Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Near the University of Washington campus, there’s a “love lab” where married couples go for testing by researcher John Gottman. The couples are hooked up to electrodes and sensors and videotaped as they interact about contentious issues in their relationship. Gottman codes every second of video for each spouse’s displayed emotions, such as disgust, contempt, anger, whining, neutrality, sadness, and so forth. The data is plugged into equations, and the marriages’ likely outcomes can be predicted.

According to Gottman, the ratio of positive to negative feelings should be at least five to one or the marriage may be in trouble. Gottman asked couples to tell the story of how they met; their initial interaction predicted their behavior later. Gottman and his colleagues discovered that it takes only three minutes of watching the tapes of interactions to accurately estimate the likelihood that a couple will remain married.

During the Second World War, the British used thousands of women as interceptors of German Morse Code transmissions. Before long, the women learned to recognize individual operators by their “fist,” or style and cadence of code clicks. They could tell a sender from only a few characters. Combined with other information, the women distinguished which German operators moved to new locations to inform the British about troop movements.

At Gottman’s lab, couples also betrayed a signature style of interaction. Sometimes they fell into “negative sentiment override,” in which whatever one spouse said was taken badly by the other. Once this pattern began, it uncontrollably snowballed.

Most people, from marriage counselors to divorcées, are unable to do better than 50/50 at predicting which marriage success. Gottman simplified the process by focusing on “the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt" (54); contempt expressed by either or both spouses is the most dangerous signal.

Winnowing down all the complexities to a simple signal—such as whether couples express contempt toward each other—is “thin-slicing,” or finding patterns from limited bits of experience. Thin-slicing often provides better answers than careful, deliberate thinking.

In a similar case, psychologist Samuel Gosling worked up personality profiles on 80 students, using the “Big Five Inventory” of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to new experiences. Gosling had friends of the students rate them and found the friends made accurate assessments. Gosling then asked strangers to simply visit the students’ dorm rooms for 15 minutes and then rate them. The strangers were less accurate on extraversion and agreeableness, but much more accurate on the latter three traits.

People often misunderstand themselves, which is why asking them what type of person they are can be misleading. It’s often better to ask indirect questions whose answers can reveal personality.

How can one tell which doctors are most likely to be sued for malpractice? The answer lies not in a careful analysis of medical records and diagnostic decisions, but by listening in as doctors talk to their patients. In malpractice cases, patients often say they feel hurried, ignored, or mistreated. One study shows that tone of voice alone—dominant versus concerned—predicts which doctors may see a lawsuit.

A new group watched Gottman’s videos in 30-second cuts, viewed each snippet twice—once for each spouse—and followed simpler instructions about which emotions to note. This time, observers were more than 80% accurate at predicting successful marriages.

Tennis coach Vic Braden had the knack of predicting when a tennis player was about to default on a serve, predicting as much as 16 out of 17 times in a row. The problem is that “he simply cannot figure out how he knows" (84).

Very often, people are unable to explain why they suddenly know something is going to happen. Art historian Bernard Berenson gets a queasy stomach or feels “off balance” in the presence of a fake; investor George Soros has back spasms that warn him it’s time to make a trade.

A “priming experiment” by researcher John Bargh gave subjects word tests sprinkled with words like “aggressively,” “bold,” and “rude," or, for other participants, “respect,” “considerate,” “patiently,” and so on. The design of the tests does not allow subjects to know of the deliberately added words. After the test, each test taker must go down the hall to an office for further instructions; however, at the office, someone was arguing with the professor, blocking the door. Subjects whose tests included the aggressive words tended to interrupt, while those who took tests sprinkled with diplomatic words simply waited.

In another test, black students took a 20-question sample of the Graduate Record Examination. Some must indicate their race first; these subjects answered correctly only half as many questions. Apparently, “that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement" (96).

Does this mean people are simply pawns of their environment? More likely, unconscious processes keep people’s actions as appropriate as possible while they concentrate on the real problems at hand.

Those who suffer damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain just behind the nose, are unable to have intuitions. They may be very intelligent but show poor judgment and must reason slowly through every situation, often without ever reaching a decision.

Speed dating—a roomful of men and women who have only a few minutes per interview before moving on to the next potential date—works because people can decide in moments whether they’re interested in someone. However, people have trouble describing the type of person they’re attracted to: They say they want one thing but choose another. Their conscious ideals don’t match their intuitive choices.

Braden notes that professional tennis players often have inaccurate understandings of how they play. Baseball player Ted Williams, one of history's greats, described how he could “look the ball onto the bat" (116), but this is physiologically impossible during the last few milliseconds before contact. Williams professed, “Well, I guess it just seemed like I could do that" (117).