Blink
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
By Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown
Copyright © 2005
Malcolm Gladwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-17232-4
Chapter One
The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of
Knowledge Goes a Long Way
Some years ago, a young couple came to the University of Washington
to visit the laboratory of a psychologist named John Gottman. They
were in their twenties, blond and blue-eyed with stylishly tousled
haircuts and funky glasses. Later, some of the people who worked in
the lab would say they were the kind of couple that is easy to
like-intelligent and attractive and funny in a droll, ironic kind of
way-and that much is immediately obvious from the videotape Gottman
made of their visit. The husband, whom I'll call Bill, had an
endearingly playful manner. His wife, Susan, had a sharp, deadpan
wit.
They were led into a small room on the second floor of the
nondescript two-story building that housed Gottman's operations, and
they sat down about five feet apart on two office chairs mounted on
raised platforms. They both had electrodes and sensors clipped to
their fingers and ears, which measured things like their heart rate,
how much they were sweating, and the temperature of their skin.
Under their chairs, a "jiggle-o-meter" on the platform measured how
much each of them moved around. Two video cameras, one aimed at each
person, recorded everything they said and did. For fifteen minutes,
they were left alone with the cameras rolling, with instructions to
discuss any topic from their marriage that had become a point of
contention. For Bill and Sue it was their dog. They lived in a small
apartment and had just gotten a very large puppy. Bill didn't like
the dog; Sue did. For fifteen minutes, they discussed what they
ought to do about it.
The videotape of Bill and Sue's discussion seems, at least at first,
to be a random sample of a very ordinary kind of conversation that
couples have all the time. No one gets angry. There are no scenes,
no breakdowns, no epiphanies. "I'm just not a dog person" is how
Bill starts things off, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. He
complains a little bit-but about the dog, not about Susan. She
complains, too, but there are also moments when they simply forget
that they are supposed to be arguing. When the subject of whether
the dog smells comes up, for example, Bill and Sue banter back and
forth happily, both with a half smile on their lips.
Sue: Sweetie! She's not smelly ...
Bill: Did you smell her today?
Sue: I smelled her. She smelled good. I petted her, and my hands
didn't stink or feel oily. Your hands have never smelled oily.
Bill: Yes, sir.
Sue: I've never let my dog get oily.
Bill: Yes, sir. She's a dog.
Sue: My dog has never gotten oily. You'd better be careful.
Bill: No, you'd better be careful.
Sue: No, you'd better be careful.... Don't call my dog oily, boy.
1. The Love Lab
How much do you think can be learned about Sue and Bill's marriage
by watching that fifteen-minute videotape? Can we tell if their
relationship is healthy or unhealthy? I suspect that most of us
would say that Bill and Sue's dog talk doesn't tell us much. It's
much too short. Marriages are buffeted by more important things,
like money and sex and children and jobs and in-laws, in constantly
changing combinations. Sometimes couples are very happy together.
Some days they fight. Sometimes they feel as though they could
almost kill each other, but then they go on vacation and come back
sounding like newlyweds. In order to "know" a couple, we feel as
though we have to observe them over many weeks and months and see
them in every state-happy, tired, angry, irritated, delighted,
having a nervous breakdown, and so on-and not just in the relaxed
and chatty mode that Bill and Sue seemed to be in. To make an
accurate prediction about something as serious as the future of a
marriage-indeed, to make a prediction of any sort-it seems that we
would have to gather a lot of information and in as many different
contexts as possible.
But John Gottman has proven that we don't have to do that at all.
Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand
married couples-just like Bill and Sue-into that small room in his
"love lab" near the University of Washington campus. Each couple has
been videotaped, and the results have been analyzed according to
something Gottman dubbed SPAFF (for specific affect), a coding
system that has twenty separate categories corresponding to every
conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a
conversation. Disgust, for example, is 1, contempt is 2, anger is 7,
defensiveness is 10, whining is 11, sadness is 12, stonewalling is
13, neutral is 14, and so on. Gottman has taught his staff how to
read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how
to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue. When they watch a
marriage videotape, they assign a SPAFF code to every second of the
couple's interaction, so that a fifteen-minute conflict discussion
ends up being translated into a row of eighteen hundred numbers-nine
hundred for the husband and nine hundred for the wife. The notation
"7, 7, 14, 10, 11, 11," for instance, means that in one six-second
stretch, one member of the couple was briefly angry, then neutral,
had a moment of defensiveness, and then began whining. Then the data
from the electrodes and sensors is factored in, so that the coders
know, for example, when the husband's or the wife's heart was
pounding or when his or her temperature was rising or when either of
them was jiggling in his or her seat, and all of that information is
fed into a complex equation.
