What to do couple of days before CAT?

Blink –The power of thinking without thinking

-by Malcom Gladwell

Whenever we see a new person, an opinion gets built up in the first two seconds. Although we spend a lot more time trying to confirm our opinion built up by the intuitive repulsion, the decision taken by our cognitive abilities in the initial few moments is what the book is all about.  The power of our brain that leaps to fast conclusions, the power of knowing, in first two seconds is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability we all cultivate for ourselves.

What do we do, when we look up and suddenly see a big truck coming close to us? Adaptive unconsciousness like a giant computer quickly and quietly processes a lot of data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. Decisions made by this fast and frugal thinking can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. The book is not just a celebration of the power of glance, it is also a reflection of the facets when our intuitive repulsion backfires. How good people’s decisions are under fast moving, high stress condition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal. Basketball game is an example of that.

Thin-Slicing

After listening for the first time to certain new released song we immediately predict that the song will be a super hit song. That's 'Thin-Slicing'

A salesman trying to become very friendly, gives us the idea of his true intentions. We thin slice his extra politeness.

After getting up in the morning for school a kid often intimates us about his severe headache. The father does thin slicing to understand the possibility of son’s incomplete homework, given by a strict Teacher.

Thin slicing is psychology’s word for an ability to accurately judge people or situation on the basis of first impressions. It refers to the ability of our unconscious self to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slice of experience. How is it possible to gather necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time? The answer is that when our unconscious mind engages in thin slicing, what we do is an automated, accelerated unconscious version.

Marriage and Morse code.

Marriage can be read and decoded by some psychologists easily. They observe a ‘fist’ in a relationship between the couple. Fist is a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically in some key part of human activity

People are in two states of relationship. The positive sentiment override and the negative sentiment override. PSO overrides irritability. Their spouse will do something bad and they’ll say, ‘Oh she/he is just in a crummy mood’.  In a NSO people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If the spouse does something positive, the partner spots some selfish motive hiding behind.

If wife says, ‘will you shut up and let me finish this work?’ In a PSO the husband stays quite though not happy, but recognizes the repair. In NSO the husband would say, ‘To hell with you’, ‘Mind your language!’ ‘Haven’t you interrupted me ever?’

For us to locate the exact problems in the relationships focus on the four Horsemen; Defensiveness, Stone-walling, Criticism and Contempt and the emotion that is considered the most important of all, “Contempt”. Showing contempt towards the spouse is the single most important sign to get the relationship in trouble. All said and done, for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.

Some interpretations of SPAFF coder’s.

‘Yes-but” tactics – appearing to agree but then taking it back, is an indication of defensiveness.

“Rolling one’s eyes” -when the person in the front talking to me rolls his/her eyes; it is a sign of contempt.

Understanding spouse is very important for us to live a happy life. From profession or social relation point of view, understanding the friends or for that matter even strangers is important. What will be more interesting for us, is to understand what the strangers think about us.


Interpretations of strangers are important:

In an experiment some students were asked to write about themselves on five selected characteristics.

The same questions were given to their friends and further the same questions were given to strangers who answered the questions after observing the students for 20 minutes or so. The experiment suggests that it is quite possible for rational strangers, who have spent only 20 minutes observing us, to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years

Service Industry clients:

Doctors are a form of God! That’s the common Indian belief. But we’ve also witnessed many occasions, where doctors are torn apart, when a mishap happens in the hospital. An interesting outcome is seen by psychologists while studying the prime causes of doctors getting sued.  The surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patients than those who had been sued did. The doctors who were gentle enough to listen and understand each patient’s problems and react softly even to ridiculous problems were never sued, even when these doctors made mistakes in the surgery. The experiment further concluded that the surgeon’s voice judged to be dominant, fell in the sued group, whereas the surgeons with less dominant and more concerned, fell in the non-sued group. The author calls this kind of judgement as ‘Thin Slicing’ which means understanding / predicting based on the unknown or the automatic coordination between memory and the current observations.

The next time you sit with a doctor and you sensed that he/she isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you with respect, listen to that feeling of yours. You have thin-sliced him and found him/her inappropriate irrespective of his/her skills, experience and qualifications.

The locked Door: Secret life of snap decisions:

A live cricket match that I saw some time back, had Rohit Sharma batting.  Rohit hit a couple of consecutive boundaries. No sooner that happened, than I told my wife that Rohit will be out soon. I thin-sliced unknowingly based on some previous experiences. My brain associated the previous experiences where-in Rohit got out after hitting quick boundaries. All this happened in flashes of seconds, may be micro-seconds. This is a critical fact about our thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconsciousness. Snap judgements are enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. Rohit Sharma eventually got out after couple of overs. But the matter is not about my correct predictions, it’s about thin slicing, which can go wrong in some other case. I need to respect the fact that it’s possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that sometimes we’re better off that way.


