A review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Anyone who does a lot of public speaking knows there are certain questions that inevitably arise from the audience in a Q&A session. In my case, lecturing on pseudoscience and the paranormal, I am almost always asked: What is my position on the afterlife? (“I’m for it”), have I ever encountered a mystery that science cannot explain? (“Paris Hilton”), and have I ever been skeptical of something that turned out to be real? For this final question I have a serious answer: intuition.

As a skeptical scientist, I have always treated with disdain the notion that one can intuit a truth about reality. Scientists should employ the logic of Mr. Spock, the deductive reasoning of Mr. Holmes, and the rational calculus of Mr. Data. Hunches, guesses, insights, feelings, and intuitions lead to misdirection and error. Thinking things through rationally and systematically is the royal road to reality.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out there’s a lot more to thinking than meets the experimental eye, and Malcolm Gladwell has penned an absolutely delightful summary of all the important research in the study of intuition. His title, Blink, is apt, for we humans have a remarkable — and heretofore unproven — capacity for making judgments in the metaphorical blink of an eye that are often superior to those we might have made had we taken the time to assess all possible variables.

Gladwell begins with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forged Kouros, a sculpture of a youth allegedly carved in 6th-century B.C. Greece. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests. For example, one of the art experts — Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — later recalled that the first word that popped into his mind when he saw the Kouros was “fresh.” Although he could not say precisely what about the statue was fresh, it was a general feeling he had about it. “I had dug in Sicily where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’t come out looking like that. The Kouros looked like it had been dipped in the very best café au lait from Starbucks.”

What is happening here is nonrational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. (This may also mean that student evaluations are actually based on first impressions rather than extensive analysis.) The same effect — called “thin slicing” — can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried “speed dating,” a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple “dates” in one evening lasts only six minutes. Thin slicing is intuitive thinking, “thinking without thinking” as Gladwell puts it. That’s not quite right, however, as I suspect it is more of a subtle, unconscious (or subconscious) form of thinking that we just don’t know that much about as yet. We are collecting data about a person or situation, and that data is being analyzed somewhere in the brain. How precisely that is being done remains a mystery.

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive “feel” in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour. Contempt for one’s spouse, for example, is a powerful predictor of a doomed marriage, and rolling one’s eyes when one’s spouse is speaking, is a proxy for contempt. A lot can be read in the blink of an eye.

We are especially good at snap judgments when it comes to human relations, because we evolved as a social primate species living in small tribes in which social relations were extremely important. We needed (and still need) to know whom we can trust and whom we cannot trust; in the prehistoric world of our Paleolithic environment we had only our wits and intuitions, the “sense” or “feeling” we had for someone’s trustworthiness, to rely on. The social calculus was not the slow and systematic logic of analysis; it was (and is) the subtle and fast feeling of a felt emotion. That “feeling” is the expression of an internal computation whose consequences are important.

This explains the interesting results of an experiment conducted by the psychologist Samuel Gosling. He rated 80 subjects on the “Big Five” personality scale (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience). He found a high correlation with similar ratings of the subjects done by their best friends — no surprise. But then he sent total strangers into the dorm rooms of the subjects and gave them 15 minutes to answer questions about the person who lived there. The strangers were not as good as the best friends in evaluating extraversion and agreeableness, but on conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness to experience, the strangers knew the subjects better than their best friends!

Some of the research findings on what might be called “the blink effect,” so well encapsulated by Gladwell, are startling. The best predictor of whether a physician will be sued for malpractice is not the doctor’s training, credentials, or track record, but a subjective evaluation by observers of short clips of conversation between doctor and patient. Physicians who seem warm and empathetic — traits that can be sensed in a blink — are less likely to be sued by their patients, regardless of the number of errors they commit. As one lawyer explained it, “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.’”

Unfortunately, in what Gladwell calls “the dark side of blink,” we sometimes make snap assessments of people based on inappropriate criteria, such as their gender or race. Research with the Implicit Association Test has shown that we form connections between things faster when there is already an association, such as between “female” and “laundry,” “home,” “kitchen,” “housework,” and “babies”; and between “male” and “professional,” “merchant,” “capitalist,” “corporation,” and “entrepreneur. Even more sinister are the associations of African-American or European-American with such adjectives as “hurt,” “evil,” “glorious,” and “wonderful.” “It turns out that over 80 percent of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations,” Gladwell explains, “meaning that it takes them measurably longer to complete the test when they are required to link good things with black people than when they are required to link bad things with black people.”

Gladwell took the test and was rated as having “moderate automatic preference for whites”; “but then again, I’m half black,” he points out. Meaning what? “What it means,” he concludes, “is that our attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have conscious attitudes. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately.” The IAT, on the other hand, measures “our racial attitudes on an unconscious level — the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think. We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good.”

Blink is packed with examples of such intuitive processes, a thoughtful and thought-provoking look into both the light tunnel and the dark well of our minds. But I wish to praise it on another plane as well.

