Book Report -- by R. Liu
Book : Blink
The world today teaches individuals that in order to make an accurate and intelligent decision, excessive amounts of time and several layers of information are necessary. As children, people are taught to “think before they act” and that “haste makes waste.” People are uncomfortable at times when they feel that they do not have enough background knowledge to make a crucial decision. The book Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell, explores the concept that less information may actually help a person make a careful choice. This is because a person’s instinct or unconscious does not need an extravagant amount of information in order to come up with a valid answer. Sometimes the overflow of information may actually be overwhelming and unnecessary.
Through scenes, events, interviews, research, and stylistic devices, Gladwell is able to prove that while large amounts of information may be needed at times, letting one’s instincts or unconscious take over can be beneficial for a majority of the time when it comes to decision-making, as less information can actually be more valuable in some situations.
Gladwell begins with a story about a firefighter; the man and his crew were at a house attempting to put out what seemed to be a typical kitchen fire. However, after the men began spraying the inside of the house with water, the fire persisted. The firefighters and his crew were furiously dousing the kitchen with water, yet this made little difference. The fire was still burning. By now, something should have happened as water usually does put out fire. Rather than taking the precious time to analyze the situation, “suddenly, the lieutenant thought to himself, There’s something wrong” (122). He ordered his men out immediately and the floor promptly collapsed, seconds after the firefighters had all filed out. It turned out that the fire had been in the basement of the house instead of the kitchen, as previously thought. If the firefighters had been in the house for a couple of seconds longer, they would have all fallen into the basement and been burned and enveloped by the fire. Thankfully, the lieutenant was able to make a quick decision and command the men to exit. In this situation, the lieutenant did not stop and consider his options or attempt to logically think things through. The insight that was used in this circumstance was crucial and would not have appeared if the lieutenant had paused. “Had the lieutenant stopped the situation, had he said to them, let’s talk this over and try to figure out what’s going on, had he done, in other words, what we often think leaders are supposed to do, he might have destroyed his ability to jump to the insight that saved their lives” (124). This quick, split-second decision was successful because it was not burdened by long analysis and long discussions. Repetition is used in the second quote when the phrase “had he” is repeated. This emphasizes the pressure of the situation, how easy it would have been to make a mistake and slip up, and how the entire event could have turned out differently if the lieutenant had done just one of those actions.
Next, Gladwell introduces the reader to the Cook County Hospital. This hospital is located in Chicago and was a place where the people in Chicago without health insurance would go to when they were desperate. The hospital was known as a last resort and people usually did not expect much when they went there. Cook County Hospital had a lot of issues, but the biggest one was how to deal with the patients who would rush in and claim they were suffering from a heart attack. “A significant number of those people filing into the Emergency Department were worried that they were having a heart attack. And they used more than their share of beds and nurses and doctors and stayed around a lot longer than other patients” (128). The process of diagnosing a heart attack, as one can imagine, was long, tedious, involved a series of questions and tests and almost wasted the time that doctors could be spending on other patients in critical conditions. Cook County Hospital was in need of a way to be able to quickly tell whether or not a patient was at risk of a heart attack and what treatment they needed. The chairman of the hospital’s Department of Medicine, Brendan Reilly, decided to adopt a method devised by a man named Lee Goldman. Rather than going through with the extensive questionnaire about a person’s medical history and various risks the patient might encounter, Goldman’s “decision tree” was based off of the results of an ECG test, blood pressure, fluid in the lungs, and unstable angina. These simple factors seem almost inadequate in determining whether or not a person is about to experience a heart attack, but once the Cook County Hospital starting using Goldman’s decision tree, the doctors had a 95% accuracy rate on determining heart attacks. Before, when the doctors would question the patient on seemingly impertinent factors such as whether or not they smoke, how much they exercise, what their diet consists of, etc., the doctors had an accuracy rate of around 81%. This is a perfect example of how less information can sometimes be more beneficial and efficient than having mounds of information. Goldman’s algorithm indicated that “the role of those other factors is so small in determining what is happening to the man right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without them… that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues” (137). It seems that what hurt the doctors before was that they were attempting to incorporate too much information and take too much into account. Gladwell utilizes diction in the second quote when he breaks up “more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues” into separate sentences. This emphasizes each statement and the pauses make it seem more drastic and more dramatic.
Gladwell brings in an experiment done by a psychologist named John Gottman that is centered on marriages. Gottman would bring couples in to his laboratory and they would sit on two office chairs mounted on raised platforms. There would also be electrodes and sensors attached to their ears and fingers in order to measure things such as heart rate, how much the people were sweating, and the temperature of their skin. The platforms could also measure how much each person moved in his or her chair. Gottman would record couples talking for fifteen minutes about anything from their marriage that had caused contention. Using these quick, fifteen-minute clips, Gottman was able to predict with 90 percent whether or not a couple would remain married for at least fifteen years. Instead of being around these couples for extended amounts of time and witnessing couples in their everyday lives, Gottman simply has to use these videos. This technique is known as “thin-slicing,” which is the ability for one’s unconscious to locate patterns in situations and behavior based on very little information or experience. The key to this is that when there are vast amounts of information, so much of it is actually useless and distracting. When other people try to duplicate Gottman’s experiment, they are usually overwhelmed and unable to predict divorce rates with Gottman’s precision, because they do not know what information is important and what is useless. Gottman has become so skilled at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can “be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children” (32). These small snippets of conversation is all Gottman needs in order to predict something as large as whether or not the couple will remain married for long. Gladwell believes that this is a prime example of how the unconscious functions. He believes that “when we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is doing what John Gottman does. It’s sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters” (34). Gladwell proposes that the unconscious is extremely good at this task, “to the point where thin-slicing often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking” (34). A person’s unconscious does not require massive amounts of information in order to make a conscientious decision or conclusion. Thin-slicing is used constantly and proves that so much of the information given to people is unnecessary and not needed. Personification is used in the second quote, since a person’s unconscious is being given human-like qualities such as “sifting through” and “throwing out.” The unconscious, being a part of the brain, cannot literally sift through anything or throw anything out.
Gladwell describes a war game known as the Millennium Challenge ‘02. In this particular scenario, a rogue military commander had split off from the government somewhere in the Persian Gulf and was threatening to submerge the entire region into a war. This anti-American man had a great power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties and he was promoting four different terrorist organizations. Paul Van Riper was asked to play the role of this rogue commander and be charge of the Red Team, while the United States and its allies would be considered the Blue Team. During this war game, the Blue Team was provided with greater intellectual resources than almost any army in history. They were given decision-making tools, matrices showing how systems were interrelated, and a tool called Effects-Based Operations, which lead them to strategize beyond the standard military method of targeting and destroying the antagonist’s military assets. However, despite the this immense amount of information, the Blue Team still lost the first round of the Millennium Challenge to the Red Team. This was because Van Riper, leader of the Red Team, “did not believe you could lift the fog of war... [he] became convinced [from his previous experience as commander of the Mike Company in Vietnam] that war was inherently unpredictable and messy and nonlinear” (106). Van Riper did not agree that all the extra information and technology the Blue Team had would necessarily be beneficial or give them an edge. Van Riper was able to win because he used minimal information, rather than holding long conversations and attempting to utilize charts during the fighting. The Millennium Challenge and war are essentially insight problems, but the Blue Team took too long to make these crucial decisions that their powers of insight had been extinguished. Van Riper thought that the Blue Team “‘was so focused on the mechanics and the process and the necessary steps to take that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning” (125). The Blue Team overanalyzed the entire situation and that caused them their loss. The second quote includes polysyndeton when the conjunction “and” is used several times in order to emphasize and exaggerate the tasks that the Blue Team was immersed with.
