summary sentence: Blink explains what happens when you listen to your gut feeling, why these snap judgments are often much more efficient than conscious deliberating, and how to avoid your intuition leading you to wrong assumptions.
Explanation:
summary paragraphs: Your unconscious is the world’s fastest filter of information: There’s a rule, which says you should only make decisions when you have at least 40% of the relevant information, but never wait until you have more than 70%. It’s called the 40-70 rule and it describes the ideal relationship between time and information, ensuring you act fast, but not uninformed, without waiting until making a decision eventually becomes moot. The funny thing is that in most situations, focusing on very few, but crucially important facts, while blocking out all the rest, is enough to do so. For example when deciding whether to move to apartment A or apartment B, knowing location, price and having a few pictures is usually all you need. Once you over-analyze every detail, such as where the plugs are more conveniently placed, it becomes impossible to make a good call, because the little puzzle pieces of information start to hide the much more important ones.
Stress can temporarily lead your gut down the wrong path: When your boss completely loses it, gets a big, fat, red head, and screams at you from the top of his lungs, you might end up punching him in the face. Just because you fear a physical attack, as that’s what his emotional state triggers in you. Similarly, a police officer will sometimes shoot an unarmed man, just because he holds a black leather wallet. This inability to read nonverbal cues is very common among autistic people. They can’t instinctively judge a person’s intentions and emotional state based on gestures, facial expressions, and behavior. That is why they have to rely on what information is communicated. When you find yourself in a stressful situation, this can render you temporarily autistic, and you develop a sort of tunnel vision, focusing on only the most imminent, threatening piece of information. This will lead your gut to make the wrong call often times, so it should be prevented whenever possible.
Use screens to filter irrelevant information in scenarios where your gut tends to be wrong: Apart from stressful situations, sometimes associations are forged so deeply in our brain that it’s hard to turn them off. Even though we might know they’re wrong. For example, you might expect every Asian to be good at math, Fortune 500 CEOs as tall, white men, and good singers to be beautiful. That last one comes from the music industry. They artificially push a singer’s visual image during performances, on album covers, and in music videos. Until we start believing all singers to be beautiful. But if you’re an agent for a record label, that’s a problem. You’re supposed to find the best singers, not models. In this case, it’s good to create your own screens and filters. That’s how you keep irrelevant information (here: looks) from ever reaching your brain in the first place.
I hope this is right
