First impressions: sometimes right, sometimes wrong, always revealing

It may never earn the status of Catch-22, but the title of Malcolm Gladwell's last book added a new phrase to popular intellectual culture: "The Tipping Point" is when an idea or product suddenly becomes fashionable. With his insight and considerable research, Gladwell explained why this occurs, and the different types of people that make it happen.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In Blink, he may have done it again--popularizing extremely complicated, diverse, but apparently interlinked explanations of why first impressions are always important, often correct, and occasionally tragically wrong.

He sucks you straight in with an art fraud bought by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1983. The experts at the Getty wanted to believe that an apparently 2,500-year-old, near-perfectly preserved kouros statue was genuine. They undertook scientific tests, including X-ray diffraction and mass spectrometry, and a geologist from the University of California indicated it certainly was not a contemporary fake.

The New York Times marked the purchase with a front-page story, and everyone appeared to be happy. But two art experts, Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison, came to see the statue and instantly knew it was a fake. Harrison's immediate response on having the cloth over the statue removed, and being told that the Getty was buying it, was: "I'm sorry to hear that."

Over the next few months, other experts came and looked, and more tests were done, and the truth came out about the elaborate, $10 million fraud. Harrison's story is somewhat unusual, in that he was able to explain why he knew it was a fake: It looked "fresh," he said. In much of Blink it is interesting to see how most experts, many of whom know things intimately through years of experience, cannot explain why they know what they know. Vic Braden, a former tennis professional and successful coach, can nearly always know when a tennis player is about to serve a double fault, and is still spending time with scientists to try and figure out how he knows.

An early story discusses one of Gladwell's key concepts, the thin slice--how a little bit of knowledge goes a long way. University of Washington psychologist John Gottman analyzes couples' conversations for an hour and can tell with 95 percent certainty how strong the relationship is, and whether it will survive. He has been doing this for 15 years, with great success.

Critically, the conversation must be about something that will bring out the fundamental dynamics of the relationship. He gives as an example the problems a new dog is creating with a couple: Bill doesn't like the dog, and Sue does. What is critical, and nonexperts don't get without training, is how to analyze the way the couple interact in their discussion. Gottman has so finely captured the key ingredients--"the signature"--in relationships that his certainty of successful prediction still holds after 15 minutes' conversation.

He even says one word can sum up the majority of marital problems: contempt. Sue treats Bill's concerns about the dog with contempt, but as Gladwell wonderfully describes, it took an expert to explain how to interpret the conversation, which was "overwhelming" at first, in that it contained so much information he wasn't sure what to listen for. Addressing contempt early in a relationship may stop its otherwise almost inevitable collapse.

Gladwell discusses myriad topics: racism in car purchasing--why blacks are quoted higher prices for the same car ("the dark side of thin slicing," as he puts it); speed dating (what makes some people instantly attractive to the opposite sex); U.S. military might losing war games to technically inferior opposition that do the unexpected; why ER doctors save more patients with heart attack risk by spending less time on diagnosis; and numerous fascinating examples from public relations.

The most interesting is why the Pepsi Challenge is totally meaningless. Pepsi beats Coca Cola at taste tests because it's sweeter and most people that sip it like it better. But of course, we don't just sip either drink in a restaurant or at home, and many of us prefer the less sweet Coke when it comes to drinking an entire glass. Misunderstanding this "tasting thin slice" caused the launch of the sweeter "New" Coke, which was a financial disaster prompting a relaunch of the old recipe, "Classic" Coke.

The final chapter, entitled "Seconds in the Bronx," shows the fatal dangers of certain types of thin slicing, and how they can be overcome with experience. A small black guy in a bad neighborhood stands casually as an unmarked police car full of white officers passes by. At least one policeman makes a key and false assumption: This weedy kid must have a reason to be confident in this bad location, he's probably armed, and he could be a lookout for a robbery. When they approach him, the police are nervous and the kid is petrified; he doesn't realize they're the police. He runs, the police pursue. He tries to pull out his wallet, the police think it's a gun and, 41 shots later, he's riddled with holes and is dead.

Gladwell says that, under extreme stress, police officers (and the rest of us) behave somewhat like autistic people, incapable of taking nonverbal cues from circumstances. The inexperience of the officers, the adrenaline from fear and the chase, makes them act without noticing that the kid's face is full of fear, not aggression.

Blink is must reading because it's a great book, and because everyone else will have read it. If nothing else, it will make you think about contempt in every relationship you've ever had.

Blink

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown, 288 pp., $25.95

Roger Bate is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

COPYRIGHT 2005 News America Incorporated
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group