I went on a big Malcolm Gladwell kick in the beginning of January — go back and check my posts, you’ll see — ending last week with the reading of Blink, so here’s my take on the book.
I’d read several reviews before Blink came out painting it as some sort of self-help manual … How rapid cognition can work for you! (To be fair, Gladwell sort of promises this himself, in his introduction, which I think was a bad move.) Many were skeptical, like David Brooks:
My first impression of ”Blink” — in blurb-speak — was ”Fascinating! Eye-Opening! Important!” Unfortunately, my brain, like yours, has more than just a thin-slicing side. It also has that thick-slicing side. The thick-slicing side wants more than a series of remarkable anecdotes. It wants a comprehensive theory of the whole. It wants to know how all the different bits of information fit together.
That thick-slicing part of my brain wasn’t as happy with ”Blink,” especially the second time through. Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered byproducts of the mysterious backstage process. (There have been books by people like Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner that go deeper into the brain chemistry of it.)
The thick-slicing side isn’t even sure what this book is about. Is it about first impressions, or intuition, or that amorphous blending of ”what is” with ”what could be” that we call imagination? In some of his stories, it’s regular people who are making snap judgments; in others, it’s experts who have been through decades of formal training. In some experiments, the environment matters a great deal; in others, the setting is a psychologist’s lab. In some, the snap judgments are based on methodical reasoning — as with a scientist who has broken facial expressions into discrete parts; in others, the snap-judgment process is formless and instinctive. In some, priming is all-important; in others, priming is disregarded.
Moreover, the thick-slicing part of my brain is telling me that while it would be pleasing if we all had these supercomputers in our heads, Gladwell is overselling his case. Most of his heartwarming stories involve the lone intuitive rebel who ends up besting the formal, bureaucratic decision-making procedure. Though Gladwell describes several ways intuition can lead people astray, he doesn’t really dwell on how often that happens. But I’ve learned from other books, notably David G. Myers’s more methodical but less entertaining ”Intuition,” that there is a great body of data suggesting that formal statistical analysis is a much, much better way of predicting everything from the outcome of a football game to the course of liver disease than the intuition even of experts.
(“Thin-slicing,” by the way, is what Malcolm Gladwell calls that first instant when our brain filters in only the relevant data.)
Don’t believe the hype. Or rather, don’t believe the backlash.
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