Dec 18 2007
Blink
I recently finished Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he tries to understand and explain intuition, the process by which we make instant decisions without consciously thinking about how we make them. He opens with a story about the Getty Museum, which in 1983 was contacted by an art dealer to see if it was interested in acquiring a kouros which the dealer claimed was made in the sixth century BC and was in almost perfect condition. Since almost all of the two hundred kouroi in existence today are badly damaged, this would be a fantastic acquistion for the museum if true. The museum had a geologist analyze the stone using an electron microscope, electron microprobe, and other instruments and he concluded that the stone was indeed very old. On this basis, the Getty agreed to buy the statue and in 1986 put it on display.
There was one problem. It did not look right. Art historians, curators, and other art experts all thought there was something wrong with it as soon as they saw it, but couldn’t quite say what. Upon further examination, they concluded that the style was wrong for the period it was supposedly from - in fact, it seemed to mix the styles of several periods. One expert thought it look too “fresh”, and a 2,600-year-old statue should not look “fresh”. Further investigation revealed that the statue was in fact a fake produced by forger in the 1980s.
It took just a few seconds for the art experts to realize that something was wrong. Blink explores what happens in those few seconds.
Gladwell talks to a number of psychologists, training experts, doctors, and other people to explore how people make snap decisions. He discusses how people are so very often right when they make those decisions, but how they can also go tragically wrong - he spends an entire chapter on the Amadou Diallo killing. The book is anecdote-driven rather data-driven, so it seemed to me to be more superficial than it should have been. I prefer more data, but that’s just me. However, I found it very interesting with a lot of insights into how we process information.