50 Psychology Classics (26 page)

Millions of years ago the first type of humans experienced a massive increase in the size of their brains in a relatively short space of time. But not every part of the new brain had grown. Most of the growth was in the frontal lobe region, above the eyes, which partly accounts for why our ancestors had
foreheads that dramatically sloped back while ours are almost vertical—we needed the room for all those millions of new brain cells.

For a long time it was thought that the frontal lobe had no particular function, but observation of patients with frontal lobe damage revealed problems with planning, and also, strangely, a reduction in feelings of anxiety. What was the link between the two? Both planning and anxiety are related to thinking about the future. Frontal lobe damage leaves people living in a permanent present, and as a result they don't bother to make plans, so they can't be anxious about them.

The huge growth in the human frontal lobe thus gave humans a distinct survival advantage: the ability to imagine different futures, choose between them, and thereby control our environment. We can make predictions about what will make us happy in the future.

It is possible for the brain to cram in all of a person's experiences, memories, and knowledge, Gilbert says, because we do not remember everything in its entirety, but instead preserve a few threads of each experience. We recall only these and the brain “fills in the rest” to make the memory seem complete.

The brain also creates ingenious shortcuts when it comes to perception. German philosopher Immanuel Kant suggested that perceptions are like portraits, which tell us as much about the hand of the artist (the perceiver) as they do about the subject. The brain creates an
interpretation
of reality, but it is so good that we do not grasp that it is only an interpretation.

In the same way that our memories and our perceptions can be faulty, when it comes to imagining the future the details that we imagine happening frequently do not give us the whole picture. It is not so much the things we
do
imagine happening that are incorrect, but more that we
leave out
things that do happen. As many psychological experiments have shown, the human mind is not well structured to note
absences
of things. But our brain does such a brilliant conjuring trick in making us believe that our interpretations are fact that we accept what it gives us without question.

Gilbert's chief point about happiness is that it is subjective. He tells of conjoined twins Lori and Reba, who have been joined at the head since birth and share a blood supply and part of their brain tissue. Despite this, they go about their lives and have said to anyone who asks that they are very happy. Most people hearing this will say that these twins don't know what happiness is, a response that presumes happiness can only come from being a “single” person. In the same way, people overestimate how bad they would feel if they became blind. But the blind still go on living and doing most of the things the sighted do, and they can be as happy and satisfied as anyone.

What makes us happy colors all our perceptions of what happiness is, but even our own perceptions of what happiness is will change at different times in our lives. Lovers can never see that how they feel about each other may be different in ten years' time, and mothers can never imagine going back to work when they are in love with their newborn. There is a neurological reason for these mistakes in perception. When we imagine things in the future, we use the same sensory parts of the brain that we use to experience real things in the present. We are generally not rational about future events, carefully weighing up the pros and cons, but run them through in our mind to see what
emotional
reaction we get. What we imagine happening is defined by what we are feeling
now
. How do we know what will make us happy in 20 years' time?

In short, the human brain is set up to imagine the future quite well, but not perfectly, and this accounts for the gulfs we often experience between what we thought would make us happy and what actually does. This means that we can spend all our lives making money then decide it wasn't worth it, but also that we can be pleasantly surprised when people, situations, or events that we were certain would make us miserable turn out not to be so.

Gilbert spends virtually the whole book identifying the problems we have in accurately predicting our future emotional states, but does he provide a solution that could make happiness more reliable? His slightly anti-climactic answer is that the best way to find out how we will feel about a particular future course of action (a certain career, a move to a particular city, having children) is to ask people who have already done it how they felt. As we are creatures of control with a strong belief in our uniqueness, we are naturally averse to relying on the experience of others. However, such a strategy, while not particularly exciting, is the best available to deliver us life satisfaction and wellbeing, whereas the happiness from relying purely on ourselves is only ever to be stumbled on.

Daniel Gilbert is Harvard College Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and is also the director of the Hedonic Psychology Laboratory at Harvard. He has written numerous influential articles in the social psychology field, and is the editor of
The Handbook of Social Psychology.

“They didn't weigh every conceivable strand of evidence. They considered only what could be gathered in a glance. Their thinking was what the cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer likes to call ‘fast and frugal.' They simply took a look at the statues and some part of their brain did a series of instant calculations, and before any kind of conscious thought took place, they
felt
something, just like the sudden prickling of sweat on the palms of the gamblers… Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But they
knew.”

“[There] can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”

In a nutshell

Assessments we make in the blink of an eye can be as good as those we make after much deliberation.

In a similar vein
Gavin de Becker
The Gift of Fear
(p 20)
Robert Cialdini
Influence
(p 62)

Malcolm Gladwell has become a celebrity in the book world. A writer for
The New Yorker
magazine since 1996, he came to the public's attention with
The Tipping Point
, which considered how small ideas or trends reach a critical mass, pushing them into the mainstream.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
, Gladwell's follow-up bestseller, is a more purely psychological work, leaning on the research of Timothy Wilson, a professor at the University of Virginia who has written about the “adaptive unconscious,” that part of our mind that can lead us to good decisions even though we don't know how we make them; and Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist who is an expert on how people arrive at decisions under pressure.