One final argument concerning why less information may actually prove to be more beneficial than extensive amounts of information is an experiment performed by a group of scientists at the University of Iowa. The experiment involved two decks of red cards and two decks of blue cards. Each card in each of those decks would either win the player a sum of money or cost the player some money. The player of this game had the task of turning over cards from any of the decks in a combination that would maximize the winnings. The catch to this, however, was that the red decks were really just traps. The rewards gained were high, but the losses from the red cards outweighed the benfits. The only way a person could actually win money was by grabbing cards from the blue deck. The scientists recorded that after about fifty cards, a person will start to have a hunch about what is occurring and the catch that comes with the red cards. After turning over close to eighty cards, the majority of people who participated in this experiment were able to figure out the game and can explain why the two red decks are a bad idea. The interesting part of this study, however, was that the Iowa scientists set up machines that measured the activity of the sweat glands beneath the gamblers’ hands. The gamblers were discovered to first have begun feeling stress responses by merely the tenth card, which is a whole forty cards before the gamblers even begin to form a theory in their heads. As soon as their palms began to generate sweat, their behavior began to change as well. The gamblers may not have noticed it right away, but they subconsciously started to favor the blue cards and take less and less cards from the red decks. “They began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making” (10). While the gamblers were consciously trying to process the information and decipher the puzzle of the game, their unconscious had already gotten a head start and figured out the game. The players were trying to use all the information they were gathering while pulling cards, but in essence, their unconscious only needed ten cards to get a grasp on what was happening behind the scenes of the game. In situations such as this Iowa experiment, “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” (61). Having abundant information and making an educational guess is reliable, safe, and foolproof at times, but other times, it is simply best to leave it to that area behind the locked door, a person’s unconscious, to make the instinctive decision. A metaphor is present in the second quote when Gladwell compares a person’s unconscious to a locked door. It is essentially impossible to alter and open the locked door that is a person’s instincts.
Through scenes, events, interviews, research, and stylistic devices, Gladwell is able to prove that while large amounts of information may be needed at times, letting one’s instincts or unconscious take over can be beneficial for a majority of the time when it comes to decision-making, as less information can actually be more valuable in some situations.
Gladwell begins with a story about a firefighter; the man and his crew were at a house attempting to put out what seemed to be a typical kitchen fire. However, after the men began spraying the inside of the house with water, the fire persisted. The firefighters and his crew were furiously dousing the kitchen with water, yet this made little difference. The fire was still burning. By now, something should have happened as water usually does put out fire. Rather than taking the precious time to analyze the situation, “suddenly, the lieutenant thought to himself, There’s something wrong” (122). He ordered his men out immediately and the floor promptly collapsed, seconds after the firefighters had all filed out. It turned out that the fire had been in the basement of the house instead of the kitchen, as previously thought. If the firefighters had been in the house for a couple of seconds longer, they would have all fallen into the basement and been burned and enveloped by the fire. Thankfully, the lieutenant was able to make a quick decision and command the men to exit. In this situation, the lieutenant did not stop and consider his options or attempt to logically think things through. The insight that was used in this circumstance was crucial and would not have appeared if the lieutenant had paused. “Had the lieutenant stopped the situation, had he said to them, let’s talk this over and try to figure out what’s going on, had he done, in other words, what we often think leaders are supposed to do, he might have destroyed his ability to jump to the insight that saved their lives” (124). This quick, split-second decision was successful because it was not burdened by long analysis and long discussions. Repetition is used in the second quote when the phrase “had he” is repeated. This emphasizes the pressure of the situation, how easy it would have been to make a mistake and slip up, and how the entire event could have turned out differently if the lieutenant had done just one of those actions.
Next, Gladwell introduces the reader to the Cook County Hospital. This hospital is located in Chicago and was a place where the people in Chicago without health insurance would go to when they were desperate. The hospital was known as a last resort and people usually did not expect much when they went there. Cook County Hospital had a lot of issues, but the biggest one was how to deal with the patients who would rush in and claim they were suffering from a heart attack. “A significant number of those people filing into the Emergency Department were worried that they were having a heart attack. And they used more than their share of beds and nurses and doctors and stayed around a lot longer than other patients” (128). The process of diagnosing a heart attack, as one can imagine, was long, tedious, involved a series of questions and tests and almost wasted the time that doctors could be spending on other patients in critical conditions. Cook County Hospital was in need of a way to be able to quickly tell whether or not a patient was at risk of a heart attack and what treatment they needed. The chairman of the hospital’s Department of Medicine, Brendan Reilly, decided to adopt a method devised by a man named Lee Goldman. Rather than going through with the extensive questionnaire about a person’s medical history and various risks the patient might encounter, Goldman’s “decision tree” was based off of the results of an ECG test, blood pressure, fluid in the lungs, and unstable angina. These simple factors seem almost inadequate in determining whether or not a person is about to experience a heart attack, but once the Cook County Hospital starting using Goldman’s decision tree, the doctors had a 95% accuracy rate on determining heart attacks. Before, when the doctors would question the patient on seemingly impertinent factors such as whether or not they smoke, how much they exercise, what their diet consists of, etc., the doctors had an accuracy rate of around 81%. This is a perfect example of how less information can sometimes be more beneficial and efficient than having mounds of information. Goldman’s algorithm indicated that “the role of those other factors is so small in determining what is happening to the man right now that an accurate diagnosis can be made without them… that extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues” (137). It seems that what hurt the doctors before was that they were attempting to incorporate too much information and take too much into account. Gladwell utilizes diction in the second quote when he breaks up “more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues” into separate sentences. This emphasizes each statement and the pauses make it seem more drastic and more dramatic.
Gladwell brings in an experiment done by a psychologist named John Gottman that is centered on marriages. Gottman would bring couples in to his laboratory and they would sit on two office chairs mounted on raised platforms. There would also be electrodes and sensors attached to their ears and fingers in order to measure things such as heart rate, how much the people were sweating, and the temperature of their skin. The platforms could also measure how much each person moved in his or her chair. Gottman would record couples talking for fifteen minutes about anything from their marriage that had caused contention. Using these quick, fifteen-minute clips, Gottman was able to predict with 90 percent whether or not a couple would remain married for at least fifteen years. Instead of being around these couples for extended amounts of time and witnessing couples in their everyday lives, Gottman simply has to use these videos. This technique is known as “thin-slicing,” which is the ability for one’s unconscious to locate patterns in situations and behavior based on very little information or experience. The key to this is that when there are vast amounts of information, so much of it is actually useless and distracting. When other people try to duplicate Gottman’s experiment, they are usually overwhelmed and unable to predict divorce rates with Gottman’s precision, because they do not know what information is important and what is useless. Gottman has become so skilled at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can “be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children” (32). These small snippets of conversation is all Gottman needs in order to predict something as large as whether or not the couple will remain married for long. Gladwell believes that this is a prime example of how the unconscious functions. He believes that “when we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is doing what John Gottman does. It’s sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters” (34). Gladwell proposes that the unconscious is extremely good at this task, “to the point where thin-slicing often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking” (34). A person’s unconscious does not require massive amounts of information in order to make a conscientious decision or conclusion. Thin-slicing is used constantly and proves that so much of the information given to people is unnecessary and not needed. Personification is used in the second quote, since a person’s unconscious is being given human-like qualities such as “sifting through” and “throwing out.” The unconscious, being a part of the brain, cannot literally sift through anything or throw anything out.
