Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Telegraphers tap out messages in Morse Code—a series of dots and dashes that represent letters and words—and each operator has a distinctive style, or “fist," that can be detected by listeners. During World War II, British women learned to recognize enemy code senders by their “fists," which helped the Allies learn about enemy troop movements. The idea of a “fist” is transferable to other areas as well, such as the unique communication styles of married couples.

Developed in the 1970s by cardiologist Lee Goldman, the Goldman algorithm simplified the diagnosis of heart ailments by using a four-point test, including the patient’s ECG record and three questions: “(1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina? (2) Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs? and (3) Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?" (230). Brendan Reilly, chairman of Cook County Hospital’s medicine department in the 1990s, applied the Goldman system to patient intake interviews and improved diagnostic accuracy by 70%.

When looking at other people, personal biases affect the view. Thus, a white person doesn’t encounter, for example, a black person but, unconsciously, a member of a group the white person may regard as socially inferior. Instead of seeing a woman for her individual qualities, she may be looked upon as a member of a group that can’t perform certain tasks as well as a man can.

These implicit biases affect judgment, bending subtly attitudes and behavior, even if there is no conscious recognition of bias. Researchers conduct word-association tests that reveal such prejudice even among the most consciously open-minded of test takers. Author Gladwell, whose mother is a Jamaican black woman, took such a test and discovered that even he holds some bias against people of African descent.

A kouros is an ancient Greek statue of a young male nude. In 1983, the Getty Museum in California considered an offer of a kouros in rare excellent condition—a prestigious find; their careful scientific and forensic analysis suggested that the $10 million artwork was genuine. However, nearly every antiquities expert shown the kouros immediately reacted with skepticism. On further inspection, the kouros was determined to be a probable fake. The Getty kouros demonstrates how evaluators—in this case, trying to justify a much-desired purchase—can ignore their instincts and make embarrassing blunders. 

Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) is a multi-service military department that manages a set of war games called Millennium Challenge, which, in 2002, practiced for war in the Middle East, pitting the US Blue Team against Paul Van Riker’s Red Team in a test of JFCOM’s new, sophisticated, and computerized war analysis procedures. When Van Riker defeated them, JFCOM rewrote the rules so Blue Team could win, leaving unanswered whether the US’s new analytical data-management system was ready for an actual battle.

Snap judgments can prove uncannily correct despite human inability to explain them. The brain works out such decisions in the background—unconsciously—and the method remains hidden behind a psychological “locked door.” Attempts to describe in detail such decisions—as when describing how a face is recognized, or why a particular food is liked—can, through “verbal overshadowing," tamper with and damage the original instinct.

Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) built a comprehensive war-planning system designed to calculate the most optimal war strategies and tactics. Millennium Challenge was a set of war games meant to test the new system, played in 2002. JFCOM invited retired Marine officer Paul Van Riper to assemble a Red Team that played a rogue leader whose forces threatened a US naval group in the Persian Gulf, while JFCOM’s Blue Team used its systematic approach to cripple Red Team’s forces prior to battle. Despite superior numbers and data-crunching capabilities, Red Team trumped Blue Team. The Pentagon fixed this problem by rewriting the rules of engagement so that Red Team could no longer use its winning tactics, and Blue Team finally got its victory. 

Mind reading is the ability to tell, by looking at a person’s facial expressions, what that person is feeling—and even thinking—in the moment. Most people are fairly good at this, but it’s possible to improve the skill by making a careful study of “micro-expressions"—the tiny movements of facial muscles that accompany emotions and cannot be suppressed by the conscious mind. People with autism are unable to read faces and must struggle to appropriately respond to others; in situations of extreme emergency, a first responder’s stress levels can climb so high that they may become effectively “mind blind” like someone with autism. This can cause catastrophes, as when police officers, encountering a potentially dangerous suspect, become overly excited, and their judgment deteriorates to the point where, instead of proceeding with caution, they begin firing their weapons in a panic.

The human mind can almost instantly size up people and situations by focusing on a few essential traits. These traits vary by situation, but with practice, people get very good at recognizing signs of danger, opportunity, and the probable mental states of persons they encounter. The speed of the process depends on limiting the problem to a few variables; this “thin-slices” the mass of sensory inputs until only a few important ones remain. Thin-slicing contrasts with careful reasoning, which is good for studying a problem, but largely useless during a rapidly changing situation. 

It’s easy to remember or recognize someone’s face but hard to describe that face in words. Moreover, the act of verbalizing a face’s characteristics causes the memory of the face to distort and become “overshadowed” by the act of verbalizing it.