Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

A young immigrant from Guinea, Amadou Diallo lived in the Bronx in 1999 and, late one evening, was standing on his front porch when approached by four plainclothes policemen. With poor English skills and fearing that the four men are not police but robbers, Diallo started to run, then stopped and tried to pull something from his pocket. The police, assuming he was drawing forth a gun, opened fire and killed Diallo—who, it turns out, was trying merely to produce his wallet to give to them.

The four policemen were tried and acquitted of manslaughter and second-degree murder, but their case points up the perils of police-suspect encounters, and how the intuitive human mind can fail during extreme crises.

John Gottman developed a powerful system for predicting the likely chances that a couple’s marriage will continue. At his “love lab," couples interact while being filmed; each second of the resulting video is marked with the emotional signals communicated at that moment. Gottman can, in moments, diagnose and predict the couple’s future prospects. His technique considers four major emotions, as displayed by a given couple. The most important emotion is contempt: if either partner displays it toward the other, the relationship is in jeopardy. 

Paul Van Riper, a career Marine, believed that war is messy, and, though careful preparation is important, battlefield conditions are unpredictable, so making decisions on the fly is crucial. In 2002, Van Riper was asked to compete in the Millennium Challenge, a set of war games meant to practice scenarios in the Middle East. The US military’s Blue Team used massive data analysis to strategize, while Van Riper’s "bad-guy" Red Team had to adapt in the moment. Though greatly outnumbered and outgunned, Red Team launched a surprise attack that crippled Blue Team and triumphed. 

New York University’s John Bargh and his associates devised clever tests to influence the behavior of test takers simply by changing a few of the adjectives used in the test instructions. Subjects whose instructions contained aggressive words behaved more rudely when, later, they encounter a delay in completing their assignment; test takers whose instructions contained polite words behaved more passively.

A New Jersey car salesman who sold twice as many cars as the average salesperson, Bob Golomb’s motto is “Take care of the customer” (153). He believed that a sales associate should never prejudge potential buyers by their outward appearance. 

As a trombonist, in 1980 Abbie Conant tried out for a spot in the brass section of the Munich Philharmonic, which attempted a system of blind auditions where musicians play behind a screen. Conant won the audition, but when the orchestra’s leaders discovered she was female, they assumed she wouldn’t be able to handle the demands of orchestral life like a man could. They launched a campaign of subtle harassment designed to get her to quit. Instead, she sued and won full instatement; her case was one of the first to demonstrate the dangers of prejudgment and the value of blind auditions, and today half of the players in American orchestras are women. 

Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun worked together as taste testers. With each sip or bite that they took on behalf of food manufacturers, the two were able to evaluate tastes across dozens of criteria, and explain provide detailed reactions. Civille and Heylmun demonstrated that accurate instincts are trainable and that it’s possible to verbally describe the complexities of tasting without letting the description overshadow and distort the judgment. 

Marketer Louis Cheskin discovered that people attribute qualities of the outside packaging to products. Add yellow to the green color of a carton of Seven-Up containers and people taste more lemon-lime flavor. Put a royal crown on a margarine carton and consumers believe the margarine is of high quality. Cheskin’s experiments prove that people sometimes judge quality by signals external to the product itself. 

A student of mind-reading expert Silvan Tomkins, UC San Francisco professor Paul Ekman is one of the leading experts in human facial expressions, which he proved are universal, not culturally determined. He discovered and cataloged 3,000 individually meaningful facial expressions and micro-expressions.

Gavin de Becker provided security services to celebrities; he trained bodyguards to respond to threats calmly and deliberately, even while wounded during a firefight. His method involved shooting the bodyguards with paint balls, causing instructive pain to the point where the guards could perform their duties unperturbed under the most grueling situations.

De Becker believed that the more “white space," or distance between assailant and target, the more time a bodyguard has to effectively react. He also pointed out that two-man police teams get into more trouble than solo officers, since the teams can goad each other with bravado, while single officers must be more cautious when entering a dangerous situation. 

A tennis pro-turned-teacher, Vic Braden’s decades of experience allowed him to predict, with uncanny accuracy, whether a player is about to double-fault on a serve. Braden never could explain how he knew this; he studied tennis serves for years, trying to figure it out. His strange ability is an example of how the human mind can sort through masses of sensory inputs in moments and make accurate predictions without the need for painstaking calculations.