The story telling problem:

Ted Williams, the greatest hitter of Baseball was most appreciated in his days. The secret behind his immaculate hitting as per him was his art of looking the ball onto the bat, that he could track it right to the point where he made contact. But his explanations did not match his actions. Similarly when people ask my wife the reason for she being physically fit even after having kids of 11yrs and 13years, the answer does not convince all. It’s not that Ted Williams or my wife are lying.  We as human beings have a story telling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for. We are ignorant of the things that affect our actions, yet we rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say “I don’t know” more often.

Even a small kid has an explanation to why India lost the cricket match. We assume that our understanding is right. I remember Steve Jobs saying, “It is easy to connect the dots looking at the back, the challenge is in connecting the dots looking ahead.” So the story telling problem as per Malcom is the habit of giving explanations after an event has happened. Even in the sports cometary box, the so called expert can’t predict the future of the game. All they are good at is in the art of analysis, which is a story telling problem in many cases.

When we talk about doing things unknowingly there is yet another behavior. Addicts have interesting stories to tell, when it comes to explain why they aren’t ready to quit those habits. Why do the addicts do not quit the bad habits when they know it is harmful? Apart from the chemical addiction and lack of determination as the reasons we know, there is another problem called ‘Disorder in the ventromedial area’ in the brain that causes disconnect between what we know and what we do.


Association error:

When we look at a stranger, just by looking at her/him we create an image about his qualities. If we manage to have a couple of minutes talk, we have at least a slight change in the perception and if we stay in touch with that person for more than a month spending few hours daily with her/him the perception changes all the more. The interesting task to do is compare the perception that we had in the first sight or the first few minutes chat with the image created after a month. There is a big difference. The learning is, to think beyond the first impression whenever we meet a stranger.

We have such a powerful association with certain words, (for example ‘Meetings’ for professionals, ‘Sports’ for someone or ‘Party’ for some others) that just being exposed to them can cause a change in behavior. There are facts about people’s appearance – their size or shape or colour or sex – that can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations.

Have we wondered why many mediocre people find a top position in corporate world? It’s because when it comes to even the most important position, our selection decisions are less rational than we think. We see tall person and we swoon.

Most of us very quick in remembering a face, but weak in describing it or writing about it. This is because the act of describing a face has the effect of impairing our otherwise effortless ability to subsequently recognize that face. It’s called Verbal overshadowing. The left hemisphere of our brain think in words, whereas the right part thinks in pictures and while describing in words a memorized picture our actual visual memory gets displaced.

 While solving some problems we need logic, whereas for some other problems we need insights, no logic, no algorithms.

An example of insight puzzle: A man and his son meet with a serious accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency room. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps, “This child is my son!” Who is the doctor?
We don’t need logic to solve the above puzzle, all we need is insight or presence of mind to know that the doctor has to be mother. When we write down our thoughts, our chances of having the flash of insight we need, in order to come up with a solution, are significantly impaired. But with a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn’t impair their ability to come up with their answers. In some cases, in fact, it helps. The problems that require insights operate by a different rule. When we start becoming reflective about the process, it undermines our ability. We lose flow. Insight is not a light-bulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

Structure of Spontaneity

Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking the book "Blink" is all about. For example While watching a movie on T.V. a person notices that the nose of the actress is too big and asks her husband in Hindi, "EeS actress ka naak kaisa lagta hai? Husband  retorts in hindi, "Khatar-naak". That's "Blink". Getting thoughts in a blink.  It's not just about humor, It works even in Business. All we need to do is to create conditions for spontaneity and creating conditions involves having lesser rules.  It involves making very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment, without the benefit of any kind of plan. How good our decisions are under the fast moving high stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsals.  Basket ball is an intricate, high speed game filled with spit-second, spontaneous decisions. But the speed of thinking improves after lot of practice. One of the most important rule for spontaneous improvisation is the idea of agreement. In life most of us are highly skilled at suppressing actions. All the improvisation needs is to reverse the skill. Bad improvisers block actions whereas good improvisers develop actions.

Introspection is good, but there are cases where we face perils of it. Too much of system in areas where it is not needed snatches the autonomy as a result the individual traits of the subordinates stay underutilized. Having lot of faith in subordinates working style works better in many cases. Having people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be the rule of agreement. It enables rapid cognition.

At times we think too much just because the task is vital and vice versa. But is the quality of decision making always in direct proportion with the time taken? In many cases it is not. In the process of training the students for the improvement of their aptitude, we at Bulls Eye follow a rule where an English question, is more often than not incorrect if it takes less than 5 seconds and more than 30 secs to react.