Gladwell's talent is for weaving together scientific research findings from fields as diverse as sociology, psychology, criminology, and marketing with an anecdotal style to create new ways of looking at things for the popular reader, and
Blink
is an attempt to bring to the public eye an emerging area of psychology, rapid cognition, that has so far received little popular attention.

The ability to come to lightning-quick conclusions, Gladwell notes, evolved for the sake of survival. In life-threatening situations, humans needed to be able to make accurate snap judgments based on the available information.

Much of our functioning occurs without us having to think consciously, and we move back and forth between conscious and unconscious modes of thought. We work with, in effect, two brains: the one that has to deliberate over things, analyze, and categorize; and the one that sizes matters up first and asks questions later.

Often, the snap judgments we make about someone are as accurate as if we had observed them for much longer periods. The psychologist Nalini Ambady, for instance, did a study that found that the assessment college students gave of a professor's effectiveness after watching a two-second film clip of them was the same as the assessment given by students who had sat in their class for a whole semester.

As children we are taught not to trust these first impressions, but to “stop and think,” “look before you leap,” and not to judge a book by its cover. While there is merit in these approaches, Gladwell points out that it is not always the best strategy to gather as much information as possible before
acting. Often, the extra information does not make our judgment any better, yet we continue to put all our trust in rational, conscious deliberation.

Gladwell introduces the concept of “thin-slicing,” which is “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.” Even the most complex situations, he says, can be “read” quickly if we can identify the underlying pattern. Most of one chapter of
Blink
is devoted to the work of psychologist John Gottman (see p 136), who on the basis of many years observing couples in action is able to predict whether they will stay together or divorce with 90 percent accuracy—after watching them for only a few minutes.

Art experts can often assay the authenticity of a work of art very quickly, getting an actual physical feeling as they stand before a sculpture or a painting. Something tells them whether it is genuine or a fake. Basketballers are said to have “court sense,” to be able to read the play of the game in an instant, and great generals have
coup d'oeil
, meaning “power of the glance.” Gladwell tells of the fireman who ordered his team out of a burning house just in time. His men were trying to put out a fire in the kitchen, but there was something not quite right about the fire—it was too hot. Only later did it emerge that the main fire was in the basement, hence the greater heat coming up through the floors. A moment after the team left the house it erupted, and probably would have killed them if they had stayed inside. The fireman could not say why exactly he suddenly decided to withdraw his men—he “just knew.”

By the laws of probability, most decisions made under pressure should be flawed ones, yet psychologists have found that people routinely make correct judgments most of the time, even with limited information. One of Gladwell's surprising points is that we can actually
learn
how to make better snap judgments, in the same way that we can learn logical, deliberative thinking. But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.

The positive aspect of thin-slicing is the ability to make quick and correct judgments. But it also carries the negative aspect of decisions that are hasty and wrong.

The people of the United States elected Warren Harding to be president, Gladwell suggests, essentially because he was tall, dark, good-looking, and had a deep voice. The “Warren Harding effect” is when we believe a person has courage, intelligence, and integrity according to their appearance—even if, as
in Harding's case, there is not much going on below the surface (he was considered to have been one of America's worst presidents in the short time he was in office).

Gladwell organized a study on the height of chief executive officers of large American corporations. He found that as well as the CEOs being predominantly white and male, their average height was just under 6 feet; 58 percent of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are over 6 feet tall, compared to only 14.5 percent of the American population. This suggests that beyond the need for leadership, we require a leader to have a particular appearance. The taller people are, the more confidence we tend to have in them—whether that is justified or not.

Wrong first impressions can have more tragic consequences. Gladwell provides a lengthy analysis of the shooting of an innocent man, Amadou Diallo, in the Bronx area of New York. Diallo, an immigrant from Guinea, was standing outside his house getting a breath of fresh air when a car of four young, white, male undercover police happened to be driving down his street. They wondered what he was doing, leaping to the conclusion he was dealing drugs or acting as the lookout for a robbery. When they called out to him, because he was afraid he went back inside the house. For the policemen this only seemed to confirm his guilt. They ran in after him, shooting, and Diallo died on the spot from bullet wounds.

Gladwell does not believe that the police were particularly racist, but he quotes the psychologist Keith Payne: “When we make a split-second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.” When we are under pressure to make an instant judgment, we cannot consciously cancel out our implicit associations, or prejudices, because our first impression is coming from below the level of our consciousness.

Older, more experienced police may be wiser in similar situations, because their decisions are based more on past experience of what is likely to happen next rather than appearances. Or they may have an excellent ability to read the micro expressions on people's faces, which may last for a fraction of a second yet reveal much about their motivation.