In Borders on Sunday I was seduced by the smell of freshly opened pages. I rarely splash out on new books, preferring to pick up second hand copies on Amazon or eBay, but the shiny blue cover of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink pulled me in, and I was reluctant to resist. In Blink, the author of The Tipping Point turns his attention to those first few seconds where we make decisions and form snap judgements.

Pay no attention to the blurb on the back of the book, or the many glowing recommendations displayed provocatively on the cover. The central argument of Blink is NOT to ‘trust your instincts‘ as many reviewers seem to suggest, but rather that the decisions we make quickly are based on far more information than we are consciously aware of. Whether that decision is the correct one or not, depends very much on how we interpret all that unconscious information. If you like your arguments to be clear and unchallenging, leading to bold conclusions you can either agree or disagree with, this book may not be for you. But if you’re fascinated by interesting questions that will set your mind wandering, and content to finish a book more confused than when you began, then Blink is worth a read. It got me thinking about a couple of examples from my own life over the past week.

In the previous post, I wrote about a Canadian rock band called Must be Tuesday, and referred to them more than once as an all girl band. I reached this conclusion despite the fact that the picture on their web-site clearly shows a male band member. Even after my error was pointed out to me, I continued to look at the picture and see three women.

So how did I decide that Bart was female, despite clear evidence to the contrary?

Once I started looking, it was easy to retrace the steps that led to this assumption. On the band’s homepage, sitting right next to the photo is a link to Gaywire - a radio show targeting gay Canadians. From this, I probably drew the conclusion that Must be Tuesday were either a gay band, or had a strong gay following. The lyrics of the song I downloaded pushed me even further towards an incorrect conclusion. Having watched a few episodes of the L-Word last year, I found myself putting ‘turkey baster‘ and ‘u-haul truck‘ together and getting lesbian rock band. And once I’d reached that conclusion, it really wouldn’t have mattered if Bart had a beard and a hairy chest - I’d already decided he was female.

My snap judgement was coloured by assumptions I’d made through unconsciously combining bits of information from the web-site with snippets from my own memories, and these assumptions affected how I interpreted the picture. They failed to allow for a male band member in what I saw as a lesbian rock band, and as such my judgement was incorrect.

How many of the decisions we make in life are just as incorrect, and based on pulling together similar strands of loose information?

Here’s a puzzle from Gladwell’s book. It’s not the sort of puzzle you can work out with a pencil and paper - the answer will either come to you or it won’t.

A man and his son are in a serious car 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?

It took me about a minute to work out the answer, and when I did it was one of those ‘How could I be so stupid?‘ moments. But it wasn’t stupidity that made me assume the doctor was male, it was an assumption I’d made through my own experiences with doctors over the years, and through the portrayal of doctors on TV shows (Grey’s Anatomy aside). If you haven’t worked it out yet, the doctor is the boy’s mother.

A few days ago, I’d almost decided the time had come to resign from the day job. Passions were running high after a particularly frustrating week, and I’d built up a list of reasons as to why leaving was the strongest course of action. And then I started to wonder. Was there more to it than the same old reasons that had existed for so long? Was I processing information I was unaware of? Maybe I was sub-consciously picking up on hints that the company was floundering, or that management was preparing to move against me.

When we make quick decisions about minor things like a face in a picture, the effects of being wrong are usually small and we brush it off as just one of those things. But how often do we make similarly incorrect judgements about the bigger issues? We quit a job, begin to suspect our partner is cheating on us, or form strong opinions about a politician. And often we make these decisions without ever really understanding why. We fail to pick up on the thousand and one little things that push us towards one judgement or another.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book does not provide conclusive answers to these questions, but it does ask them, and that’s a start.