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85 pages 2 hours read

Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2005

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Chapter 5-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “Kenna’s Dilemma: The Right—and Wrong— Way to Ask People What They Want”

Kenna wrote and performed unusual rock music that inspired musicians and record producers; rock band U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, heard him and said, “he’s going to change the world” (262-63)—yet consumer research companies found that the listening public didn’t much care for Kenna.

In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola's market share dipped as Pepsi made inroads. Coca-Cola researchers developed "New Coke," which did better than Pepsi in extensive market testing. When New Coke was launched, it was a disaster; consumers stage protests and the old recipe is quickly reintroduced as Classic Coke. New Coke fades away.

New Coke was based on sip-tests, but these can mislead. Sweetness, for example, tends to win with sip testers but becomes overpowering when someone drinks an entire can of something too sweet. Home-use tests—where tasters try out a case of the drinks in real-life conditions—are more reliable.

In the late 1940s, marketer Louis Cheskin discovered that people tend to confuse packaging with their feelings about the product inside. Margarine is naturally white and unpopular; when Cheskin has the margarine colored yellow, wrapped in foil—which connotes high quality—and put in a carton with a crown image and the name “Imperial Margarine,” sales take off. Cheskin’s firm later added yellow to the green Seven-Up cartons, and consumers reported the taste now had too much lemon and lime.

The problem with Kenna’s music is that radio stations rely on market testing that missed his live appeal: “Judging Kenna without that additional information is like making people choose between Pepsi and Coke in a blind taste test" (288).

Some products are so innovative that they seem bad at first. The Herman Miller Company designed the Aeron chair in the early 1990s to be as comfortable as technically possible; the result was a chair with no cushions that looked like an insect. Testers confirmed it was comfy but ugly. Herman Miller launched the product anyway, and at first sales were slow; however, many viewed it as a cult object, and the Aeron became Miller’s best-selling chair. It's now widely regarded as beautiful; the word “ugly” may simply have been early consumers’ way of saying “different.”

New and different products often fare poorly in market research because testers don’t know what to make of them. The innovative late 1960s television comedies All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show tested poorly—they were thought dull or abrasive—but became two of the most successful TV shows. Viewers didn’t hate the shows but were simply shocked by their newness.

Though most people can’t explain why they like or dislike a product—and verbalizing it distorts their original opinion—expert evaluators learn how to manage their impressions by breaking them into specific categories. Food tasters, for example, consider dozens of attributes of appearance, texture, and flavor, each on a 15-point scale. Years of practice let them make fine distinctions without distorting tasters' first impressions.

Diehard cola fans will argue that they can tell the difference between two colas, and often they are right. If, however, they test three glasses—a “triangle test” where the object is to pick which of the three drinks is different—only about one in three can answer correctly. Expert tasters, though, can handle the triangle test with ease.

Music experts and audiences who get the chance to hear it loved Kenna’s music. Top-40 radio, however, uses consumer research that sometimes generates incoherent and misleading opinions about new music styles—judgments that fail to capture the music’s potential to surprise and delight.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading”

In the South Bronx one evening in February 1999, four plainclothes police officers drove past a young, suspicious-looking black man standing on a front stoop. They approached him to talk but he ran away. The young man was Amadou Diallo, a recent immigrant from Guinea with limited English who feared the plainclothesmen were local ruffians out to rob him.

The police gave chase; Diallo turned and pulled something dark from his wallet. Thinking he had a gun, the officers fired on him. In moments, Diallo was dead, his wallet in his outstretched hand. Shocked by their mistake, one of the officers “sat down on the steps, next to Diallo’s bullet-ridden body, and started to cry" (336). The officers were charged with first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder.

In encounters with others, people make continuous, rapid-fire judgments of them, inferring and predicting their state of mind. Subtle facial expressions reveal intent; recognizing them involves thin-slicing. These impressions “would just come to you, blink" (337).

With Diallo, the officers made three crucial mistakes. They assumed a man out for some air was suspicious; they backed up and he was still there, instead of running away (but they ignored this fact); and they overreacted to Diallo’s reaching into his pocket. His death was due to a failure of the kind of mind reading people do all the time. The jury found the officers not guilty, but many people believed them guilty of racism, and protests broke out.

Psychology professor Silvan Tomkins had an uncanny ability to read faces. His student, Paul Ekman, proved that human facial expressions are universal, not culturally determined; Ekman also catalogued 3,000 individual expressions in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). He discovered that people who copy a given facial expression undergo the same emotions and physiological responses as people who simply recall and relive those feelings.

People can’t completely hide automatic micro-expressions; these aren't under conscious control and are detectable by observers to ascertain a person’s true feelings. If people could shut off those expressions, their ability to communicate would become severely limited—parents would be unable to know what their babies are feeling, couples would cease to be intimate, and so on.

Instead, people have a natural ability to read faces. How, then, did the police so badly misread Amadou Diallo? It seems like it would have been obvious: “Diallo was innocent, curious, and terrified—and every one of those emotions must have been written all over his face. Yet they saw none of it” (371).

In normal conversation, people watch each other’s faces, especially the eyes, for cues to the other person’s thoughts and feelings. Those with autism are unable to do this; they are “mind-blind” and must focus entirely on spoken words to glean anything from an interaction.

In example, an autistic patient, “Peter”—intelligent, independent, and holder of graduate degrees—watched the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, about an intense and difficult encounter between four people. Cameras monitored Peter’s eye movements; most viewers spend a great deal of time observing the actors’ faces and eyes, but Peter did little of this.

Human brains have a specific area—the fusiform gyrus—that recognizes faces; they use another, weaker area—the inferior temporal gyrus—to recognize objects. People with autism use the weaker area to deal with faces, as if faces were mere things, like chairs or hammers.

It’s possible, in stressful situations, that anyone could use their brain as people with autism do. Extreme arousal can make people mind-blind; they can no longer appropriately interpret other people’s faces and gestures. Police officers involved in shootings commonly report “extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down" (390). Heart rates are around 115 to 145 beats per minute; above that rate, motor skills and mental functions begin to break down, and actions become uncoordinated and inappropriately aggressive. Major urban riots have begun when police, chasing a suspect at high speed, become overly excited and beat up or kill the suspect.

In emergencies, there’s often little or no time to react thoughtfully, and the mind defaults to old biases and stereotypes. Two-officer teams get into more trouble than single officers do because two may rush forward with aggressive bravado where a solo officer would take a cautious moment to evaluate the situation.

With practice, emergency responders can learn not to panic. Gavin de Becker's private security company trains its bodyguards—using painful plastic marking capsules fired at them—to stay calm and in control even when hit by hostile fire.

People can learn to decipher micro-expressions, which improves mind reading. Ekman’s law enforcement seminars teach students in 35 minutes to correctly read a large group of tiny facial expressions. With such awareness, responders have more ways to read a situation and make better decisions.

Diallo died because the police, two of them new to the force and the neighborhood, became overly excited and, in a panic, catastrophically misread the situation.

Conclusion Summary: “Listening with Your Eyes: The Lessons of Blink”

Abbie Conant played trombone. In 1980, she auditioned behind a curtain for a position in the Munich Philharmonic, and the judges immediately want her; they sent home the other applicants. Then they discovered that she’s a woman, playing what they consider a man’s instrument. Though they admitted her to the orchestra, they tried in several ways to make her leave—demoting her, paying her less, and the like. She took them to court and won, largely because the conductor originally cried, “That’s who we want!” (443) when they first heard her play.

Orchestras are traditionally composed almost entirely of men; music directors believe women are weaker players. In recent decades, musicians have demanded more fairness, and audition candidates have started performing while hidden behind screens. The result is that orchestras have increased the number of women players fivefold.

Musicians sometimes appear belabored, nerdy, or unconfident, but their sound is excellent. Their appearance may turn the judges against them; even the particular instrument they perform—its materials or manufacturer—can cause bias. It's been said that, “There is only one way to make a proper snap judgment […] and that’s from behind a screen" (439).

Rapid cognition can be improved, and biases avoided, by making small changes to the settings in which intuitive judgments take place. Orchestras do it by putting player candidates behind screens; Thomas Hoving learns to do it by having works of art appear suddenly—surprising him in a closet or from under a black cloth pulled away quickly—so that his first impression is stripped of pre-judgment.

These small tweaks clear away the biases that cling to first impressions so that the true nature of the situation can shine through in an instant.

Afterword Summary

During the American Civil War, Union general Joe Hooker faced Robert E. Lee’s forces at Chancellorsville. Hooker had twice as many soldiers and more cannon than Lee and managed to sneak half his force behind Lee’s position. Instead of retreating into the waiting jaws of the rear guard, Lee’s men attacked to the front, stunning Hooker, then attacked him at his strongest point when those troops are eating dinner, causing them to flee in a rout.

War isn’t an arithmetic problem; it’s an activity that requires an ineffable quality of judgment. Lee, finding himself pressed from both front and behind, realized that Hooker’s forces are halved, so he attacked their front troops with his own comparable force and, using superior tactics, won the day.

Instinct is a powerful gift but fragile and easy to disrupt. The northern general, with his network of spies and observation balloons, knew much more than Lee about the disposition of forces, but sometimes too much information is thwarted by not enough information. Lee used counterintuitive tactics that interrupt Hooker’s flow of intuition, and Hooker—already intimidated by Lee’s reputation—simply caved in.

The US military, inundated in 1941 with information about Japanese forces, was surprised when the Asian nation bombed Pearl Harbor. Meanwhile, American journalists, with much less information, figured out the likely attack beforehand. At Chancellorsville, Pearl Harbor, and the Millennium Challenge, the losers had much more information than the winners did. What counts isn’t knowledge, but wisdom.

Black men are incarcerated for drug crimes at much higher rates than white men. Perhaps putting screens in the courtroom or placing the accused in a separate room where he communicates by text, might reduce the effects of unconscious bias during trials.