On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something
remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he
can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still
be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen
minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent. Recently, a
professor who works with Gottman named Sybil Carrère, who was
playing around with some of the videotapes, trying to design a new
study, discovered that if they looked at only
three minutes of a
couple talking, they could still predict with fairly impressive
accuracy who was going to get divorced and who was going to make it.
The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time
than anyone ever imagined.
John Gottman is a middle-aged man with owl-like eyes, silvery hair,
and a neatly trimmed beard. He is short and very charming, and when
he talks about something that excites him-which is nearly all the
time-his eyes light up and open even wider. During the Vietnam War,
he was a conscientious objector, and there is still something of the
'60s hippie about him, like the Mao cap he sometimes wears over his
braided yarmulke. He is a psychologist by training, but he also
studied mathematics at MIT, and the rigor and precision of
mathematics clearly moves him as much as anything else. When I met
Gottman, he had just published his most ambitious book, a dense
five-hundred-page treatise called
The Mathematics of Divorce, and he
attempted to give me a sense of his argument, scribbling equations
and impromptu graphs on a paper napkin until my head began to swim.
Gottman may seem to be an odd example in a book about the thoughts
and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. There's nothing
instinctive about his approach. He's not making snap judgments. He's
sitting down with his computer and painstakingly analyzing
videotapes, second by second. His work is a classic example of
conscious and deliberate thinking. But Gottman, it turns out, can
teach us a great deal about a critical part of rapid cognition known
as thin-slicing. "Thin-slicing" refers to the ability of our
unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on
very narrow slices of experience. When Evelyn Harrison looked at the
kouros and blurted out, "I'm sorry to hear that," she was
thin-slicing; so were the Iowa gamblers when they had a stress
reaction to the red decks after just ten cards.
Thin-slicing is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling. But
it's also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How
is it possible to gather the necessary information for a
sophisticated judgment in such a short time? The answer is that when
our unconscious engages in thin-slicing, what we are doing is an
automated, accelerated unconscious version of what Gottman does with
his videotapes and equations. Can a marriage really be understood in
one sitting? Yes it can, and so can lots of other seemingly complex
situations. What Gottman has done is to show us how.
2. Marriage and Morse Code
I watched the videotape of Bill and Sue with Amber Tabares, a
graduate student in Gottman's lab who is a trained SPAFF coder. We
sat in the same room that Bill and Sue used, watching their
interaction on a monitor. The conversation began with Bill. He liked
their old dog, he said. He just didn't like their new dog. He didn't
speak angrily or with any hostility. It seemed like he genuinely
just wanted to explain his feelings.
If we listened closely, Tabares pointed out, it was clear that Bill
was being very defensive. In the language of SPAFF, he was
cross-complaining and engaging in "yes-but" tactics-appearing to
agree but then taking it back. Bill was coded as defensive, as it
turned out, for forty of the first sixty-six seconds of their
conversation. As for Sue, while Bill was talking, on more than one
occasion she rolled her eyes very quickly, which is a classic sign
of contempt. Bill then began to talk about his objection to the pen
where the dog lives. Sue replied by closing her eyes and then
assuming a patronizing lecturing voice. Bill went on to say that he
didn't want a fence in the living room. Sue said, "I don't want to
argue about that," and rolled her eyes-another indication of
contempt. "Look at that," Tabares said. "More contempt. We've barely
started and we've seen him be defensive for almost the whole time,
and she has rolled her eyes several times."
