blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. 

4/5 rating. 

Book #28 of 2020. Read May 6, 2020.

This is a great book about our unconscious thoughts and the ways they affect our daily lives.

Malcolm does an amazing job of using different stories to show: how effective quick decisions can be; when to accept these decisions and when to be skeptical of them; and convince us that these quick decisions can be honed and improved.

Malcolm says:

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

This misunderstanding applies not only to the quick judgments on whether a piece of art is a forgery, but also to a police officer’s split-second decision of whether to shoot. These decisions spread the gambit from mundane to life-altering and it is hard when biases come into play and our past experiences are impacting our thoughts. Sometimes too much information can hurt us and slow down our decision making, other times, this info really matters.

As Malcolm so eloquently says:

“It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works – and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment – it is our responsibility to act.”

Unfortunately, the hardest thing to know, is when we should rely on our snap judgments, and when we should take in more info, if you want to get some wonderful insight into this, go check out #blink and see how it can change your thinking and impact your life.

Quotes:

“If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way – who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those you have for whites – it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.”

“An officer with a partner is no safer than an officer on his own. Just as important, two-officer teams are more likely to have complaints filed against them. With two officers, encounters with citizens are far more likely to end in an arrest or an injury to whomever they are arresting or a charge of assaulting a police officer. Why? Because when police officers are by themselves, they slow things down, and when they are with someone else, they speed things up. ‘All cops want two-man cars,’ says de Becker. ‘You have a buddy, someone to talk to. But one-man cars get into less trouble because you reduce bravado. A cop by himself makes an approach that is entirely different. He is not as prone to ambush. He doesn’t charge in. He says, “I’m going to wait for the other cops to arrive.” He acts more kindly. He allows more time.’”

“Fyfe once ran a project in Dade County, Florida, where there were an unusually high number of violent incidents between police officers and civilians. You can imagine the kind of tension that violence caused. Community groups accused the police of being insensitive and racist. The police responded with anger and defensiveness; violence, they said, was a tragic but inevitable part of police work. It was an all-too-familiar script. Fyfe’s response, though, was to sidestep that controversy and conduct a study. He put observers in squad cars and had them keep a running score of how the officers’ behavior matched up with proper training techniques…What Fyfe found was that the officers were really good when they were face-to-face with a suspect and when they had the suspect in custody. In those situations, they did the ‘right’ thing 92 percent of the time. But in their approach to the scene they were terrible, scoring just 15 percent. That was the problem. They didn’t take the necessary steps to steer clear of temporary autism. And when Dade County zeroed in on improving what officers did before they encountered the suspect, the number of complaints against officers and the number of injuries to officers and civilians plummeted. ‘You don’t want to put yourself in a position where the only way you have to defend yourself is to shoot someone,’ Fyfe says. ‘If you have to rely on your reflexes, someone is going to get hurt – and get hurt unnecessarily. If you take advantage of intelligence and cover, you will almost never have to make an instinctive decision.’”

“But one of the things that Van Riper taught me was that being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous course of education and experience.”

“When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated – when we have to juggle many different variables – then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.”

“Nationwide, the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men is thirteen times greater than the rate for white men. In ten states black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at rates that are 26 to 57 times greater than those of white men in the same state.”

“Justice is supposed to be blind. It isn’t.”

“What if we put screens in the courtroom? We have a jury system in the Western world based on the idea that goes back to antiquity: that the accused has the right to confront his accusers and to be judged by a jury of his peers. Back then it was thought that for justice to be achieved, the jury, the accuser, and the accused all had to see one another. But now we know more: we know that what we see – particularly when it is the color of someone’s skin, or gender, or age – does not always aid understanding. Sometimes we can make better judgments with less information. I think that the accused in a criminal trial shouldn’t be in the courtroom. He or she should be in another room entirely, answering questions by e-mail or through the use of an intermediary. And I think that all evidence and testimony in a trial that tips the jury off to the age or race or gender of the defendant ought to be edited out.”

“This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works – and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment – it is our responsibility to act.”

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