Many a times what screws up the doctors when they are trying to predict heart attack is that they take too much information into account and too much information drifts the focus. Arthur Evans feels that there are some questions that help you to reach the real problem but he also says that the physicians have a tendency to believe that a life-or - death decision has to be a difficult decision. Most doctors feel it's mundane to follow guidelines. A truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

In good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced to its simplest elements: Even the most complicated of the relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern. In picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision maker with information, makes picking up clues harder, not easier. When we thin-slice, when we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this process of editing unconsciously. We get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted-when we can't edit, or we don't know what to edit, or our environment doesn't let us edit.

Where can the Quick decisions backfire?

Doing Market research:
In Market research the questions are to be answered quickly, so in most of the cases the reactions of the volunteers are snap judgments, adaptive unconsciousness. The problem with market research is that it often is too blunt an instrument to pick up the distinction between bad and merely different.

In 1980's Pepsi was coming very close to Coke in the cola war. Coke took a Sip test or a CLT (Central location Test) where people were asked to decide the better drink after taking a sip of each. The identities of the brands were hidden.  The survey up-voted Pepsi and that made the Coke management all the more nervous. Pepsi was slightly sweeter. Coke scientists tinkered with the fabled secret formula to make it a little lighter and sweeter. After 3 to 4 versions of changes, in 1984 Coke CEO Roberto Goizueta launched the new Coke. Again came the Sip test and this time the volunteers up-voted Coke. With lot of confidence and increased ad campaigns the 'New Coke' hit the market'. To everyone's surprise the 'New coke ' failed miserably.

What went wrong? 'Taking a sip and then making a decision with immediate reaction was the mistake.'

Sweeter drinks taste better in one sip, but they don't if the entire bottle is consumed.

In an experiment eight singers were asked to sing in front of a crowd and the crowd was asked to vote, to rank them in the descending order of the singing talent. The next experiment was conducted after few days. The same singers were asked to sing the same songs in front of the same crowd. This time the difference was that the singers were behind the screen. So when the audience judged the singers talent without seeing the singers singing, the evaluation was different. The conclusion was that our judgement at times gets biased by the personality or the appearance of the performer. No wonder why most of the CEOs are handsome.

Before the advent of blind auditions, the percentage of women in major symphony orchestras in the US was less than 5 %. Today 25 years later, it’s close to 50%.

Reading Minds.
If you approach a one-year child playing on the floor and do something little bit puzzling such as cupping your hand over hers, the child would immediately look up into your eyes. Why? Because what you've done requires explanation and we human beings find the answers on faces. This is classic thin slicing.
The psychologists follow something called FACS (Facial action coding system) which has a document of around 500 pages consisting of A.U. (Action units) which basically are the clues on the face that indicate some intention. For eg. A.U. -9 indicates disgust which is wrinkling of the nose.

Face normally is the secondary billboard for our internal feelings. But it can be reverse in some cases. The kids with pen kept between their teeth will find watching cartoon films much funnier than those with the pen in between their lips, where it becomes impossible to contract either of the two smiling muscles, the resorius and the zygomatic major.
The orbicularis oculi is a muscle in the face that closes the eyelids. It is almost impossible to tighten this muscles on demand and it is equally difficult to stop it from tightening when we smile at someone genuinely pleasurable. This kind of smile "does not obey the will". Its absence unmasks the false friend."

Anger hijacks the forebrain:
Arousals leaves mind-blind. In anger what actually happens is our forebrain shuts down and the mid-brain that is the same as dog’s (all mammals have same part of the brain) reaches up and hijacks the forebrain. Have you ever tried having a discussion with angry or frightened human being? You can't! This is the reason that many police departments in the US in recent years have banned high-speed chases. They realized that the person being chased rigorously was more often than not killed even when he/ she was ready to surrender. Similarly in too much of pressure, where the person at the receiving end is scared of the results become temporarily autistic, a disorder with kids who are unable to read the facial messages. In autism faces are taken as objects and the person with the disorder does not try to read the minds to understand the messages.
Are extreme arousals and mind-blindness inevitable under conditions of extreme stress? No! But then it needs lot of conscious practice. Every moment-every blink- is composed of series of discrete moving parts and those parts offer an opportunity for intervention, for reform and for correction.

When should we trust our instincts? When should we consciously think things through?
Well here is a particular answer, on a straight-forward choice, deliberate analysis is the best.
In purchasing the low cost items, the people who think the most before buying are the most satisfied and those who make impulse purchases more often regret their decisions. In the expensive purchases the reverse is true. In the purchases of minor importance it is good to consider the pros and cons to keep us happy after the purchase, whereas in vital purchases the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed by deep inner needs of our nature.

That’s the synopsis of ‘Blink”. Now all I need to do is understand the areas where the decisions taken in blinks are favorable and the areas where unconscious, intuitive repulsions are adverse.



Disclaimer

This thought-provoking book by Malcom Gladwel has forced to undo and/or redo somethings in life. In the process of preserving the interesting points made by Malcom, I have used my experience and understanding, to make a point helpful for me.



Vinay Wagh.
Bulls Eye Nasik