At no time as the conversation continued did either of them show any
overt signs of hostility. Only subtle things popped up for a second
or two, prompting Tabares to stop the tape and point them out. Some
couples, when they fight,
fight. But these two were a lot less
obvious. Bill complained that the dog cut into their social life,
since they always had to come home early for fear of what the dog
might do to their apartment. Sue responded that that wasn't true,
arguing, "If she's going to chew anything, she's going to do it in
the first fifteen minutes that we're gone." Bill seemed to agree
with that. He nodded lightly and said, "Yeah, I know," and then
added, "I'm not saying it's rational. I just don't want to have a
dog."
Tabares pointed at the videotape. "He started out with 'Yeah, I
know.' But it's a yes-but. Even though he started to validate her,
he went on to say that he didn't like the dog. He's really being
defensive. I kept thinking, He's so nice. He's doing all this
validation. But then I realized he was doing the yes-but. It's easy
to be fooled by them."
Bill went on: "I'm getting way better. You've got to admit it. I'm
better this week than last week, and the week before and the week
before."
Tabares jumped in again. "In one study, we were watching newlyweds,
and what often happened with the couples who ended up in divorce is
that when one partner would ask for credit, the other spouse
wouldn't give it. And with the happier couples, the spouse would
hear it and say, 'You're right.' That stood out. When you nod and
say 'uh-huh' or 'yeah,' you are doing that as a sign of support, and
here she never does it, not once in the entire session, which none
of us had realized until we did the coding.
"It's weird," she went on. "You don't get the sense that they are an
unhappy couple when they come in. And when they were finished, they
were instructed to watch their own discussion, and they thought the
whole thing was hilarious. They seem fine, in a way. But I don't
know. They haven't been married that long. They're still in the
glowy phase. But the fact is that she's completely inflexible. They
are arguing about dogs, but it's really about how whenever they have
a disagreement, she's completely inflexible. It's one of those
things that could cause a lot of long-term harm. I wonder if they'll
hit the seven-year wall. Is there enough positive emotion there?
Because what seems positive isn't actually positive at all."
What was Tabares looking for in the couple? On a technical level,
she was measuring the amount of positive and negative emotion,
because one of Gottman's findings is that for a marriage to survive,
the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has
to be at least five to one. On a simpler level, though, what Tabares
was looking for in that short discussion was a pattern in Bill and
Sue's marriage, because a central argument in Gottman's work is that
all marriages have a distinctive pattern, a kind of marital DNA,
that surfaces in any kind of meaningful interaction. This is why
Gottman asks couples to tell the story of how they met, because he
has found that when a husband and wife recount the most important
episode in their relationship, that pattern shows up right away.
"It's so easy to tell," Gottman says. "I just looked at this tape
yesterday. The woman says, 'We met at a ski weekend, and he was
there with a bunch of his friends, and I kind of liked him and we
made a date to be together. But then he drank too much, and he went
home and went to sleep, and I was waiting for him for three hours. I
woke him up, and I said I don't appreciate being treated this way.
You're really not a nice person. And he said, yeah, hey, I really
had a lot to drink.'" There was a troubling pattern in their first
interaction, and the sad truth was that that pattern persisted
throughout their relationship. "It's not that hard," Gottman went
on. "When I first started doing these interviews, I thought maybe we
were getting these people on a crappy day. But the prediction levels
are just so high, and if you do it again, you get the same pattern
over and over again."
One way to understand what Gottman is saying about marriages is to
use the analogy of what people in the world of Morse code call a
fist. Morse code is made up of dots and dashes, each of which has
its own prescribed length. But no one ever replicates those
prescribed lengths perfectly. When operators send a
message-particularly using the old manual machines known as the
straight key or the bug-they vary the spacing or stretch out the
dots and dashes or combine dots and dashes and spaces in a
particular rhythm. Morse code is like speech. Everyone has a
different voice.
In the Second World War, the British assembled thousands of
so-called interceptors-mostly women-whose job it was to tune in
every day and night to the radio broadcasts of the various divisions
of the German military.
Continues...
Excerpted from Blink
by Malcolm Gladwell
Copyright © 2005 by Malcolm Gladwell.
Excerpted by permission.
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