To Think or to Blink?

(Edi­tor’s Note: Should Ham­let be liv­ing with us now and read­ing best­sellers, he might be won­der­ing: To Blink or not to Blink? To Think or not to Think? We are pleased to present, as part of our ongo­ing Author Speaks Series, an arti­cle by Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart Peo­ple Do Dumb Things. In it, she offers the “on the oth­er hand” to Mal­colm Glad­well’s Blink argument.)

To Think or to Blink?

- By Madeleine Van Hecke, PhD

Is thought­ful reflec­tion nec­es­sar­i­ly bet­ter than hasty judgments?

Not accord­ing to Mal­colm Glad­well who argued in his best-sell­ing book, Blink, that the deci­sions peo­ple make in a blink are often not only just as accu­rate, but MORE accu­rate, than the con­clu­sions they draw after painstak­ing analysis.

So, should we blink, or think?

When we make judg­ments based on a thin slice of time  a few min­utes talk­ing with some­one in a speed dat­ing sit­u­a­tion, for exam­ple are our judg­ments real­ly as accu­rate as when we ana­lyze end­less reams of data?

Glad­well says sure  that’s why Blink is called the pow­er of think­ing with­out think­ing. Glad­well tells some com­pelling sto­ries to demon­strate that pow­er, includ­ing his open­ing gam­bit about the Greek kouros sculp­ture that two experts accu­rate­ly detect­ed as a fake with­in a few moments perusal, after months of sci­en­tif­ic test­ing had deemed it genuine.

But Glad­well’s own exam­ples show that peo­ple are most like­ly to be cor­rect in their blink judg­ments when they are like the two art experts when their judg­ments rest on a moth­er lode of back­ground expe­ri­ence or infor­ma­tion. So a blink judg­ment might serve you well at those times but the rest of the time, you need to slow down in order to avoid the blind spots that can trip up even the smartest peo­ple. In my book, Blind Spots, I sug­gest tac­tics to help one make bet­ter deci­sions because they help side­step the pit­falls that our blind spots keep us from seeing.

While some “blink” deci­sions can be on tar­get when they’re based on our exper­tise, they don’t always serve us well, for two rea­sons. First, because in high­ly-charged, emo­tion­al sit­u­a­tions  such as when a police offi­cer becomes sus­pi­cious of some­one and fears dan­ger  blink deci­sions can result in tragedy. Glad­well acknowl­edges this he notes that some police depart­ments have adopt­ed one-offi­cer squad cars. Why? Because an offi­cer alone will act more slow­ly, often wait for back-up. This delays the time between becom­ing sus­pi­cious and tak­ing action, and it appar­ent­ly reduces the num­ber of inac­cu­rate blink-deci­sions that offi­cers make.

In Blind Spots, I point out that fail­ing to stop and think is a blind spot  we don’t think because we don’t rec­og­nize this is a sit­u­a­tion in which I real­ly need to step back from what’s going on and fig­ure out what to do. As a result we shoot off an e‑mail that we lat­er regret, or exu­ber­ant­ly embrace a flawed mar­ket­ing plan. Every time you have ever said I real­ize now, you’re rec­og­niz­ing an ear­li­er time where you failed to stop and think.

The sec­ond rea­son that expert blink deci­sions can go astray is because some­times our very exper­tise blinds us to new, more cre­ative per­spec­tives. Why, for exam­ple, did peo­ple design ear­ly train cars with no cen­tral aisles, and with brakes that had to be oper­at­ed by a con­duc­tor seat­ed out­side, on top of the train car  a dan­ger­ous prac­tice? Because these ear­ly cars were almost exact repli­cas of what the expert design­ers were most famil­iar with the stage­coach. So our exper­tise can some­times trap us.

Now, I think intu­ition is impor­tant, and one of the good things about Blink is that it’s kind of a cor­rec­tive book, one that cel­e­brates the val­ue of intu­itive think­ing and pokes fun a bit at care­ful, ana­lyt­ic rea­son­ing. But Blink over­sim­pli­fies the issue. Blind Spots reflects more deeply on the ten­sion between ana­lyt­ic thought and intu­ition. It’s a mis­take to enthrone log­ic as the sole and sure-fire way to Truth, but it’s also a mis­take to blithe­ly accept every whim as inspired. A bet­ter slo­gan might be Don’t believe every­thing that you think. The strate­gies in Blind Spots help you fig­ure out what you should and should­n’t believe.

Some of the sto­ries that Glad­well tells are tes­ti­mo­ny to the mys­tery of our minds, and I absolute­ly agree that our minds often work in mys­te­ri­ous ways. But that mys­tery goes way beyond the nature of intu­ition. Take the evi­dence that chil­dren can be incred­i­bly log­i­cal in their think­ing. One three-year-old girl was being teased by her Aunt, who was nib­bling at the child’s toes and threat­en­ing I’m going to eat you up No! said the lit­tle girl, I’m going to eat you up! Aha, said the Aunt, but I’m big­ger than you, so I’ll eat you up first. Uh-uhre­tort­ed this young­ster: because I’ll eat your mouth first. The log­ic of this preschool­er is quite breath­tak­ing. How did she do that?

On the oth­er hand, there’s also research that rais­es the oppo­site ques­tion: the How could any­one be so dumb? ques­tion. Some stud­ies, for exam­ple, show that intel­li­gent adults con­sis­tent­ly make mis­takes in rea­son­ing. How do you explain that? To me, the appar­ent stu­pid­i­ty of adults the enig­ma of why smart peo­ple do dumb things is a puz­zle to be solved.

Smart peo­ple do dumb things because our minds work FOR us  80 or 90 per­cent of the time. But the rest of the time they work against us: they cre­ate blind spots that trip us up. Some of these blind spots are famil­iar to us, like my-side bias — not see­ing anoth­er point of view. One smart fel­low told me what he did to get a squir­rel out of his base­ment. He opened a win­dow, piled up some planks and box­es to cre­ate a road, and set down a trail of nuts, end­ing with a heap on the patio. Now that MIGHT have been a smart thing to do — but it could have back­fired. Because that trail went both ways  pos­si­bly lead­ing the trou­ble­some squir­rel out of the base­ment, but pos­si­bly lead­ing oth­er squir­rels INTO the base­ment. Some smart plans fail because of my-side bias. For­get­ting that there’s anoth­er point of view is one of the nat­ur­al blind spots that work against us.

It takes some time, it takes some effort it takes more than a blink  but pay­ing atten­tion to your Blind Spots can help you think more crit­i­cal­ly and more creatively.

– Madeleine Van Hecke, Ph.D., is a licensed clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist, speak­er, con­sul­tant, and author. She is the author of Blind Spots: Why Smart Peo­ple Do Dumb Things (Prometheus Books, Inc., 2007).

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy read­ing this relat­ed article:

• Why Smart Brains Make Stu­pid Deci­sions.