Blink
Book Review by Adam Chan

Secrets of Snap Judgment a.k.a Thin-Slicing

A Retired Professional Tennis Player - Pg 49

Vic Braden, a retired professional tennis player can accurately predict if a tennis player will double fault on his or her serve before the services were completed. What puzzles him is both the unexplained accuracy in the predictions and the speed at which he made them.

Speed dating - Pg 62

How 6 minutes can determine your life? You will be marveled by how incomplete our conscious choices are and how infrequent we have act on our unconscious choices even they are unconscious. Behind the locked door of unconscious, this subterranean force has profound effect on how we select our life partners.

Spontaneity - Pg 114

An improvisational comedy group named The Mother. These actors and actress performed without a story or a script. They simply wait for the audience to prompt the theme of the acts and the rest are improvisation while on-the-fly. Are they just simply talented?

A Crisis In The ER - Pg 129

Cook County Hospital faced an arduous responsibility to accurately identify heart disease patient and to administer the appropriate treatment. The many variables that cause heart attack make it impossible for doctors to turn away non-urgent cases for the doctors are able to make certain assessments to differentiate urgent ones and non urgent ones. Lee Goldman, a cardiologist had developed a mathematical model to help determine if any heart-attack cases warrant urgent treatment.

The Pepsi Challenge - Pg 160

The classic Pepsi challenge requires the challenger to sip from two cups of soft drinks with one containing Pepsi and the other Coca Cola. Both cups are identified by an alphabet each with no resemblance to the drink’s origin. The outcome of the sip test was Pepsi beating Coca Cola flat. This had prompted Coca Cola to make their biggest mistake in understanding the consumers.

Relying on the outcome of the Pepsi challenge, Coca Cola developed the New Coke to battle the war declared by Pepsi. Indeed the New Coke had triumphed over Pepsi in the New Coke when a sip test was conducted. What Coca Cola didn’t expect was the intense reaction from the fans. They absolutely detested the New Coke and they expressed their sediments by protesting and boycotting the New Coke. The fans did not want any Coke other than the Classic Coca Cola.

It was a total failure even the initial New Coke sip test has seems to offer Coca Cola the definite company direction for the millennium. An expert taster for Coca Cola has opposite views on the New Coke. Carol Dollard, product development for Coca Cola mentioned that Pepsi is sweeter than Coca Cola in sugar content. It would be logical for consumer to exercise preference over sweeter beverages, especially when only a sip is given. Another word, the sip test is bias towards sweetness. If the entire can of Pepsi is required to consume, the overpowering of sweetness may produce different outcome.

Critically, the classic Coke has been long associated with how visually it should be like to the fans, a change in association was considered a taboo to the fans, resulted in the fans responding audibly and visually. If Pepsi has won the initial sip test, wouldn’t have Pepsi overtake Coca Cola in its market share? The outcome was opposite, not only Pepsi did not soar, unknown to Coca Cola is they remain as number one soft drink in the world and incidentally Coca Cola continued to struggle in trying to promote the New Coke. From the expert’s opinion, the sip test is bias right from the start but what was so compelling to the top executives in Coca Cola were the visible results of the Pepsi challenge. Ignoring their faithful opinion on Coca Cola, they reacted. Also without understanding the compounded factors that made Coca Cola the number one soft drinks, they gave birth to the New Coke, which didn’t have it at all. They should have kept to their belief in the classic coke. The expert can see through the dust within a blink.

Afterthoughts

What are in common among all the mentioned anecdotes? There are experts and snap judgments. Vic Braden could thin sliced the rapid service actions that allowed him to tell if the service is going to be in or out. What is not possible to be seen by most people is crystal clear to Braden but this clarity is only visible in his adaptive unconsciousness. With years of training in tennis, Braden is able to thin slice but not anyone of us. The actors and actresses from the Mother are well versed in acting through years of practicing. Lee Goldman is no novice when it comes to heart attack. Carol Dollard probably understood why the classic coke is still number one more than anybody else. The secret of thin-slicing is no rocket science but it can be subject specific.

