He gives examples of antiquities specialists, firefighters
and generals who are able to effectively glance at a situation and come up with
accurate impressions. The antiquities
specialists could identify a forged statue at a glance, even though the museum
had documents authenticating the item. A
firefighter was able to predict flashover (the moment when the air ignites in a
fire) and save his crew, even though the visual evidence pointed to a small
kitchen fire. The general was notorious
for his ability to manage complex and intricate assaults but rarely took field
reports from his troops. All of these
people were able to draw on their expertise unconsciously to make decisions,
even when the apparent evidence was against them.
That appears to be the key.
In order to make good decisions in a split second, we have to have a
certain expertise in the subject at hand.
Otherwise we can get thrown by unconscious manipulation and
expectations. Gladwell shows how focus
groups end up restricting creativity, since most people have an unconscious
negative reaction to new things. We are
cautious when confronting something strange which means unexpert focus groups
will automatically reject things outside their comfort zone, even if they would
end up liking it if they had more time.
(This explains a lot about why TV and movies have been getting more and
more repetitive, since the big studios rely a lot on focus groups to decide
what to produce.)
Gladwell also spoke about our unconscious prejudices and how
easily we can be manipulated. He ran an
experiment with university students where they had to memorize lists of words
and repeat them to the tester. They
thought it was an exercise in memory retention but the real test came
after. The students were told to bring
their scorecard to him and hand it in.
But he was talking to a graduate student about her thesis. The test was to see how long they would wait to
interrupt him. Some of the students had
been given lists with words like important, hurry, etc and those interrupted
after three to five minutes. Other
students had been given lists with considerate, patient, etc and they waited
ten minutes to interrupt.
Gladwell also found a way to change scores on the Implicit
Association Test (IAT). There’s been a
lot of talk about how this test reveals implicit and unconscious bias, showing
how people take longer to associate positive words with African-Americans or
business terms with women, etc. He found
that showing people a short film about Martin Luther King Jr. or Barrack Obama
right before the test negated the bias.
The effect didn’t last long but it suggests our unconscious biases might
be easier to fix than we ever thought.
Daily counter-prejudice messages or visuals might have more effect than
we thought.
It’s an interesting book and it’s making me more conscious
of how I think. I agree with him that we
would do better as a society if we understood how our unconscious mind can
influence our actions, for better or worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment