The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Gut feeling. Intuition. Funny feeling. We have all experienced this sensation at one time or another where instinctively we knew something was off or had a snap judgement made. This is what author Malcolm Gladwell explores in his bestseller, Blink.
Building on the concept of a snap judgement, Gladwell walks the reader through a series of real-life examples and experiments that strengthens the case for minds stronger than we know. The reader will see ‘thin-slicing’ used repeatedly to prove in just how short an amount of time is needed by our brain to make a correct unconscious judgement. The delay in the unconscious judgement to a conscious acknowledgement – if at all – is something that is not well understood. What we do learn from this book, however, is that these subtle but powerful actions exist.
Priming Effects
One example provided stood out for me in particular, which makes me question the way our education, justice, and healthcare systems are set up. In the chapter dealing with priming, that is tapping into the adaptive unconscious brain to focus or be primed a certain way, Gladwell shares the results of an exam study.
The GRE, or Graduate Record Examination, is a standardized test used for entry into graduate school. Students in this experiment were simply asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire. The result? Students who marked down African American had their scores cut in half.
“I talked to the black students afterward and I asked them, ‘Did anything lower your performance?'”
“I would ask, ‘Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?’ Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like ‘You know, I just don’t think I’m smart enough to be here.'”
Recommendation: Malcolm Gladwell Does it Again
Time and time again, Gladwell has piqued the interests of readers through his uncanny style of writing and expert examples. Though the book’s intent is to focus on the power unconscious, it touches on aspects of bias, conditioning, and body language. The mind is a powerful and funny thing. The fact that the mind studies itself through books like these has always been a fun observation for me.