Research suggests that when choices involve few bits of information, people choose better by thinking it through, but when faced with large amounts of information, they fare better by going with their gut.

Chapter 5-Afterword Analysis

Chapters 5 and 6 present ways to improve intuition and fast thinking. The Conclusion and Afterword provide two additional stories that point up the value of quick perception, which can be nurtured and used to a person's best advantage.

Chapter 5 discusses fast-and-frugal thinking as it affects product marketing. Once they realize humans tend to make snap decisions about purchases, marketers refine their products’ packaging and advertising to make use of our tendency to employ mental shortcuts when shopping.

Some will argue that this merely takes advantage of weaknesses in mental fast thinking—gaming the Warren Harding effect, so to speak—but it’s also a way of quickly communicating the qualities marketers want their customers to recognize in their products. Sometimes the public reacts strongly and precisely to packaging changes—as when Seven-Up discovers that adding a bit of yellow to the soft drink’s green packaging causes people to believe the manufacturer has added more citrus flavor—which forces the marketing department to even more precisely refine their product’s appearance, lest it mislead buyers.

Chapter 6 tackles the most serious lesson in the book—the murder of Amadou Diallo by New York City police. It isn’t so much that the officers made errors of instinctive judgment—though they did—but that, in the heat of the moment, they lost the ability to correct those errors or make any further judgments. Gladwell discusses at length a number of ways first responders can train themselves to remain calm during emergencies so that their natural, instinctive ability to correctly read a situation doesn’t deteriorate under extreme circumstances.

Besides strong emotions, the other major distorter of quick thinking is internal bias. Chapter 3 touches on this idea, and it's again discussed in the Conclusion with the example of Abbie Conant’s blind audition that hid her gender and allowed her musical ability to clearly resonate with the judges.

Generally, orchestra members are expected to play in unison without gesticulating or over-emoting, but the same cannot be said for soloists, whose dramatic presentation can enhance a performance and improve an audience’s perception of the quality of the music they hear. This is an instance where visual bias actually benefits the artistic experience.

Related research shows that people who watch a music competition with the sound turned off can tell which musicians are the likely winners; generally, these are the overly emotional and dramatic ones. This indicates how much people enjoy music based on visual cues.

An orchestra needs little, from the rest of its players, in the way of stage drama; thus, the sound should be paramount. It’s not until screens are introduced—at first, simply to reduce political bias—that judges realize a lot of high-quality playing is being overlooked simply because some excellent candidates either lack stagecraft pizazz or are members of a minority group.

By simplifying the mass of sensory data and limiting it to the auditory channel, blind auditions remove inputs that can overload the mind with irrelevancies. The nervous system will try to make use of all stimuli, but in the end, it’s the ears—not the eyes—that really matter in music.

Back in the day, musicians and audiences believed that men were better players, especially of larger and louder instruments like trombones. As the cultural bias against women has faded—and as the quality of high-fidelity recordings has increased demand for perfection in sound—the value of blind auditions has increased.

Those old judgments that today seem stilted and biased weren’t “wrong” within the former setting; they were expected, and it didn’t occur to most listeners to question the all-male character of most ensembles. Today, however, those outdated attitudes don’t fit the urban world’s modern demand for greater participation and higher quality—attributes that are enhanced when more women and minorities have the opportunity to add their talents to classical music.

In these situations, people's instinctive minds aren’t stupid or evil or in dire need of moral correction; they’re simply trying to safely navigate through the existing culture. Gladwell believes that trying to improve equality by wagging fingers at people who haven’t yet awoken to the new standards simply won’t work. Instead, tweaking the environment—for example, by introducing blind auditions—is a much more effective way to shift people’s attitudes. (Lately, this approach is termed as “nudging.”)

The point of blind auditions isn’t to promote feminism; it’s to remove biases that arise from watching a player instead of listening to them. The new belief in greater equality and respect may be an improvement, but fast judgments will adapt to the changes either way. When the environment shifts, so do instinctive responses.

There are two types of problems susceptible to intuition: recognizing and acting. Recognizing, knowing at once that a musician is excellent or a kouros is fake, is a matter of seeing the essential pattern within a mass of sensory data. With enough experience, this can happen almost instantly. Acting—as with Riker’s Red Team, improvisational actors, or Lee at Chancellorsville—involves winnowing down the mass of available information until a huge problem converts into a simple one. Examples include choosing which pair of socks to wear or where to eat lunch—it's the kind of challenge that’s relatively easy to quickly think through to a successful conclusion. 

The Afterword appears in later editions of Blink. It describes the Civil War battle at Chancellorsville, where underdog General Robert E. Lee outthinks Union commander Joe Hooker in an approach similar to that taken by Paul Van Riker during his victory at the US military’s Millennium Challenge war games. The close resemblance of these battles and their winning strategies isn’t surprising, considering that Chancellorsville is Van Riper’s favorite battle in history.

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