Autistic Judgments

41 Shots in 7 Seconds (Pg 193).

February 4th, 1999, in South Bronx, Wheeler Avenue, a narrow street, a modest two-storey house, a young man named, Amadou Diallo, was taking a breath of fresh air on the top steps to his building nearing midnight. A police vehicle from the Street Crime Unit of the NYPD was on patrol carrying four policemen. One of the four, officer Sean Caroll spotted Diallo from the street level. Together with another officer Edward McMellon, they approached Diallo and asked, “Can we have a word?” Diallo wasn’t conversant in speaking English, did not reply instead became fearful and backup into his building. Both officers gave chase and that had sealed Diallo’s fate. Caroll shot who he perceived as an armed suspect but found no arms on Diallo’s body after the shooting.

Amadou Diallo passed on after taking 41 gun shots at point blank, all that happened in 7 seconds. What went wrong? In the statement, Caroll saw Diallo turning his body sideways towards him, exposing only his left hand, which was on the door knob and the right hand was removing a black object. His training told him it was the top of a black gun Diallo was pulling out. He then shouted, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” Diallo didn’t stop pulling his right hand out. The officers responded by shooting at Diallo repeatedly. The rest is history.

Four of them were charged with first-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder. Later all the four were acquitted of all charges. When we communicate verbally to each other, not only words were used, facial expressions were just as critical for the right message to be transmitted. Sometimes we clap our hands to attract attention from a kid, when the kid look at the clapper, the kid is searching for an explanation on the clapper’s face. This practice of inferring the motivations and intentions of others is classic examples of thin slicing. It is to pick up subtle cues in order to read someone’s mind.

Caroll did not read Diallo’s mind that night. That was the major blunder he made. Caroll was blind to Diallo’s nervousness and fearful countenance, no matter how obvious it was. It didn’t help when it was in South Bronx, a hot spot for crimes, it was midnight, the officer are on a purposeful patrol, Diallo’s inability to converse, a narrow street and the black thing he was pulling out. Compounding all these factors it would seem reasonable to consider the fact that police officers make many life and death decisions under uncertainties and these is one honest mistake they have committed, that is assuming a man getting fresh air outside his house as a potential criminal.

This was how the judges concluded the trial with all charges dropped. The verdict may not be satisfying to most people especially to Diallo’s friends, relatives and the neighborhood. Without a shadow of doubt, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that the four officers were bad characters, racism or they are out to get Diallo. Given a calm situation, Caroll may be able to detect Diallo’s emotions. That could very well change Caroll’s reactions to Diallo. This sums up a classic case of mind-reading failure.

Mind reading, its Theory (Pg 202).

Wallace Friesen and Paul Ekman believe facial expression held valuable clues to inner emotions and motivation. They created taxonomy of facial expressions based on the distinct muscular movement that a face could make. Dividing the face into parts according to facial muscular and identifying every facial muscular movement, incidentally there are forty-three and they are called action units.

They spent years perfecting their ability to activate each action unit. With success, they continue to layer and combine these action units until they achieve combinations up to 5 layers, deriving over ten thousand visible facial configurations. Most of facial expressions of the ten thousand don’t mean anything, but by working through each action-unit combination, they identified about three thousand did seem to mean something until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human facial display of emotions.

The outcome of Ekman’s hard work was a meticulous detailed documentation of rules for reading and interpreting the combinations of these action units; leads to the birth of Facial Action Coding System, FACS. John Gottman has worked with Ekman in the research of what keeps marriages intact as mentioned in early sections. Pixar Studio (Toy Story) and Dreamworks (Shrek) have both applied FACS in their animation process. Are we not surprise we find today’s animated movies are getting very real not only in the backdrop but the facial expressions of the animated characters too?

Apart from these practical applications, Ekman has made a startling discovery from the FACS; not only the face is an enormous source of information regarding our emotions and these expressions are not merely signals of what is going on in our minds, Ekman is certain that it is what is going in our minds. He discovered this startling connection during his arduous training to master these facial expressions.

Certain action units affected his emotions as well as his autonomic nervous system. He experienced increase in heartbeat, breathing, hot palms by practicing some compounded action units which he has no control over these physiological alterations. He felt terrible and frustrated at the same time through these practices. However he managed to document the practice and concluded that these action units represent unpleasant emotions.

So do we feel the emotions first thus we express it on our faces or by merely making these faces we will feel the corresponding emotions even we might not have mentally prepared for it? Ekman has carried experiments to verify his proposition; he has two groups of volunteers hooked up with instruments to measure their physiological responses, the first group was told to relieve some stressful situations in their lives while the second group was told to create on their faces, the expressions that correspond to stressful emotions such as anger, sadness and fear.