Blink

by Malcolm Gladwell

This is the first book for my new summer book club. I've fulfilled my nerdy dream and started one to keep in touch with people over the summer, and not let my brain turn to mush. I've also learned a very important lesson today about condensation from containers that I brought things for lunch and the things they do to the nice paper book jackets of hard-bound books (like Blink). Sigh. Ah well.

The subtitle of this book is "The Power of Thinking Without Thinking". Its message is that we should trust our gut, and stop overthinking things. He claims that overthinking not only wastes time, but in some cases, more thought and information makes our decisions worse. Sounds like a neat idea, right? That we know more than we think we know and we should seize the moment and trust ourselves? And he points out a lot of examples where this works. It's very tempting. And yet, it seems like this practice could also be responsible for some awful results too. It kinda feels like he's trying to make the exception into the rule. Or maybe as one who overthinks things, I'm reluctant to accept that it's all for naught. It's a really quick read, though (or at least the first 100 pages... After that, you get the point of where he's going with this.). And the "thin-slicing" approach to relationships (like the guy who can watch you talk with your spouse for 15 minutes and tell whether in 15 years or not you'll still be married) is fascinating.

"What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity - whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone - has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition.

' People are in one of two states in a relationship,' Gottman went on. 'The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrrides irritability. It's like a buffer. Their spose will do something bad, and they'll say, "Oh, he's just in a crummy mood." Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it's a selfish person doing a positive thing. It's really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation. For example, I'm talking with my wife, and she says, "Will you shut up and let me finish?" In positive sentiment override, I say, "Sorry, go ahead." I'm not very happy but I recognize the repair. In negative sentiment override, I say, "To hell with you, I'm not getting a chance to finish either. You're such a bitch, you remind me of your mother."'"