Blinkby Malcolm GladwellLittle, Brown and Company, 277 pages, $25.95Malcolm Gladwell, science writer for The New Yorker magazine, recently dominated the nonfiction bestseller list with his first book, The Tipping Point, subtitled “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” He’s repeating his bestselling performance with his current book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. His wide popularity is somewhat surprising, considering the veneer of his ideas. Gladwell’s theories are to science what non-alcoholic beer is to Saturday night. There may be the appearance of authenticity, but there just isn’t any potency. You can pretend you are getting educated, just as you can pretend you are getting inebriated.Gladwell sets out three tasks for himself in Blink: 1) to prove to us that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately; 2) to demonstrate when we should trust our instincts and when we should be wary of them; and 3) to convince us that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. As skilled as Gladwell is at selling books, he falls slightly short of the mark of selling these three points.His style is to discuss in a conversational manner various and sundry scientific experiments that bolster his thesis. His desire to be layman friendly (i.e., bestseller friendly) often reduces his focus to incidental details at the sacrifice of more valuable information. This was prevalent in The Tipping Point as well. For example, Gladwell spends much time upon, and gives great credence to the videotaping experiments conducted by a University of Washington psychologist who claims he can predict with 90% accuracy whether a couple will still be married 15 years later by watching 15 minutes of their taped conversation. Gladwell describes the psychologist as “a middle-aged man with owl-like eyes, silvery hair, and a neatly trimmed beard.” Nothing surprising or particularly useful there. Then, for no apparent reason and with absolutely no follow-up, Gladwell adds, “During the Vietnam War, he was a conscientious objector, and there is still something of the ’60s hippie about him like the Mao cap he sometimes wears over his braided yarmulke.” Although Gladwell includes this gratuitous information, he fails to give us any vital long term data on this experiment and its 15-year prediction window. Without such data, the whole experiments seems like not much more than a parlor game.Gladwell is guilty of this throughout Blink. He describes a clinician as wearing a beret and another academic as wearing black plastic-rimmed glasses. Who cares? Is this Vogue magazine or a book on science? What we need to know is the validity, accuracy and application of the experiments conducted. Too often, those foundations are given short shrift.Blink introduces concepts such as “thin-slicing,” “priming” and “mind reading” to explain what might otherwise be called intuition or hunch. The book proposes that we are processing more information than we think we are. In one of Gladwell’s weakest arguments in the book, he uses an extended example of the emergency room at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago. With limited time and resources, the emergency doctors had to quickly determine whether patients complaining of chest pains were experiencing heart attack. The traditional method was to make a diagnosis based upon as much intake information as could be obtained. “What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks,” according to Gladwell, “is that they take too much information into account.” Then a cardiologist “came up with an algorithm–an equation–that he believed would take much of the guesswork out of treating chest pain,” Gladwell writes. “Doctors, he concluded, ought to combine the evidence of the ECG with three of what he called urgent risk factors: (1) Is the pain felt by the patient unstable angina? (2) Is there fluid in the patient’s lungs? And (3) Is the patient’s systolic blood pressure below 100?” For each combination of risk factors, the cardiologist drew up a decision tree that recommended a treatment option. Gladwell applauds this as an application of thin-slicing, or thinking without thinking. He completely ignores the fact that the application of this algorithm is the antidote to intuition and seat-of-the-pants diagnosis. Such a checklist instills order and logic over hunch and guesswork. “Left to their own devices, the doctors guessed right on the most serious patients somewhere between 75 and 89 percent of the time,” Gladwell says. “The algorithm guessed right more than 95 percent of the time.” Gladwell simply paints himself into a corner with this example.Having identified one of Blink’s less effective passages, it should be noted that the book does contain stronger material. One of the more convincing experiments involves electronically filtered recordings of doctors speaking with their patients. Using only the tone of voice as a predictor, experimenters found they could determine which group of doctors had been sued for malpractice and which group had not. “If the surgeon’s voice was judged to sound dominant, the surgeon tended to be in the sued group. If the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned, the surgeon tended to be in the non-sued group.” Further, “the surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did (18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes).” Gladwell points out that although malpractice appears to be an infinitely complicated and multidimensional problem, this is actually how patients thin-slice their doctors.Often, the conclusions stated by Gladwell are simply too glib. In explaining brain function, for instance, he assigns a hierarchy to the ability to identify people over the ability to identify objects. “The difference in the sophistication of those two regions [of the brain] explains why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade forty years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel,” he writes. Doesn’t this fail to take into consideration that Sally has more distinguishing features than a black rectangle? Gladwell states, “If we are to learn to improve the quality of decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.” But is that how we want important, critical decisions to be made? Probably not. We prefer a more studied, deliberate process. It may, however, be how we decide to buy a book from the bestseller list.
