Reviewed by Stephanie Stubbs, Assoc. AIA
Managing Editor

At the turn of the millennium, many of us found it easy to embrace and adapt the underlying premise of Malcolm Gladwell’s first blockbuster, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Tipping, still topping the charts as a best-selling paperback, explained the “social epidemic,” a set of circumstances that align to allow an object or a trend to achieve mass popularity. “Tipping Points” began to appear in AIA conference titles and even in AIA Presidential news columns as an elegant framing device for exploring this social phenomenon of “an idea whose time has come” within and outside the profession. Architects, like the media and the public at large, discovered that the tipping point had reached its tipping point as a culturally accepted reference.

This year has brought us Gladwell’s second bestseller, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which also reigns on the New York Times’ nonfiction bestsellers list. Blink presents case studies of some phenomenal decision makers, people who know in a blink of an eye the right choice to make. In every walk of life, we all have encountered those people who—seemingly without effort—know. In architecture, where everyday decisions require almost instant synthesis of thousands of bits of information, people who think this way seemingly are the norm. Why? And—how do people get that way? Is it nature or nurture? Personal or professional?

Thin-slicing our thinking
We accomplish the split-second decision-making called “blink” through a technique Gladwell terms “thin-slicing”: taking a slice—a very short period of time—to read an incredibly complex situation, such as a building or a space. It turns out that, in many instances, the quick read is just as accurate as a long study. Gladwell recounts experts in many types of situations: the military general on the battlefield, birdwatchers tracking their subjects on the wing, the brilliant basketball player who owns the court. Marriage counselors can watch mere minutes of a couple interacting on videotape and tell with amazing accuracy whether they will still be a couple six months down the road. Laypeople serving as psychology experiment subjects can easily “get” a student’s personality by a quick look at his or her dorm room—and do so with much more accuracy than by looking at or talking to the student.

Gladwell makes convincing arguments for thinly sliced decisions but admits that it is not generally accepted as reliable. “I think we are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it,” he writes. “We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation . . . The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

Instinct or judgment?
The second purpose of the book, Gladwell explains, is to be able to recognize when we should or should not trust this split-second judgment. It boils down to reacting by instinct rather than by finely honed decision, a point often not distinguished in cursory examination of Blink. Gladwell offers several case studies of instinct gone wrong. Perhaps most significant and gut-wrenching is the 1999 shooting of Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in the South Bronx by four patrol officers who thought he was pulling a gun on them, when in fact he was reaching for his wallet. He describes this kind of knee-jerk reaction as a “momentary autism,” in which a person loses the ability to mind-read what is going on in another person’s head. (This in itself is an interesting definition of autism.) Gladwell says that police training is coming around to teaching cops to avoid as much as humanly possible situations that call for knee-jerk reaction as opposed to split-second decision making.

This kind of training would fulfill Gladwell’s stated third purpose for Blink: that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. “The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few,” Gladwell writes. “It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.” Blink does not offer a textbook on how to do this, unfortunately, but it provides fascinating fodder to argument: “What would happen if we took our instincts seriously?” Gladwell asks. “The task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”

Does it start with neuroscience?
Early in Blink, Gladwell discusses the experiments of Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist and author of The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, who studied patients with damage to a part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, just behind the nose, where the function of judgment is stored. People with damage to this part of the brain can be highly functional and intelligent, “but don’t have the mental valet in their unconscious that frees them up to concentrate on what really matters.” In other words, these people can’t Blink.

The concepts of Blink also would make fascinating study for and about architects, who (one could argue, anyway) have power that lies as much in the ability to use that blink-of-the-eye judgment as much as the serious scientific method-based study. It is just not yet codified in a way easily translated cross-discipline. Perhaps it would be a field of study bridging neuroscience and architecture. Do you suppose architects have highly developed ventromedial prefrontal cortexes?

One quibble with Blink: After a point, the examples—although fascinating and entertaining—don’t add much to the theory Gladwell establishes early on. On the bright side, that dearth of explanation just points up that there is a wide-open field for research into that ever-fascinating field of how people in general and architects in particular use their brains.

Copyright 2005 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved. Home Page