appropriate responses to social situations.
How Fast-and-Frugal Thinking Can Be Improved
The first principle in improving the use of fast thinking is to use it. Western society encourages humans to solve problems by thinking them through carefully, perusing all the available information sources. Up to a point, this can be useful, especially when people need to prime their brains with data prior to doing creative or inventive work, as when Van Riper’s Red Team carefully studies the field of battle, arrangement of forces, and availability of resources before launching a campaign against the enemy.
However, studious research can lead to overthinking, which distorts the decision-making process. It’s better to simply absorb information without trying to make too much sense of it, and then let the mind digest the data in its own way. Soon enough, good ideas will pop up unbidden—ideas that can lead to good results.
Snap judgments can be made more accurate in multiple ways. The first is to remove unconscious bias by, for example, interacting with the cultures and daily lives of minorities until they are viewed as real and worthwhile human beings, instead of one-dimensional symbols of slanted beliefs.
Bias also diminishes through the removal of extraneous inputs, as orchestras do when they place candidate musicians behind screens so their music and not their appearance is at the forefront, or when Thomas Hoving has his assistants surprise him with sudden reveals of artworks, thereby preventing his mind from building up anticipatory preconceptions.
To reduce judgment failures during emergencies, first responders train in simulations to stay calm and observant under stress. They also learn to increase “white space," the distance between a responder and a suspect, which gives them more time to gather information, make better judgments, and avoid overexcitement or panic.
The most important points to remember, when working to improve instinctive judgment, are (1) don’t overthink a situation, (2) don’t prejudge by appearances, and (3) don’t panic.
Unlock all 85 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Malcolm Gladwell