There are, roughly speaking, three levels of science writing in our culture: (1) technical (peer-reviewed papers, monographs, and university press books written by and for professional scientists); (2) popular professional (essays and articles in popular magazines and trade press books written by scientists for both scientists and moderately informed general readers — Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond come to mind); (3) popular general (essays, articles, and books by journalists and science writers for completely uninformed readers).

We live in the Age of Science, and all three levels are vital for the dispersal of scientific knowledge to an educated democracy. Sadly, too many professional scientists think level one is the only legitimate form of science writing, and that anything else is simply “dumbing down.” For his presentation of science to hundreds of millions of people, the astronomer Carl Sagan was slammed by his peers, denied tenure at Harvard, and rejected by the National Academy of Science. Yet he never stopped producing peer-reviewed articles, averaging one a month for his entire career.

Gladwell is presenting science at level three, where it is most needed, and where good writing is most vital. He has the ability to synthesize a large body of scientific data into a highly readable, page-turning narrative, and to convert the raw numbers of research and statistics into meaningful facts for our personal lives. I thought he did this brilliantly with The Tipping Point, and I think he does it even better in Blink. For this feat all of us in the scientific community should be grateful, because the craft of writing good science is just as important as the skill of producing good science.

(Little, Brown & Company, 2005, ISBN 0316172324)
This review was originally published in New York Sun.

A review of David G. Myers’ Intuition: It’s Powers and Perils.

Imagine yourself a contestant on the classic television game show Let’s Make a Deal. You must choose one of three doors, behind one of which is a brand new automobile (while the other two harbor goats). You choose door number one. Host Monty Hall, who knows what is behind all the doors, shows you what’s behind door number two, a goat, then inquires: would you like keep the door you chose or switch? It’s 50/50 so it doesn’t matter, right?

Wrong. You had a one in three chance to start, but now that Monty has shown you one of the losing doors, you have a 2/3rds chance of winning by switching doors. Think of it this way: There are 10 doors; you choose door number one and Monty shows you door numbers 2 through 9, all losers. Now you would switch because your chances increase from 1/10 to 9/10. This is a counterintuitive problem that drives people batty, including mathematicians, and is just one of numerous examples presented by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his latest book on the “powers and perils” of intuition.

The perils are legion. Gamblers’ intuitions, for example, are notoriously flawed (to the profitable delight of casino operators). You’ve hit five reds in a row on the roulette wheel. Should you stay with red because you are on a “hot streak” or should you switch because black is “due”? It doesn’t matter because the roulette wheel has no memory, but try telling that to the happy gambler whose pile of chips grows before his eyes.

What about hot streaks in sports? Intuitively don’t we just know that when Kobe’s hot he can’t miss? Intuitively yes, but Myers presents the findings of a fascinating 1985 study of “hot hands” in basketball by Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky, who analyzed every basket shot by the Philadelphia 76ers for an entire season. They discovered that the probability of a player hitting a second shot did not increase following an initial successful basket (beyond what one would expect by chance and the average shooting percentage of the player). What they found is so counter-intuitive that it is jarring to the sensibilities: the number of streaks, or successful baskets in sequence, did not exceed the predictions of a statistical coin-flip model. That is, if you conduct a coin flipping experiment and record heads or tails, you will shortly encounter streaks. On average and in the long run, you will flip five heads or tails in a row once in every 32 sequences of five tosses. (Since we are dealing with professional basketball players instead of coins, adjustments have to be made. If a player’s shooting percentage is 60 percent, for example, we would expect, by chance, that he will sink six baskets in a row once for every 20 sequences of six shots attempted.) Players may feel “hot” when they have games that fall into the high range of chance expectations, but science shows that this intuition is an illusion.

Myers systematically catalogues the countless ways our intuitions about the world lead us astray: we rewrite our past to fit present beliefs and moods, we badly misinterpret the source and meaning of our emotions, we are subject to the hindsight bias where we falsely surmise that we knew it all along, we succumb to the self-serving bias where we think we are far more important than we really are, we see illusory correlations that do not exist (superstitions), and we fall for the confirmation bias, where we look for and find evidence for what we already believe.

Since I’m a scientist and skeptic Myers’ demonstration that intuition cannot be trusted triggered my own confirmation bias — everyone knows that intuition is just mushy new age nonsense. But as Myers demonstrates through countless well-documented experiments, our intuitions about intuition may be wrong. There is something else going on in the brain. That something else, for lack of a better word (and I do wish there were a better word), is intuition, or what Myers defines as “our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason.”

Consider the research by Harvard’s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, who discovered that the evaluation of teachers by students who saw a mere 30-second video of the teacher were remarkably similar to those of students who had taken the course. Even three two-second video clips of the teacher yielded a striking .72 correlation with the course student evaluations!

