Blink

The statue that didn't look right, and thin-slicing

In 1983 the J. Paul Getty Museum in California was offered a marble kouros, a Greek statue of a standing youth, for close to $10 million. The museum spent 14 months checking it. A geologist examined the surface and found a thin layer of calcite that seemed to take centuries to form. Lawyers traced the paperwork. The Getty bought the statue. Then it showed the piece to experts. Federico Zeri, an art historian, looked at the fingernails and felt something was wrong. Evelyn Harrison, a specialist in Greek sculpture, felt a jolt of doubt the instant she saw it. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum, said the first word that came to mind was "fresh." None of them could explain their reaction at first. Later investigation showed the documents were forged and the statue was probably a modern fake.

Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer at The New Yorker, uses this story to frame the book. In the first two seconds of looking, the experts reached a better conclusion than the Getty's team did in 14 months. Blink asks three questions. When are snap judgments reliable? When do they fail? And can we control and improve them?

Gladwell borrows the term adaptive unconscious from psychologist Timothy Wilson. It is a part of the mind that processes large amounts of data quickly and quietly, like a mental computer. It is not the Freudian unconscious. It is the system that lets you duck a thrown object before you know you have seen it.

The skill he calls thin-slicing is the ability of this system to find patterns from a very narrow slice of experience. His main example is John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington who ran a "love lab." Gottman recorded couples talking for 15 minutes about a point of disagreement, coded every second of the conversation for emotion, and used the results to predict with about 90 percent accuracy whether the couple would still be married 15 years later. With an hour of tape he reached 95 percent. The key signal was contempt, one of what Gottman calls the Four Horsemen (the others are criticism, defensiveness and stonewalling). A marriage has a signature, and a short sample contains it.

Other examples follow. Psychologist Nalini Ambady showed students silent video clips of teachers as short as two seconds. Their ratings matched the end-of-semester evaluations of students who sat through the full course. In another of her studies, judges who heard only the tone of surgeons' voices, with the words filtered out, could predict which surgeons had been sued for malpractice. Psychologist Samuel Gosling found that strangers who spent 15 minutes looking at a student's dorm room judged the student's conscientiousness and openness better than the student's close friends did. The room was a thin slice.

Gladwell closes the chapter with the Iowa gambling experiment by Antonio Damasio's team. Players drew cards from four decks, two of which were rigged to lose. Players began to sweat when reaching for the bad decks after about ten cards, before they could say why. Their bodies knew before their conscious minds did.

The locked door

The second chapter explains why snap judgments are hard to describe. Gladwell calls the adaptive unconscious a locked door: we get the output but not the reasoning. Vic Braden, a tennis coach, could tell when a player was about to double-fault before the ball was hit, with near-perfect accuracy, but he could never explain how.

Gladwell describes priming experiments by psychologist John Bargh. Students who unscrambled sentences containing words such as "Florida," "gray" and "wrinkle" walked more slowly down the hall afterward. Students primed with rude words interrupted an experimenter sooner. Gladwell also cites a study where Black students who identified their race before a test scored worse. The point is that behavior is shaped by cues we never notice.

The chapter's warning is the storytelling problem. When asked to explain an intuition, people make up a plausible story. In a speed-dating study by Sheena Iyengar and Raymond Fisman, participants said in advance what they wanted in a partner, then chose people who did not match their stated preferences, then revised their stated preferences to match their choices. Asking people why they feel what they feel can distort the feeling itself. Gladwell recounts a study in which students who were asked to explain why they liked a poster ended up less happy with their choice than those who just picked one.

The Warren Harding error

The third chapter is about the dark side of thin-slicing. Warren Harding became president of the United States in 1920 largely because he looked like a president: tall, handsome, dignified. He is widely regarded as one of the worst presidents in history. Gladwell calls this the Warren Harding error: a snap judgment that is driven by a surface cue, such as appearance, and that then shuts down deeper thinking.

The tool for measuring this is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek. The test measures how quickly people pair words and faces. Most people, including Gladwell himself, who is half Jamaican, are faster to pair white faces with positive words than Black faces with positive words. The result is not a measure of stated beliefs. It measures associations absorbed from the culture, and those associations affect behavior in the first seconds of an encounter.

Gladwell adds data on height: in his survey of Fortune 500 CEOs, about 30 percent were 6 feet 2 or taller, against under 4 percent of American men. Then he visits Bob Golomb, a car salesman in Flemington, New Jersey, who sells about twice the average. Golomb's rule is to treat every customer the same way and to never judge from appearance. Studies by law professor Ian Ayres found that Chicago car dealers quoted Black and female shoppers higher prices than white men, even when the shoppers followed identical scripts. The dealers were not necessarily racist in their stated beliefs. Their snap judgments did the work.

