“In his landmark bestseller
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world
around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes
the way we understand the world within”
As described in publisher’s note, Blink is a book about understanding
our processes of decision making that we experience in our daily life. Galdwell
describes how spontaneous thinking might have important position in giving the
right decision, by using pop-scientific examples from psychology and behavioral
economics.
“Adaptive Unconscious”, as
described in the book, is an ability of our brains which reflects in extreme
cases before the conscious settlement of our minds. As fast as a ‘blink of an eye’, that part of our
brain could create some patterns and find a way of understanding “based on very
narrow slices of experience”, which Gladwell calls “Thin-slicing”. Thin-slicing is
used in extreme situations that require fast judgements like job
interviews, in moments of fear or under stress, when an expert decides about
his/her topic in milliseconds without examining it properly etc. For example, Dr.
John Gottman is known by his ability to predict on marital stability in fifteen
minutes. Watching a couple for one hour means to predict about their future
with 95 per cent accuracy while he got 90 per cent by observing them for
fifteen minutes. A professor works with him, Sybil Carrere, working on another
study that decreases the time to three minutes by thin-slicing.
Students were asked to enter an exam in which they need to identify
their race before starting to the test. What psychologists Claude Steele and
Joshua Aronson found out that, when those students were exposed to a stereotypical
question, they score lower than their usual performances. When they were asked
the reasons of their lower scores, they said; “You know, I just don’t think I
am smart enough to be here”. However, Steele and Aronson knew that the level of
the exam was the same with their previous tests and they got true items half as
much as other exam, which means that the race question primed them with the
idea of “not being smart”. Following that, one of the most striking conclusions
in the book comes;
“...free will is largely an illusion:...the way we think and act are a
lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.”
Another example about our bias are showed in the Implicit Association
Test* (IAT), a test measuring your level of unconscious associations between
different terms (for example between male and career, female with family). It
does not mean, Gladwell comments, that “you choose to believe” women should
stay at home while men works outside. However, it is true that your unconscious
thinking strongly associates men with workforce. These unconscious biases could
have strong effect on your spontaneous decisions in your daily life. As an HR,
you might behave women differently, for instance. Or as a salesman, you might
give wrong decisions about identifying your potential customer.
In order to avoid such kind of errors, Galdwell suggests “Creating Structure for Spontaneity” in
the further chapters. He argues that thin-slicing is an ability and it can be
improved. Conditions we are in should be suitable for spontaneity. There might
be some rules in our daily life that we did not recognize yet, just like actors
have while improvising. The number of the options should be limited, not all
extra information is a plus and might even be distracted. And not to forget that asking people explain their experiences verbally
might not be enough sometimes
.
These rules are not used only in different moments of spontaneous
thinking but also in marketing science and market research. Most of the
traditional methods of market research are based on surveys. Gladwell gives the
famous Pepsi Challenge example to explain the odds of asking people explain
what they feel. A blind taste test was practiced in which people are asked to taste one
cup filled with Pepsi and another with Coca Cola. Based on the test,
Cola introduces its New Coke assuming people like Pepsi because of its
different taste. Failure of Cola is firstly because of trusting what people
said ignoring the term called “sensation transference” and secondly, believing
that a sip will be counted as similar as home usage tests. Danger of
traditional market research method is, what is called “verbal overshadowing”, the negative effect of our verbal expressions
over different sensory experiences like taste. In another example about tasting
jams, Gladwell concludes that “..we
simply don’t have any way of explaining our feelings about jam. We know
unconsciously what good jam is”. Some experiences are in the limits of
rapid cognition, which is very hard to explain. “Buying” is one of them.
Consumer could be affected by the can, taste, visuals or just by the
environment of inner environment of a shopping mall. Explaining unconscious
judgements with conscious, rational reasons may well be fail, the book warns.
Blink describes different
aspects of one point: spontaneous decisions, or thin-slicing as Gladwell calls.
He first explains what is it with the term Adaptive Unconscious, then warns
about the “dark sides” of thin-slicing and finally explains how to create
environment to do it properly. There are different feedbacks about the book Blink. Sometimes it is criticized as not
being as scientific as it should be. It is in the form of popular
science, an implementation of psychology for a more general audience,
including lots of examples and less scientific explanations then it should have
for some. However, Gladwell seems to have a point to tell which every of us
experience in daily life, therefore examples and few scientific conclusions
might well be enough to support that point.
Malcolm Gladwell, (2005), Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking, www.twbookmark.com,2013
*www.implicit.harvard.edu
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