While it’s good to trust one’s own judgment, there are certain other factors that can make a person a better decision-maker
“DECISIONS made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” Seriously, can one subscribe to this school of thought?
I used to, and still do.
Except, often times decisions made on snap judgments have not stood me in good stead and I have lived to rue the day when I took the plunge. So for me to advocate that you go with your gut or listen to your gut ... whatever ... may be a trifle out of place.
Yet, young Malcolm Gladwell, once a Washington Post science writer and currently a New Yorker staff writer, has in his book Blink: The power of thinking without thinking made a convincing argument that “rapid cognition”, a kind of thinking that happens in a “blink of an eye” enables our mind to come to a conclusion in two seconds — to be exact.
“I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It’s thinking — its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision — making that we usually associate with ‘thinking’,” says he.
As I read this sentence, I think of a zillion things that hit me in the ‘first two seconds’, during the course of a single day. Without sounding facetious, let me count the ways ... things I see each day and allow my thinking to run wild.
Oh yes ... that house on the hill with its private lake below ... I want to own it. Especially now when the prices of real estate in Islamabad are touching the sky, as someone from there recently tells me, and I for one am not in that category of filthy rich ... never will be (good thinking, I pat myself). Here comes the next town and its houses for sale. They are even more mouthwatering. Yes, yes, yes ... that’s the one with its cathedral ceilings and perfectly landscaped garden with a prototype Italian marble statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, seducing you in.
Look, look ... I want to buy the iceberg white Bentley that cruised by just now. It’s a must have ... so off to the car dealership ... hold on ... where’s the dough?
In sum, one can dream away to one’s lustful ‘first two seconds’ thinking all day long, but in real life, you and I know only too well — things don’t work out just because your gut says so. But that does not mean one should dump the ‘Blink’ theory in a blink of two seconds and shut out your brain which Gladwell calls the ‘giant computer’. It’s supposed to ‘quickly and quietly process a lot of data’ allowing us to function as humans, shaping those flurry of thoughts, images and preconditions that often get converted into snap judgments.
“That part of our brain that leaps to conclusions is called adaptive unconscious, it’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information.”
Gladwell calls it ‘thin slicing’... telling us that we have the power, as humans of making “sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience”.
Cook County hospital in Chicago is a perfect example according to him. Catering to the poor without medical insurance who can’t pay for their medical treatment, the 100-year-old hospital was near collapse under the burden of its patients. Its emergency section alone admitted more than 30 people daily complaining of chest pains, sending doctors scurrying to diagnose whether they were suffering a heart attack.
And then something revolutionary happened.
The doctors were told to gather less information on their patients and were encouraged by the management to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain — like blood pressure and the ECG — while ignoring everything else, like the patient’s age and weight and medical history.
Hunch or gut; intuition or thin slicing; rapid cognition or instinct — call it whatever — was put into play by the doctors on duty!
“And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain”, writes Gladwell. In the book he explains how the hospital hired the services of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman who worked out a formula for predicting heart attacks.
Agreeing with the blink theory is Scott Libin, a journalist at Poynteronline, who says in “decision-making, more information isn’t always better. This is a tough one for people like me, who find comfort in facts, data, evidence. So, apparently, do many doctors. Beyond a certain point, additional information, no matter how accurate or seemingly relevant it might be, can actually impede decision-making ... triage that occurs in newsrooms every day — some stories will make it, some won’t; some people will make it, some won’t.”
However, admits Gladwell that while it’s good to trust your judgment, “it is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it.” And the examples he lays out are kind of lightweight. He talks about physical attributions like height, colour, looks and hairstyles that provide people with a flash of insight. He says he called up several hundred of the Fortune 500 companies in the US to ask how tall their CEOs were.
“And the answer was that they are almost all tall.” Calling it “weird”, Gladwell argues that there is no correlation between height and intelligence, or height and judgment, or height and the ability to motivate and lead people. “But for some reason corporations overwhelmingly choose tall people for leadership roles. I think that’s an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed towards thinking of that person as an effective leader.”
Gladwell, whose mother is Jamaican and father white, was persuaded to write Blink when he let his Afro hair grow ‘wild’. One day the police looked at his hair and decided he resembled a criminal. He began getting speeding tickets all the time — “I had never gotten any before;” he started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention.
“Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration ... and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers’ thinking ... these episodes got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.”
Stereotyping is universal. Take for example the allegedly drunk federal secretary, who bothered the woman sitting next to him on a flight from Washington to London. Why? Because, most Pakistani men consider white women easy game?
Pakistani bureaucrats will kill for a foreign course or a trip abroad. And what are they looking for? Sex with a white woman.
Married or not, young or old, junior or senior ... most of our civil servants go absolutely berserk the minute they sit on an airplane fantasizing their sexual exploits without the fear of being caught.
A snobbish club in London blackballed Pakistanis from using its residential rooms after a federal secretary, some years ago, while defying club rules, got women of ill repute in his room for the night.
Then there was yet another federal secretary (read sextary) who was so starved for sex that he’d go roaming the streets of Manhattan in the hope of picking up a white woman.
It’s not fair to bracket bureaucrats only as sexual predators while abroad ... men from our armed forces, all and sundry, are known to have stalked, assaulted, seduced women with white skin, whether in Pakistan or abroad. Just pick up the former Financial Times reporter Christina Lamb’s book Waiting for Allah about the lecherous men she encountered while on assignment in Pakistan many moons ago.
While it’s good to trust one’s own judgment, there are certain other factors that can make a person a better decision-maker 
