Episode Details

Several years ago, I was standing in our school lunchroom watching hundreds of students eat breakfast.

I was positioned in the middle section of the room, and the front doors of the school were about one hundred feet across the room from me. Dozens of students were entering when I saw one high school boy who caught my attention. He was so far away, I could not see his facial features, but his demeanor and walk gave me a quick pause.

I decided to follow my hunch. I walked across the room, and as I approached him more closely, he tried to avoid eye-contact. But I casually stepped closer and asked him if I could talk to him in private for a minute. Once he was in my office, I invited another administrative team member to join me, and my hunch proved accurate.

The boy was under the influence of marijuana and was also in possession. Later that morning as we worked through meeting with parents and school discipline procedures, he suddenly looked up at me and asked, “How did you know I was messed up from all the way across the room?” I didn’t know how to explain how I knew. I had been a school administrator for more than ten years, and a lot of my observations came second nature.

This summer I enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In the book, he explains the importance of understanding your adaptive unconscious — the small ways we discern situations and make decisions that often happen in a split second.

Throughout the book, Gladwell uncovers three main takeaways: 

1. Decisions made quickly can be as important as ones made over a long period.
2. Sometimes our instincts betray us.
3. Our first impressions and snap judgements can be educated and controlled.

Slicing Information

Gladwell explains that experts often “thin slice” information for quick judgements. For instance, he talks about the ability of experts in ancient artifacts to be able to tell the difference between a fake and an authentic piece of art by just glancing at the work. He describes the work of social scientists who can predict whether new couples will stay together long-term just based on a few minutes of watching them talk and interact. The lesson? Over time, you develop abilities to “think slice” large amounts of data or information that help with decision-making.

Instincts That Betray Us

But he also explains ways that our unconscious ideas can infiltrate or manipulate reality. One startling example is the way we perceive gender and race. Gladwell cites numerous studies where the majority of people (even people of diversity) will misjudge or assign more negative emotional levels to people of color, men who are shorter in stature, or to women in general. 

Gladwell is the child of an integrated family. He shares how he participated in a scientifically designed computer programs that required participants to assign emotions to photos. To his surprise and embarrassment, he inevitably assigned more negative emotions to minorities. These blind-spots in our unconscious can be danger