Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we’ve developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information."

In the wild, situations pop up that may be dangerous; people have no time to examine or ponder them. Instead, humans have an ability to almost instantly size up threats (and opportunities) and act on them at once.

“The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.”

Although the West values intellect, the larger mind—much of it unconscious—can reach accurate judgments in less time than it takes a scholar to open a book on the topic.

“A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester."

The fast-thinking mind will understand a situation as accurately, and in vastly less time, than the slow reasoning mind. It’s not necessary to spend months with a person to instinctively know what sort of character they possess.

“We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately." 

Much personal research into important issues—what car to buy, what job to take, which person to date—is redundant; it's merely an effort to justify a choice that's already been made. To ignore first impressions and, instead, to puzzle things out extensively, is to make a fundamental error of cognition by underestimating humans' considerable powers of instant understanding.

“Contempt is special. If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don’t need to know every detail of the couple’s relationship."

John Gottman made videos of couples, analyzing every second of each encounter of emotions expressed by the partners. He discovered that only a handful of feelings are pivotal to the future of a relationship; of those, only one—contempt, displayed by either member—can signal the marriage’s doom. Thus, what observers need to know to judge a couple’s marital health is remarkably simple.

“As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker’s ability and knowledge. But are they really? If a white student from a prestigious private high school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner-city school, is it because she’s truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious high school is to be constantly primed with the idea of ‘smart’?”

Americans receive rafts of signals that imply that white people are “superior” to black people and other people from minority groups; this input leaks into everyone’s attitudes, affecting their performance in competitive situations. 

“We don’t want to stand there endlessly talking through our options. Sometimes we’re better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our decisions for us." 

Humans' fast minds sometimes provide unwanted or untrustworthy answers, and people tend to overthink certain situations. Learning to trust signals from within can greatly improve human behavior when dealing with new people and problems.

“The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we’ve had, the people we’ve met, the lessons we’ve learned, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion." 

The fast-and-frugal mind contains a vast library of all the experiences and people ever encountered, and can recognize almost instantly the appropriate response to the latest situation. If a scholar were to meticulously research all that data, it would take months.

“Part of what it means to take thin-slicing and first impressions seriously is accepting the fact that sometimes we can know more about someone or something in the Blink of an eye than we can after months of study. But we also have to acknowledge and understand those circumstances when rapid cognition leads us astray."

The fast mind is only as effective as the information it possesses, and if that knowledge and those memories are tainted by bias or distorted by strong emotions, the results may not be accurate.

“Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon."

Public personalities often present themselves as something more desirable than who they are in private. Voters and fans, for their part, live busy lives and don’t have time to research everyone they hear about in the media. Instead, people make snap judgments that are sometimes overly simplistic or biased and which can lead to bad decisions about whom to support. 

“They see someone, and somehow they let the first impression they have about that person’s appearance drown out every other piece of information they manage to gather in that first instant." 

Especially when a public figure has a very appealing appearance, people are inclined to overgeneralize and overestimate that figure’s character and capabilities. This is especially true in politics, where the issues are stressful and people yearn to find someone who can make the problems go away—a fanciful desire that distorts perception.

“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 that you have with 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."

Unexamined unconscious biases can trip up one's conscious decision to be unbiased, backed by no further action. Deliberate immersion into an underrated culture, on the other hand, can dissolve prejudices and preconceptions about people who are different from one another.

“It wasn’t that Van Riper hated all rational analysis. It’s that he thought it was inappropriate in the midst of battle, where the uncertainties of war and the pressures of time made it impossible to compare options carefully and calmly." 

Preparing for battle—or for any important activity—benefits from careful study and lots of practice. However, once the starting gun is fired and the contest has begun, there’s no time for slow and labored reasoning. In the heat of the moment, if people trust their instincts, they do much better than if they keep consulting the rulebook for advice. 

“Klein studied nurses, intensive care units, firefighters, and other people who make decisions under pressure, and one of his conclusions is that when experts make decisions, they don’t logically and systematically compare all available options. That is the way people are taught to make decisions, but in real life it is much too slow. Klein’s nurses and firefighters would size up a situation almost immediately and act, drawing on experience and intuition and a kind of rough mental simulation." 

It’s one thing to study a skill and quite another to use it. In the moment, people only have time to observe, recognize, and act appropriately. This is what fast-and-frugal thinking does by design.

“Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves people making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot." 

Improvisational theatre demonstrates that people can gracefully and skillfully interact in complex ways—even when they haven’t practiced beforehand. Improv achieves this by teaching actors to accept and never resist whatever happens onstage. This greatly simplifies the problem and serves as a lesson for other situations in life. 

“If I were to show you a picture of Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein, you’d recognize both faces in a fraction of a second. My guess is that right now you can ‘see’ them both almost perfectly in your imagination. But how accurately can you describe them?" 

A lot of things at which humans excel, like recognizing faces, are hard to describe verbally. What’s worse, doing so tends to distort memories, making it harder to effectively use them in the future. 

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out." 

Quick insights are light and fragile, subject to distortion by strong emotions or biases. Simply to recognize these intuitions when they pop up permits humans to nurture and strengthen the ability to generate them. 

“Deliberate thinking is a wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, the help of a computer, and a clearly defined task, and the fruits of that type of analysis can set the stage for rapid cognition.” 

Learning a new subject or skill is where slow thinking shines, carefully teaching what needs to be known. When one masters such knowledge, they no longer need to think long and hard about it, but can quickly and accurately employ it, as when steering a car through traffic, engaging in banter at a party, or using skills to polish off a work assignment. New situations may cause momentary pause to think as people absorb the novel information, but quickly they tuck the new data into an existing repository of knowledge and resume the fast pace of expertise. 

“When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance." 

Van Riper’s Red Team carefully studied the war game’s military situation, makes general strategic plans, then went into the field and thereafter adapted and adjusted using informal and intuitive thinking under the rapid-fire dynamics of battle. Blue Team, on the other hand, believed that strategizing is enough, after which they simply launched their program and waited for its logic to unfold and guarantee them victory. Red Team understood better than Blue Team the importance of shifting from slow to fast thinking and served up a dominating and embarrassing victory.

“Whenever we have something that we are good at—something we care about—that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding."

Intuitive action works best when grounded in deep experience, but it will also do what it can with whatever information it can gather; naturally, uninformed intuitions are wobbly and more likely to go off course. Beginners who are careful not to jump to biased conclusions or become overly emotional often will find that by relying on their intuition, they perform much better than expected.

“What Ekman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even bolder claim—one central to understanding how mind reading works—and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind."

Research reveals that the simple shifting of one’s face into an expression can trigger feelings associated with that expression. Smiling will make us happier, while frowning can lure us into sadness. In this respect, facial expressions are deeply wired into the human consciousness to the point where people are basically unable completely to hide feelings that leak out onto their faces.

“Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. That response may linger on the face for just a fraction of a second or be detectable only if electrical sensors are attached to the face. But it’s always there."

The principle that emotions always find their way onto faces reveals that, with practice, people can learn to detect subtle cues as to the states of mind of the people around them by carefully observing their facial expressions. 

“It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes."

Though intuition and fast thinking are universal traits, they can bettered through training. With enough practice in avoiding bias and overreaction, emergency responders can learn to make smarter quick decisions. This nurturing and strengthening of intuitive wisdom is something anyone can practice in daily life to improve reactions and behaviors.