Out first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions - we can alter the way we thin-slice - by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Taking rapid cognition seriously - acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives - requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
How good people’s decisions are under the fast moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.
Create the conditions for successful spontaneity.
Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improve. It enables rapid cognition.
People who were asked to explain themselves ended up solving 30 percent fewer problems than those who weren’t.
Sometimes, extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account. Decision-making in complex situations doesn’t require a complex decision tree. Overloading the decision makers with information [..] makes picking up that signature harder, not easier.
To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.
“Say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see? No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you can’t see what the other guy is thinking. More and more commanders want to know everything, and they get imprisoned by that idea. They get locked in. But you can never know everything.”
The blind taste test never translated too much in the real world. Because in the real-world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind. We transfer to our sensation of the Coca-Cola taste all the unconscious associations we have of the brand, the image, the can, and even the unmistakble red of the logo.” Thin-slicing has to be done in context. It is possible to quickly diagnose the health of a marriage. But you can’t just watch a couple playing Ping-Pong. You have to observe them while they are discussing something of relevance to their relationship.
The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us sometime to understand that we actually like them.
When you are in the product development world, you become immersed in your own stuff, and it’s hard to keep in mind the fact that the customers you go out and see spend very little time with your product. They know the experience of it then and there. But they don’t have the history with it, and it’s hard for them to imagine a future with it, especially if it’s something very different.
Introspection can destroy people’s ability to solve insight problems - e.g. asking students to enumerate their reasons for selecting one jam over another.
Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room. But with experience we become export at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions.
Whenever we have something that we are good at - something we care about - that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.
Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrifced in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.
The optimal state of “arousal” - the range in which stress improves performance - is when our heart rate is between 115 and 145 beats per minute. After 145, “bad things start to happen”. Complex motor skills start to break down. Doing something with one hand and not the other becomes very difficult. At 175, we begin to see an absolute break-down of cognitive processing.
Action: Make concrete plans for 911 emergencies.
“When you remove time you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.”
Out unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
This is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience. To a novice, that inicident would have gone by in a blur. But it wasn’t a blur at all. Every moment - every blink - is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.