If Books Could Kill - Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink"

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Did you know that in the split-second it took you to read the title of this episode, your subconscious already figured out that it was going to be extremely good?Peter and Michael talk about Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," a book that is mostly cute scientific anecdotes but also indirectly resulted in millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted on fraudulent science.Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Unconscious influences on decision making: A critical reviewHalf a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations From Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness'Thin slices' of lifeConditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to DisagreeTelling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental ProcessesMagic at the marketplace: Choice blindness for the taste of jam and the smell of teaFalse-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as SignificantReading Lies: Nonverbal Communication and Deception Behavioral Science and SecurityTSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection ActivitiesTSA Does Not Have Valid Evidence Supporting Most of the Revised Behavioral Indicators Used in Its Behavior Detection Activities Telling Lies: Fact, Fiction, and NonsenseTSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot TerroristsA Review of 'Blink' by Malcolm GladwellThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!

Michael. Peter. What do you know about Blink? All I know is that my first impression of this book was that it was very dumb And I'm looking forward to hearing about how first impressions are always true All right, the book is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Heard of it, heard of him. Big bestseller, at least a few million copies sold. It came out in 2005. This is also the first Gladwell book, I think, just based on my sort of casual perusal to get some very negative early reviews.

I think there was like a good number of people at this point who were getting wise to the shallowness of the pop science airport book genre. Yeah this is this is at the time when like four of the top ten TED talks are just like thoroughly debunked. I'm sorry grit is not a thing. I guess it's sort of perfect for me because I am ever a contrarian and I guess the twist here is that I kind of like this book. I think this book is pretty good. I think we should talk about

your complicated feelings on this because you've been agonizing about this episode for like weeks. I have. I expected this book to be pseudoscientific trash. Yeah, same. There is a lot of pseudoscience in this book and we'll talk about it.

But like, I don't think it's quite as bad as some of his other work Even though he makes a lot of these narrative mistakes. He touches on a bunch of really interesting science, and I'm not an expert I might have missed something especially because this book is just a torrent of anecdotes. Yeah, there are so many anecdotes It's wild, but I didn't find too many significant cases of him misrepresenting the science. Or your brain is so cooked from hosting this podcast that you're like, only 30% of the anecdotes are fake? Rookie numbers. Before we get into it, we have housekeeping, right? For the first time ever. We've decided

to do one episode where we do a little bit of sellout shit because we wanted to plug our merch. We have merch. T-shirts, sweaters, mugs, the usual stuff. IfBooksPod.dashree.com, we'll put a link in the show description. And then also, because we're already doing sellout shit, subscribe to our Patreon. Lean in, go for it. We have monthly bonus episodes. Get Peter's newsletter.

Oh yeah, my newsletter, stringetmaze.net. What do you want to sell, anything? Nothing. I'm against this entire thing, but we're doing it because you want to mention on the show. This is why you put out teasers of our bonus episodes that are 85% of the episode. I mean, whatever.

I feel like there is a huge contingent of listeners who just think that some episodes cut off with a little sound. Because nobody reads the descriptions of podcasts. So I feel like some is a huge contingent of listeners who just think that like some episodes cut off with like a little sound I don't even read the descriptions of podcasts So I feel like some people are just like well that was an hour-long podcast that ended abruptly And have no idea that we have a patreon or like anything else That's because Michael does teasers for these episodes that consist of just an unbelievable amount of the episode I'm trying to get the word out. You don't do it for every episode, which is the only reason that we're still

friends. But I swear this last one we put the last one where you did 60 minutes of an 80 minute episode. I want to tell the people. I thought that you were trying to pull some kind of prank on me. I thought that this was like a joke that was specifically targeting me where you're like Let's see how much of this episode I can release for free without Peter getting mad We did not talk about it specifically, but I just said I'll schedule the teaser and then yeah You're just like I'll publish a teaser and I was like cool, and then I saw that it was 60 minutes long All right enough sellout shit, that's that's it for that's it forever We will never be mentioning yes our patreon or a merch again

And the teasers will get even longer until morale improves. People who don't listen to the Blink episode will never know about this shit. Let's get into the book here. I'm going to send the opening paragraph to you. Okay, he says, In September of 1983, an art dealer by the name of John Franco Baccina approached the J. Paul Getty Museum of California. He had in his possession, he said, a marble statue dating from the 6th century BC. It was what is known as a coros, a sculpture of a nude male youth standing with his left leg forward and his arms at his sides. There are only around 200 coroi in existence, and most have been recovered badly damaged

or in fragments from grave sites or archaeological digs. But this one was almost perfectly preserved. It stood close to seven feet tall, it had a kind of light-colored glow that set it apart from other ancient works. It was an extraordinary find. Bachina's asking price was just under $10 million. We did spoil this one in the Outliers episode. Yeah, and look, this is now a very famous anecdote because of this book Oh, yeah, so the museum conducts a 14-month investigation into the statue's provenance and everything looks great

the ownership records are consistent a Geologist says that the rock looks right the style looks accurate to the period but Gladwell goes on the Kuros. However had a problem It didn't look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri. When Zeri was taken down to the museum's restoration studio to see the Kuros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculpture's fingernails. In a way he couldn't immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him.