Paul Van Riper's big victory

The fourth chapter contrasts two ways of deciding. In 2002 the US military ran Millennium Challenge, a war game that cost about $250 million. The Blue Team, representing the United States, had enormous data, computer models and a decision process called Operational Net Assessment. The Red Team, a rogue Persian Gulf commander, was led by retired Marine general Paul Van Riper. Van Riper used motorcycle couriers and light signals instead of radios, launched a surprise attack with small boats and cruise missiles, and sank most of the Blue fleet in the first day. The exercise was then reset and scripted so that Blue would win.

Gladwell uses this to argue that more information is not always better. He draws on Gary Klein's research on firefighters, who do not compare options in a crisis but recognize a pattern and act, and on improv comedy, where the rule of accepting every offer lets a group make fast decisions without planning. The strongest example is Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Brendan Reilly, the chairman of medicine, adopted an algorithm by cardiologist Lee Goldman for deciding which chest-pain patients to admit. It used only a few factors: the ECG, unstable angina, fluid in the lungs and low blood pressure. Doctors with much more information, including age, weight, smoking and history, did worse than the simple rule. Extra data added confidence but not accuracy. Gladwell's conclusion: good snap judgment requires both spontaneity and structure. Van Riper gave his team freedom within a framework, and Reilly gave doctors a rule that focused them on what mattered.

Kenna's dilemma

The fifth chapter asks when first impressions should not be trusted. Kenna is a musician whose demo thrilled record executives, radio programmers and fans at live shows, but who scored badly in market research with ordinary listeners. Gladwell argues that the test audience was being asked to judge something unfamiliar in a format that could not capture it.

He compares this with the Pepsi Challenge. In sip tests, people prefer Pepsi, which is sweeter. Coca-Cola responded with New Coke in 1985, which won sip tests and failed in the market. A sip test measures the first sip, not a whole can, and it strips away the brand. The Aeron chair from Herman Miller scored poorly in early comfort and appearance tests because it looked strange, yet it became the best-selling office chair in the company's history. Gladwell describes sensation transference, the idea of marketing researcher Louis Cheskin that people transfer their reaction to a package onto the product inside, as with margarine colored yellow to look like butter. The lesson is that snap judgments about new things are unreliable, and that experts who have trained their reactions, such as the food tasters who can describe a product on dozens of scales, give better first impressions than untrained consumers.

Seven seconds in the Bronx, and listening with your eyes

The sixth chapter is built around the death of Amadou Diallo. In February 1999, four plainclothes New York police officers saw Diallo, a West African immigrant, standing on his stoop in the Bronx. They thought he looked like a suspect. He reached for his wallet. They thought it was a gun and fired 41 shots. The whole sequence took about seven seconds.

Gladwell explains this as a failure of mind-reading. He describes the work of Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, who cataloged the facial muscles into the Facial Action Coding System and showed that fleeting expressions reveal emotion. He then describes research by Ami Klin on autism: when an autistic man watched the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, his eye tracking showed he looked at a light switch rather than at the actors' faces. Gladwell argues that extreme stress produces a kind of temporary autism. Research by Dave Grossman on heart rate shows that above about 145 beats per minute, fine motor skills and perception degrade, and above 175, people stop processing what they see. The officers, under stress and moving fast, lost the ability to read Diallo's face. Gladwell notes that police departments that switched to one-officer patrol cars saw officers slow down and take fewer risks, because they had no partner to perform for. The fix for bad snap judgments is often time and distance.

The conclusion returns to the kouros and adds the story of trombonist Abbie Conant. In 1980 she auditioned for the Munich Philharmonic behind a screen, and the conductor, Sergiu Celibidache, declared her the one he wanted. When she walked out and the orchestra saw she was a woman, she was demoted and sidelined for years. Once orchestras adopted blind auditions, the share of women in major American orchestras rose several times over. Gladwell's final argument: snap judgments can be controlled by changing the environment in which they happen. Remove the cue that triggers the bias and the judgment improves.

What the critics say

Reviewers such as Richard Posner argued that the book has no clear thesis: it says intuition is powerful, then says it is unreliable, and offers no rule for telling the two apart. Several of the priming studies Gladwell cites, including John Bargh's slow-walking experiment, failed to replicate in later research, and the Implicit Association Test's power to predict behavior is now disputed. Critics also note that Gladwell tends to build arguments from vivid stories rather than systematic evidence.

Who should read it

Read it if you want to understand why first impressions feel so convincing and when to trust them. It suits managers, hiring teams and anyone who makes fast decisions under pressure. Readers who want a more rigorous treatment of the same questions should pair it with Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.