MORE BLINK

(sigh)

I wrote the other day about the book, Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and since then I've been thinking further about some of what he wrote. It really does include some fascinating psychological studies, the most interesting to me being those on relationships. As I mentioned in my previous post on this book, the premise is that we can (and do) make accurate assessments with just "thin slices" every day of our lives -- and that it's not necessary to research, study, and delve deeply into issues in order to get a clear "read" on things.

Gladwell mentions a study done where psychologist John Gottman devised a list of a dozen or so emotions and assigned a number to each...1 = happiness; 2 = contempt; 3 = anger, etc. He then had married couples (one couple at a time) sit alone in a room and discuss one thing that was causing stress in the marriage. He annotated one of those numbers to his perceptions of both individuals' emotions for every second of the 15-minute discussion between them, and at the conclusion of the 15 minutes he was able to examine the range (and positive or negative inflections) and ascertain which couple would eventually be divorced. This was a complicated study and too laborious to flesh out here, but the conclusions he made about hundreds of couples were followed up on for 15 years and were 95% accurate. All this with having only eavesdropped on 15 minutes of conversation between the man and wife early in their marriage.

This is only one of many examples Gladwell cites about our subconscious ability to intuit a myriad of issues in the blink of an eye. These are fascinating case studies and ingenious methodologies. Truly an interesting read. I learned much.
(sigh)