As part of my ongoing search for decisiveness, I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. Perfect, I thought. Instead of going back and forth between countless pros and cons when faced with a decision, I’ll learn how to go with my gut. I’ve always been bad about trusting my gut. (Actually, I never know what my gut is saying, let alone whether to trust it or not.)
The book started off promising enough. I learned about “thin slicing”, the ability of our brains to find patterns in situations and behaviors based on very narrow slices of experience. It happens quickly and with virtually no effort on our part. It’s how some art experts were able to know at a glance that a statue was a fake. They couldn’t even say how exactly they knew, just that it was an immediate feeling or thought. So, the key was to let our brains operate on autopilot.
Unless I don’t have one. An autopilot, that is.
As I learned on page 59, people who have damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which lies right behind the nose and plays a critical role in decision making) lack judgment. There is a passage in the book describing a patient being unable to choose between two possible appointment dates — comparing cost-benefits and possible outcomes of choosing this date over that date — that sounded reminiscent of the last time I made an appointment to take Lucy to the vet. Yeegods. Maybe I got hit in the nose as a kid and damaged my ventromedial area.
After reassuring myself that my level of wishy-washiness didn’t constitute brain damage and that I could, indeed, thin slice, I read on to learn that there is actually a dark side to thin slicing: unconscious prejudices. For example, before orchestras began holding blind auditions — when they could see the musician play the instrument instead of having the person behind a curtain — women never won seats for French horn because unconsciously the judges considered the instrument to be masculine and only able to be played properly by a man.
So now I have to worry about my unconscious prejudices clouding the databank that my brain is thin-slicing through. How am I supposed to trust my gut knowing that? The more I read Blink, the more I worried I would never again be able to make a decision.
Then finally, in the last chapter, I did find a nugget to help guide me. Various scientific experiments tend to prove that there is a time to blink and a time to think; a time to trust our instincts and a time to consciously think things through. When choices are pretty simple and straightforward — which t-shirt color to pick — it’s best to conduct deliberate analysis. But when we have to decide something big with a lot of variables — what career would be best — then our unconscious may be a better decision maker, and quicker to boot.
This is actually opposite of the way most people think, and I really like this idea. The book quotes Sigmund Freud to sum it up:
“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
So when I have big decisions to make, if I can quiet myself enough to hear what my gut is saying, in general I should trust what it’s telling me. And for the little decisions, like whether to buy the anti-tarter toothpaste or the whitening gel, I’m just going to have to go through my painstaking decision tree, no matter how long it takes. (The toothpaste decision took an entire minute in the grocery store yesterday. I went with the whitening gel, as I’ve been drinking a lot of coffee lately.)
