Here’s another post I hope keeps “thinker brains” awake at night. If you’re one of those “thinker brain” types who believes spending hours, days, weeks, or months researching and planning results in better decisions, I suggest you read “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell today. According to the author the purpose of the book “is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” In fact snap decisions are often better.

There are several real-life examples where decisions made in two seconds are actually better than decisions that were way over thought and over analyzed. The first chapter tells the true story of “the statue that didn’t look right.” In the 1980’s the J. Paul Getty Museum took 14 months paying for extensive (& expensive) testing by top scientists & geologists to verify the authenticity of a Greek statue. During the evaluation period, several experts on Greek art visited the museum and looked at the statue. Upon seeing it, each expert instantly said the statue “didn’t look right.” They couldn’t explain their intuition in words but advised against purchasing the statue. The Getty Museum ignored this advice and paid nearly $10 million for a statue that turned out to be a fraud.

What these Greek art experts had done is called “thin-slicing.” Thin-slicing is the ability to make instant decisions based on a “thin-slice” of the facts. Speed dating is a modern day application of “thin-slicing.” You meet someone for a few minutes and based on that “thin-slice” you decide whether or not you’d like to go on a date with that person. The decision is usually made in seconds based on first impressions. The “computer” in your brain quickly takes the “thin-slice” of facts, compares them to your database of stored experiences, and instantly makes a decision. We all do it when we meet someone for the first time. It’s human nature. It’s amazing how often your intuition is correct but it’s difficult to put into words exactly how and why you reached your conclusion, isn’t it?

Researchers at the “Love Lab” in Washington can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will still be married 15 years later based on a “thin-slice” of watching a 60 minute videotape of one of the couple’s conversations. And the accuracy of the prediction is still around 90% after watching only a 15 minute videotape. You might argue that these researchers have spent years on the project and normal people couldn’t repeat those results and you’d be correct. Over time the researchers have learned to ignore the “noise” consisting of everything irrelevant going on in the conversation and focus on the most revealing factors. (By the way, couples that show “contempt” during the conversation won’t be together 15 years later.)

However, with minimal training on what to look for, nonexperts were able to predict with 80% accuracy which couples were still together after 15 years. That shouldn’t be surprising because humans have been “thin-slicing” since the beginning of time. And over time we all learn the most revealing factors in specific situations and become expert thin-slicers.

The challenge is accepting, and more importantly acting on, our snap decisions. Even though we know the quick decisions we make are generally correct, it’s difficult to accept them because we can’t explain “why” we’ve reached those decisions. It requires guts to act on decisions that aren’t substantiated by mountains of facts and data. It’s so difficult for most people to accept the mysterious nature of the quick decisions made by our subconscious mind that we generally don’t. Your “hunch” or “gut reaction” is probably correct so why don’t you always act on it?

In many cases we would be better off to respect & accept the fact that it is possible to know without knowing “why.” The Getty Museum could have saved itself 14 months & $10 million if it had only listened to the art experts who reached the correct conclusion in the blink of an eye instead of relying on reams of scientific research. Would you succeed faster if you would stop over analyzing opportunities and just act on your intuition? I say yes. What do you think?

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