Writing tips: Reading BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell and applying principles of “thin-slicing” / instinct to writing…

When is careful thought non-productive? Journal thoughts from my personal reading.

BLINK by Malcolm Gladwell explores “thin-slicing” ~ making decisions based on instinct/thin slices of information, writing about several commonly-held misconceptions about gut feeling. For instance, we assume that instinct should be applied to small decisions and thought to big decisions. Studies show this is incorrect. More often than introspection, gut feeling leads to “success” in love, work, and when making quick decisions on the battlefield (don’t ask me why these examples are thrown together in this way, I can’t type because I’m kissing, wielding a sword, and talking to my accountant).

Take friendship ~ a form of love that is fairly easy to think about in this way, because we don’t give who we pick as friends as much thought as how we make moves in our careers or who and how we choose to date. Can any of us explain why our friends are our friends? You might answer, “she’s so kind”, but there are lots of kind people. Perhaps you got a favourable impression of them in that first meeting or perhaps not, but somehow they slip into step with you and you feel like they’ve always been around. That a new friend can feel like an old couch seems a phenomenon, but it’s not. We have an instinct for people who we get on with. We are drawn to people. It’s not magic. It’s insight. It’s an under-rated intelligence. And it’s a biological normalcy.

Gladwell writes that introspection “destroy[s] peoples ability to solve insight problems”, causing us to lose “the ability to know our own mind”. He writes about a case in which making people think about jam “turned them into jam idiots”, unable to rate jam well at all where previously they had rated it very closely in line with experts. We “come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.”

I have reasons to distrust being reasonable.