Copyright: 2005

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

ISBN: 0-316-17232-4

Malcolm Gladwell wrote "The Tipping Point" another book that I have on my list to read but I came to this one first.  "Blink" is an interesting foray into the power of the unconscious mind... or rather unconscious thinking.  Whether we realize it or not, our brains are working non-stop and sometimes we come to conclusions without knowing how or why.  Gladwell's exploration of this topic is a detailed, anecdote-filled book that is a pleasure to read and will spark some interesting thoughts along the way!

Thin Slicing

Gladwell spends a good deal of time in the book bouncing around the idea of what he calls "thin-slicing."  This term refers to the part of rapid cognition that allows the unconscious mind to find patterns with very narrow "slices" of experience.  In one experiment, a scientist carefully measures the actions, facial expressions, tone and words of a married couple as they talk about some aspect of their relationship.  Over the years the lab has proven remarkably accurate at predicting the future of the marriage using just short 15 minute samples of these conversations.  Further research has shown that you can achieve similar results using even just 3 minute videos of married couples talking about their relationship.

The key to this is by going back and analyzing the data one second at a time, you can pick up on things that you might otherwise miss.  A rolling of the eyes, a quick contraction of the mouth muscles... tiny visual cues that can tell a lot about a person's true emotional state.  The premise of the rest of the book is that not only can you train your mind to pick up on these cues... thus "reading people's minds" but in fact your mind DOES pick up on these cues whether you like it or not.  The fact that these tiny clues are picked up by the unconscious mind doesn't necessarily mean that we know how to act on them or interpret them.

Warren Harding--- How did HE get elected? 

President Harding was the proverbial "tall, dark and handsome man" and many believe that is what got him elected.  He wasn't a particularly good President... in fact some historians believe he was the WORST of the President's.  He wasn't tremendously cerebral or gifted in any particular way, but Gladwell recounts the story of Harry Daugherty meeting him in 1899 and thinking "wouldn't he make a great President?"  Daugherty was a political lobbyist that would go on to run Harding's campaign for President.  The interesting thing about Daugherty's observation was that it was made before the men even spoke!  Banking that the public would feel that this man "looked Presidential" they were able to run a campaign that allowed him to elected President even though arguably he was no where near qualified for the office.

If people are willing to vote for a man to run their country simply based on how he looks, are people also willing to make the same mistakes in other areas?  According to plenty of research that is just what happens.  Gladwell conducted a survey of about half of the Fortune 500 companies and found out that overwhelmingly they chose tall men as their CEO's.  When compared to the averages for the rest of the US, he found that the height of a man was more indicative of his chances at the top job than any other qualification.  This might explain some of the mediocre management in today's top corporations! 

This begs the question though... why?  Intelligent men and women make the decisions to promote people in the company, why would a person's height influence their decision?  An interesting tool called the "Implicit Association Test" might hold the key.  The test goes something like this: you are given a list of names or concepts and on either side is a blank space under a heading.  For instance the first list might be:

The idea is you have to categorize them as quickly as possible.  Most of us can do this one pretty easily.

Again... this one goes faster.. but notice where you put things and how long does it take you to do it? Now another:

Now a trend emerges... how long does it take you NOW to identify and categorize?  These same tests are conducted to measure racial bias etc.  The measurement is a continuum measurement of your association of certain ideas and concepts.  The longer it takes you to make connections when disparate ideas are placed in front of you, the more strongly your associations are with the opposite ideas.  So if it takes a long time for you to decide if "babies" belongs with "family" or "female" then you have a strong association with Females and Family... or more correctly... a strong association between Male and Career. 

Now back to the "tall vs. short" question.  If we are conditioned by society to view tall men as powerful, smart and capable of handling things, then we are more likely to choose tall men for positions of leadership.  But are tall men more likely to be smart, make better decisions or handle stress better than short men?  Not likely.  But because of the strong associations that we have... even unconscious ones...  we choose tall men as CEO and "better looking men" as President.  Mitt Romney anyone? 

Much Ado About Nothing

My personal preference for books is to find them intensely practical.  As a "good read" this book gets high marks.  It is easy to read and well written.  As far as practical advice though, there isn't much to be had here.  Gladwell gives an incredible amount of information that is well written and presented but he doesn't draw any useful conclusions.  He hints throughout the book that you should train your unconscious thinking to work for you... but he never tells you how to do that.  He gives examples towards the end of the book of police training etc. that can help but in the practical day to day life of decision making there isn't much to help here. 

That is not to say that the book is a waste of time.  In fact I gleaned a tremendous amount of information from the book and was able to draw many of my own conclusions. 

I work in an Agile Software shop where we do Extreme Programming.  This requires us to once a week sit down and decide what we are going to do for the week.  We accomplish our planning by "estimating" the amount of effort required to do each item that the customer asks us to do.  We call these stories and estimating stories requires a bit of technical know-how, some good programming smarts and a generous amount of SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess.)  As I read through the account of an algorithm designed for heart doctors to determine the signs of a heart attack, it occured to me that perhaps we needed an algorithm for deciding how big a story might be. 

Another thought that I had was recently we have had several discussions about how far to go with refactoring.  For those of you who aren't software developers, refactoring is when you take code that is working and you change it around so it is easier to read or better constructed in some way... but without changing what it does.  The problem is that there are literally hundreds of thousands of permutations of any given segment of code that would all result in the same outcome.  So how do you know when you "have it right"?  Well...  sometimes you make yourself a "Jam idiot" by thinking about it too much!

Jam Idiots

Some researchers did an interesting experiment with Jam once.  Consumer Reports put together a panel of experts to rank forty-four different brands of strawberry jam.  The researchers took the 1st, 11th, 24th, 32nd and 44th ranked jams and gave them to a group of college students who were NOT food experts.  The idea was...  how close can the "non-experts" come to the "experts"?  The answer? Surprisingly close.  The correlation of their picks with the experts was .55, a very high correlation.  So non-experts can rank jam pretty well it would seem.

Next they took a group of college students and had them explain their choices.  They had to think about why they were ranking the jams where they ranked them. Turns out that when we have to think about the "why" us non-experts suddenly become "Jam Idiots".  The correlation of the second group to the experts opinions was .11, meaning the evaluations had virtually nothing in common.

So in the question above... how do you "know" when you have done enough refactoring, the answer is, "stop thinking about it so much."  If you are an expert at refactoring, you will know when it is time to stop.  If you are new to programming or not particularly skilled at refactoring, you will just feel that it is right... and you will probably be right. 

To Infinity And Beyond!

One of the fascinating sections of the book deals with "mind reading."  Researchers have discovered certain involuntary facial expressions that are tell-tale signs of what is going on in the mind.  In fact some researcher indicates that by changing your facial expression, it is possible to change your thought processes.  The facial expression research culminated in the cataloguing of 43 facial movements and their combinations.  By combining these movements and studying the emotions behind them, they came up with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) that details what you can "read" in a face.  This system has been used for research into schizophrenia as well as heart disease.  It has even been put to use by Pixar in the making of Toy Story!  DreamWorks also used the research in the making of Shrek.  Part of why these animated characters appear so real is the use of the FACS to program their expressions.

Conclusion

While this book is very interesting to read, I was not as pleased as I thought I would be.  I expected a little more substance in the way of practical advice and ideas.  That said, the book was by no means a fluffy, light nothingness.  There was plenty of good information in the book and there is nothing wrong with an author presenting the evidence and letting the reader draw his or her own conclusions.  If you are interested in understanding some of the reasons we make the decisions we make, I would recommend reading this book.