Occasionally the staccato pacing of Myers’ scientific analysis is jarringly punctuated with such sentimental expressions as “What the conscious mind cannot understand, the heart knows,” and a few too many pithy and over-familiar witticisms of writers and poets. But these are easily overlooked by the hundreds of studies presented to make his case that intuition is a fruitful field of scientific analysis. For example, I was stunned by, and still do not quite know what to make of the experiments by researchers on how unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. Scientists flashed emotionally positive scenes (kitten, romantic couple) or negative scenes (werewolf, dead body) for 47 milliseconds before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally-linked scenes, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photos had been associated with the positive scenes. Something registered somewhere in the brain beneath awareness.

This effect is most striking in brain-damaged patients. Myers describes a woman who is unable to recognize her own hand, and when asked to use her thumb and forefinger to estimate the size of an object was unable to do it. Yet when she reached for the object her thumb and forefinger were correctly placed. Another study revealed that stroke patients who have lost a portion of their visual cortex may be consciously blind in part of their field of vision. When shown a series of sticks they report seeing nothing, yet unerringly identify whether the unseen sticks are vertical or horizontal. That’s weird.

Even for us non brain-damaged folks, subtle perception and learning is ongoing, especially in the social sphere where, Myers speculates, evolution would have designed our brains to be finely tuned to important relationships. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist will work out for you, for example, is your initial reaction in the first five minutes of the first session (not unlike the first impression on a first date). And research supports another intuition we have that women are more intuitively sensitive to subtle cues: women are better lie detectors than men, are superior in discerning which of two people in a photo was the other’s supervisor, and were more able to tell whether a male-female couple in a photograph is a genuine romantic relationship or a posed phony one.

What is going on here is not fully understood, and I worry that such research will be used to bolster belief in psychic power. Before we say something is out of this world we must first establish that it is not in this world. That has yet to be done with intuition. Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning — knowing without knowing that you know. A full scientific explanation is still forthcoming because this is a relatively new field of inquiry, but Myers’s book brilliantly establishes intuition as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry.

(Yale University Press, 2004, ISBN 0300095317)
This review was originally published in Los Angeles Times.

Stardate: 1672.1. Earthdate: October 6, 1966. Star Trek, Episode 5, “The Enemy Within.”

Captain James T. Kirk has just beamed up from planet Alpha 177, where magnetic anomalies have caused the transporter to malfunction, splitting Kirk into two beings. One is cool and rational. The other is impulsive and irrational. Rational Kirk must make a command decision to save the crew, but he is paralyzed with indecision, bemoaning to Dr. McCoy: “I can’t survive without him. I don’t want to take him back. He’s like an animal — a thoughtless, brutal animal. And yet it’s me!”

This psychological battle between intellect and intuition was played out in almost every episode of Star Trek in the characters of the ultrarational Mr. Spock and the hyperemotional Dr. McCoy, with Captain Kirk as the near perfect synthesis of both. Thus, I call this balance the Captain Kirk Principle: intellect is driven by intuition, intuition is directed by intellect.

For most scientists, intuition is the bête noire of a rational life, the enemy within to beam away faster than a phaser on overload. Yet the Captain Kirk Principle is now finding support from a rich emerging field of scientific inquiry brilliantly summarized by Hope College psychologist David G. Myers in his book Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale University Press, 2002). I confess to having been skeptical when I first picked up the book, but as Myers demonstrates through numerous well-replicated experiments, intuition—“our capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight without observation or reason” — is as much a component of our thinking as analytical logic.

Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal of Harvard University, for example, discovered that evaluations of teachers by students who saw a mere 30-second video of the teacher were remarkably akin to those of students who had taken the course.

Even three two-second video clips of the instructor yielded a striking 0.72 correlation with the course students’ evaluations.
Research consistently shows how so-called unattended stimuli can subtly affect us. At the University of Southern California, Moshe Bar and Irving Biederman flashed emotionally positive images (kitten, romantic couple) or negative scenes (werewolf, corpse) for 47 milliseconds immediately before subjects viewed slides of people. Although subjects reported seeing only a flash of light for the initial emotionally charged pictures, they gave more positive ratings to people whose photographs had been associated with the positive ones — so something registered.

Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning — knowing without knowing that you know. Chess masters often “know” the right move to make even if they cannot articulate how they know it. People who are highly skilled in identifying “micromomentary” facial expressions are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing college students, psychiatrists, polygraphists, court judges, police officers and Secret Service agents on their ability to detect lies, only the agents, trained to look for subtle cues, scored above chance.

Most of us are not good at lie detection, because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic stroke victims, who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on facial expressions. (Nonaphasic subjects did no better than chance.) We may even be hardwired for intuitive thinking: damage to parts of the frontal lobe and amygdala (the fear center) will prevent someone from understanding relationships or detecting cheating, particularly in social contracts, even if he or she is otherwise cognitively normal.

Although in science we eschew intuition because of its many perils (also noted by Myers), we’d do well to remember the Captain Kirk Principle, that intellect and intuition are complementary, not competitive. Without intellect, our intuition may drive us unchecked into emotional chaos. Without intuition, we risk failing to resolve complex social dynamics and moral dilemmas.

As Dr. McCoy explained to Kirk: “We all have our darker side — we need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human. Your strength of command lies mostly in him.”