blink

We were invited to a wedding last weekend, kind of a tangential relationship with the bride, as her brother was a high school and college friend of our son’s. The point was that several of the kids who all went to high school together were gathered together in one place for the first time in several years. They had flown and driven in from various cities and it was something that might not happen again for some time. I suggested to my son that we get everyone together for a photo op for the momentous occasion.

Miraculously, they all agreed and were eager to do it. I was afraid the whole enterprise would fall apart since it is a group of very independent people. Son Patrick herded the crowd into the lobby of the party center and I saw a couch against one wall and suggested a “Family Feud” photo, with the women seated on the couch and the men standing behind them. They all laughed and said yes, let’s do that.

As we arranged the furniture, three tiny digital cameras appeared and different people asked to have one taken with their camera. Of course I obliged them. There were a couple of new additions to the group, two women who became attached to a couple of the original males in the set.

Kathy and I both had the same reaction to one of the new young women we met that night. She seemed a little self absorbed. The first word that popped into my mind when I met her was “outsider.” She just didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the kids. It wasn’t just that she was new to the scene, because there was another young lady who joined the group recently and we didn’t get the same vibes from her. Now usually I give people the benefit of the doubt when I first meet them, but Kathy is able to immediately size people up and nothing changes her mind.

Can you do that? Are you able to read people in a few milliseconds and learn a lot about them in a short period of time?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, “blink”, he talks about the ability to “thin slice” people and situations. That is, he believes we all have the ability to read a person or problem in seconds and that those judgments are supported over time, as control groups study the problem for several weeks and arrive at the same conclusions. We can’t explain how we do this, we just do it.

There are problems, though with thin slicing, as he points out in several famous examples. For instance, Warren G. Harding certainly looked presidential, but that’s as far as it went. He also talks about what went wrong in some well known police actions, like the black immigrant who was killed in New York City because the police officers “thin sliced” the situation of a black man standing outside in the middle of the night and figured he was up to no good.

He talks about the “New Coke” debacle, how screened auditions led to having more women hired into orchestras, how psychologists can tell from a few seconds of videotapes of couples interacting who will be divorced and who will stay together, and how a war game was turned on its head by someone who didn’t play by the usual decision making rules.

Give it a read and see what you think. I think I’m going to start paying more attention to my initial impressions of people and situations and see if I can learn to trust them more than I do right now.