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"The Blink Effect" --old concept, new name
On August 28, 2005 by Jamie Madigan
There's an interesting post on About Human Resources regarding Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Says the author of the About.com piece:
Whenever we have to make sense of complicated situations or deal with lots of information quickly, we bring to bear all of our beliefs, attitudes, values, experiences, education and more on the situation. Then, we thin-slice the situation to comprehend it quickly. The implications of this concept have astonishing significance for our personal reactions to most situations.
It seems to me that this ability to think without thinking, to make snap decisions about situations and people in a "blink", has significant implications for how we interview and hire staff.
She's right, of course. But "the Blink effect" and "thin slicing" are new terms for an old phenomenon that's been studied out the kazoo by psychologists for years now. One of my favorite classes in grad school was a seminar on Judgement and Decision-Making, and we called this phenomenon "heuristics" or, more generally, "decision-making under uncertainty." The gist of it is this: puny humans are limited in their information-processing capabilities, so they have to use various mental shortcuts or heuristics lest their brains pop, fizzle, and burst into flame before the end of a typical morning. There's no way you can accumulate and more to the point use all the information needed to achieve complete rationality for every decision you have to make. None of us has the mental horsepower, time, or other resources needed for that.
So we do the best we can. We rely on those mental shortcuts and make snap judgements because it gets us through the day and keeps things going, no matter how bone-headed and irrational such reliance is. Our brains are hard-wired for it and it's the root of a variety of innate human foibles, including:
- Liking people who are similar to ourselves
- Thinking an event is more frequent than it is if we're familiar with it
- Attributing the behaviors of others to their nature rather than external influences
- Ignoring information that contradicts our previously-held beliefs...
- ...and putting too much weight on information that confirms them
And tons more. In the end, though, we have to acknowledge, as Gladwell apparently does, that these biases exist and we can't completely expunge them from our daily lives. The trick is to be aware of them in decision-making and use the tools and techniques needed to avoid them when making really important decisions. It's fine to be irrational when deciding what movie to see or what menu item to order, but not so much when deciding whether or not to refinance your mortgage or whether or not to hire a particular person. So that's why we do things like standardize employment testing procedures or structure interviews so that everyone is asked the same questions and has their answers evaluated in the same way.
And indeed, the author of the About.com piece makes the same point, though with hipper terminology:
The key take away from the book is the necessity for each of us to be aware of and control our thin-slicing. After reading Blink, I’m more convinced than ever that we make snap decisions about situations and people, unconsciously, that bring into play all of our biases. All candidates for positions deserve the same treatment and the same attention to factors other than race, religion, appearance and size.
Any decisions that we make based on our thin-slicing must be accompanied by the recognition that we do make important decisions using this process - unconsciously. Take the time to gather a larger pool of data before going with your initial gut reaction. While you may be right, you can be wrong. And, there is the constant opportunity to unconsciously discriminate, make poor hiring and networking choices and to trust or distrust employee stories for all of the wrong reasons.
So there you go: old lesson, new lexicon.
Read "Why "Blink" Matters: The Power of First Impressions" on About.com.
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