Gladwell describes a war game known as the Millennium Challenge ‘02. In this particular scenario, a rogue military commander had split off from the government somewhere in the Persian Gulf and was threatening to submerge the entire region into a war. This anti-American man had a great power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties and he was promoting four different terrorist organizations. Paul Van Riper was asked to play the role of this rogue commander and be charge of the Red Team, while the United States and its allies would be considered the Blue Team. During this war game, the Blue Team was provided with greater intellectual resources than almost any army in history. They were given decision-making tools, matrices showing how systems were interrelated, and a tool called Effects-Based Operations, which lead them to strategize beyond the standard military method of targeting and destroying the antagonist’s military assets. However, despite the this immense amount of information, the Blue Team still lost the first round of the Millennium Challenge to the Red Team. This was because Van Riper, leader of the Red Team, “did not believe you could lift the fog of war... [he] became convinced [from his previous experience as commander of the Mike Company in Vietnam] that war was inherently unpredictable and messy and nonlinear” (106). Van Riper did not agree that all the extra information and technology the Blue Team had would necessarily be beneficial or give them an edge. Van Riper was able to win because he used minimal information, rather than holding long conversations and attempting to utilize charts during the fighting. The Millennium Challenge and war are essentially insight problems, but the Blue Team took too long to make these crucial decisions that their powers of insight had been extinguished. Van Riper thought that the Blue Team “‘was so focused on the mechanics and the process and the necessary steps to take that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning” (125). The Blue Team overanalyzed the entire situation and that caused them their loss. The second quote includes polysyndeton when the conjunction “and” is used several times in order to emphasize and exaggerate the tasks that the Blue Team was immersed with.
One final argument concerning why less information may actually prove to be more beneficial than extensive amounts of information is an experiment performed by a group of scientists at the University of Iowa. The experiment involved two decks of red cards and two decks of blue cards. Each card in each of those decks would either win the player a sum of money or cost the player some money. The player of this game had the task of turning over cards from any of the decks in a combination that would maximize the winnings. The catch to this, however, was that the red decks were really just traps. The rewards gained were high, but the losses from the red cards outweighed the benfits. The only way a person could actually win money was by grabbing cards from the blue deck. The scientists recorded that after about fifty cards, a person will start to have a hunch about what is occurring and the catch that comes with the red cards. After turning over close to eighty cards, the majority of people who participated in this experiment were able to figure out the game and can explain why the two red decks are a bad idea. The interesting part of this study, however, was that the Iowa scientists set up machines that measured the activity of the sweat glands beneath the gamblers’ hands. The gamblers were discovered to first have begun feeling stress responses by merely the tenth card, which is a whole forty cards before the gamblers even begin to form a theory in their heads. As soon as their palms began to generate sweat, their behavior began to change as well. The gamblers may not have noticed it right away, but they subconsciously started to favor the blue cards and take less and less cards from the red decks. “They began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making” (10). While the gamblers were consciously trying to process the information and decipher the puzzle of the game, their unconscious had already gotten a head start and figured out the game. The players were trying to use all the information they were gathering while pulling cards, but in essence, their unconscious only needed ten cards to get a grasp on what was happening behind the scenes of the game. In situations such as this Iowa experiment, “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” (61). Having abundant information and making an educational guess is reliable, safe, and foolproof at times, but other times, it is simply best to leave it to that area behind the locked door, a person’s unconscious, to make the instinctive decision. A metaphor is present in the second quote when Gladwell compares a person’s unconscious to a locked door. It is essentially impossible to alter and open the locked door that is a person’s instincts.
It is a common belief that the amount of information provided is directly proportional to the quality of the decision that must be made. When doctors are unsure of a patient’s condition, it seems obvious that the doctor will perform more tests in order to get a better sense of what is happening. At school, people often feel more prepared for tests after they have studied for prolonged amounts of time. In the book Blink, Gladwell explores the idea that perhaps a person’s instinct is the best decision-maker, and requires the least amount of information. The brain toggles back and forth between the conscious part that makes these carefully thought-out decisions, while the unconscious portion is responsible for the instinctive decisions that must be made on the fly. However, people may try and decipher the reasoning behind this and try and enter this locked door, but the purpose of the unconscious is to remain a mystery. These two sections of the brain should be kept separate and rather than being given the ability to delve into the mysteries of the unconscious, it is best for people to just leave it up to their unconscious for it to reveal itself whenever it pleases.
