Angelos Delivorrias, an art expert,
immediately recognizes a statue as a fake one which otherwise was confirmed as
authentic after a thorough scientific investigation of fourteen months.
John Gottman, a psychologist,
watches married couples (whom he has
never met before) discuss a contentious topic from their marriage for about
15 minutes and predicts with a 90% certainty if the couple will still be
married 15 years later.
Nalini Ambady, another psychologist,
goes through a 40 second taped conversion between a surgeon and his patients
and predicts with surprising accuracy if the surgeon will be sued in future for negligence of duty!
Is there a common link between the
above three narratives? If so, what is it?
Thin-slicing, according to Malcom Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point), is what allows Angelos Delivorrias, John
Gottman and Nalini Ambady to make accurate snap decisions when even a rational
analysis of the problem using conventional methods doesn’t yield any result.
Thin-slicing is the ability to find patterns based on only “thin slices” or a
very narrow window of time.
According to Gladwell the
subconscious mind has the unique ability to thin-slice by blocking out
redundant data and extracting just the right amount of information from the
surroundings to make a decision, which is what Angelos did while judging the
fake statue. He was able to look at the statue and immediately feel something
amiss, something not right. He prevailed
where fourteen months of scientific investigation failed.
Interestingly, when Angelos was
asked why he called out the statue as fake he couldn’t give a definite answer.
He said he felt an “intuitive repulsion” after looking at the statue; hardly a
substitute for 14 months of rigorous scientific investigation, yet he was
right. This is another point Gladwell makes in the book. Even though the
subconscious mind thin-slices and provides an answer, we have no idea why. It is very difficult to see what lies beyond
the locked door in our mind where snap decisions are made. We may have a
gut-feeling or an intuition about something, but we cannot pin-point exactly
why we think so. That is probably why the subconscious mind cannot be relied
upon completely to make snap decisions. In fact, there are lots of instances when
our past prejudices affect our ability to thin-slice and lead us astray. Gladwell goes on to give a lot of real life
examples where thin-slicing has proved disastrous, including an instance where
four police officers gunned down an innocent unarmed black man in a
neighborhood notorious for its crime rate.
So
even though thin-slicing is extremely handy when it comes to making snap
decisions, things can go disastrously wrong. It is a double edged sword. How do
we improve our ability to make snap judgments?
By practice, says Malcolm Gladwell.
We can train our subconscious mind to make snap decisions accurately by
being in similar kind of situations and making similar kind of decisions day
after day. We might not know what goes behind the locked door, but with
practice we can make sure what comes out of it. Over the course of his life
Angelos Delivorrias experienced countless ancient sculptures and learned to
interpret his first impressions. John Gottman videotaped thousands of couples
and studied each and every minute detail about their conversations to gain the
ability to thin-slice a conversing couple sitting next to him in a restaurant
and pass judgment about their future.
Nalini Ambady studied hundreds of hours of taped conversations between
surgeons and their patients to identify the level of warmth, hostility,
dominance and anxiousness present in their exchanges and determine which
surgeons got sued and which ones didn’t.
