There's a new Malcolm Gladwell book coming out, a sequel to his admirably successful Tipping Point, which has now passed into pop parlance as a phrase. It's called Blink: The Power of Thinking without thinking. Does that seem like a slightly duff title to you? It's only because you don't know about the 'science of rapid cognition' that Gladwell is now talking about - the study of how we sum up people in an instant. And how that can be both good and bad in its effects.
Good when heart doctors focus on the vital symptoms of a patient with chest-pains; bad when Gladwell phones up the top 500 companies in America, and finds that their CEO's are all... tall. How shallow is that as an indice of authority? You might be noticing his alarming photo at the top - that hairstyle is, apparently, the reason for the book:
If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager.
Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me.
They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go.
On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight.
It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers' thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.
Like Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open, this is an example of the 'third culture' - science and humanities - expressing itself eloquently. (The Play Ethic has become an excuse for me to begin a lifelong exploration into the hard and soft sciences of play). Gladwell, ever the articulate New Yorker writer, will no doubt haze the ethical impact of his beautifully deployed science (does it make us respect our intution more? Or feel a victim of first impressions more?). But as an example of increased intellectual thirst in the non-fiction mainstream, Gladwell is to be welcomed.
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