Last week on the plane I read 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a fun book that reads surprisingly fast. (I had to buy a new book for the return flight)
Basically Gladwell Maintains that the 'hunch' we get in the first split second we see something can be a far better and quicker judgment than if we take more time to observe and reason.
Of course it can go awfully wrong if we only go on first impressions, so the author comes up with three preconditions must be met before you can trust your hunch:
- You should have adequate experience in the situation you are judging. The patterns should be there in your subconscious. Gladwell illustrates this with marital consulting experts and face expression experts.
- You should have the right stress level. Being too relaxed makes you miss things. Being too stressed (illustrated by police officers in a firefight) makes you resort back to your 'reptilian' brain and survival instincts. Not good for judging a situation!
- You should not have too much information coming at you. This makes the rational brain kick to process all that and the wisdom of the blink is lost. Only the essential information should be there.
The point is illustrated painfully by a female trombone player who wins a blind audition with a huge lead. After the judges see that she is a woman, all of a sudden they can not believe anymore that she is a good trombone player since women were thought to be too frail to play the trombone.
Your initial feeling about something can also go wrong by implicit subconscious associations, that may be entirely irrational. Some very interesting tests and background information are at http://implicit.harvard.edu/
I think I'll trust my snap judgements more, and although I think the above mentioned preconditions are very strict, they act as a nice warning sign when you should double check your intuition.