Evelyn Harris was next. She was one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture, and she was in Los Angeles visiting the Getty just before the museum finalized its deal with Pachina. Arthur Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it, Harrison remembers. He just swished a cloth off the top of it and said, well, it isn't ours yet, but it will be in a couple weeks. And I said, I'm sorry to hear that. What did Harrison see?

She didn't know. In that very first moment when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense That something was amiss her first impression Peter her blink was correct for Freakonomics I did Freakonomics and for this one. It's just blank You got blinked every title we just do a stupid voice for to make fun of it Several other experts have the same immediate reaction. The museum gets concerned. They convene a symposium on the issue and then everything starts to fall apart.

Not only are the experts skeptical, eventually some of the documentation used to verify the past ownership proves fraudulent. Other experts explain how certain forgery techniques could have fooled the geologist. explain how certain forgery techniques could have fooled the geologist, it turns out the statue very likely a fake and the initial instinct was proven correct. Right? Gladwell says quote, in the first two seconds of looking in a single glance they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after 14 months. Blink is a book about those first two seconds. I mean we talked about this in the Outliers episode that like these are people with specialized expertise. This is actually part of Gladwell's thesis.

Okay. One, intuition is a very powerful thing. Two, it's something that is most effective when someone has an expertise in the subject. Okay. And then three, there's sort of this ancillary idea that even though their intuitions are telling them something, these experts can't quite like articulate the source of it. For all of the faults of this book, and there are quite a few, all of these basic ideas have a lot of truth to them. Also, because my brain is also cooked from hosting this show,

so much discourse now is about egghead elites and how we should disregard anything that quote unquote experts say. A book that's like, hey, experts are right about something, even if they can't describe it all that well, it's like kind of fine overall. Right, right. Like yeah, maybe listen to somebody who knows more about Greek sculptures than you. I actually was kind of surprised by this because I think a lot of the like popular understanding of the book is just like intuition is magic, right? Not at all what Gladwell is saying and in fact like there are

various parts of the book where he basically says that like Untrained intuition is very dangerous and precarious, right? So the heart of the book is the concept of thin slicing Okay, Gladwell defines thin slicing as the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior Based on a very narrow slice of experience. He's not making this up This is a term coined a few decades back by a couple of researchers, Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal. They conducted a study, which Gladwell talks about, where people were exposed to silent video clips

of teachers teaching. The clips were very short, two, five, and 10 seconds. And then they were asked to rate the teachers across different metrics based on what they saw. The researchers took those ratings and then compared them with ratings that students gave those same teachers at the end of a whole semester. They found that the ratings based on even the two second clips were strongly correlated with the ratings that the students gave teachers after an entire semester. So people were basically

observing these very basic cues body body language, posture, etc., and coming away with the same impression that someone did after like actually being taught by these teachers, right? So from this one study I can make broad sweeping conclusions. Absolutely. I'm fin slicing from the research of fin slicing. I think you can say based on this is that like one, our brains are making determinations very quickly, and then two, those determinations very quickly and then two those determinations are lasting so in this particular case there's a caveat here which is that teacher ratings are subjective it's not like the statue

where like it's either fake or it's not right it's not like the unconscious mind here is identifying some objective truth in a matter of seconds right because you could also make the argument that the kids in those classes were also basing their impression on body language these these kind of superficial cues, but then they just kept those impressions throughout the course of the semester regardless of new information. So that's sort of like the seminal, thin-slicing study. He tells another story. He says, ask you to play a very simple gambling game. In front of you there are four decks of cards, two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money,

and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks one at a time in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don't know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on the red cards, you lose a lot. Actually you can win only by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties. The question is, how long will it take you to figure this out? A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago,

and what they found is that after we've turned over about 50 cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what's going on. We don't know why we prefer the blue decks, but we're pretty sure at that point that they are a better bet. After turning over about 80 cards, most of us have figured out the game and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. Interesting. And the twist here is that researchers then hooked participants up to some machinery to measure their stress responses, like sweaty palms, and found out that people started to have stress responses to their red decks only ten cards in. Well before they know something's wrong, and even farther before they can articulate what's happening.

So it's like your body starts to notice, and then your instincts start to notice, and then finally your brain notices, and you're like, fuck those red cards. Right. This isn't quite thin slicing in the same sense as I like originally understood it, but it's a cool example of how your subconscious is pretty powerful and ahead of you at times, right? Before you know what's going on, some part of your brain is like building the case and you're actually acting differently before you know why. Right. Although, I mean, racing through my brain is a million examples of when that is not the case, right? Right, right. I always think of those studies that find that conventionally attractive people are considered more honest. That's not us like Accurately assessing a situation. That's us believing that we're accurately assessing a situation, but we're actually operating on something else I love how every you're gonna think of like all these different examples of

Irrationality and stuff and I guarantee you gladwell somewhere in this fucking book has this example because there are just so many Anecdotes. Yeah, the whole chapter that he calls us the Warren Harding problem because Warren Harding was sort of you know Tall and handsome and people thought that made him presidential. Okay, I doubt he's sort of a dipshit Okay, yeah, that is like a good example of where this sort of a rationality bubbles up, right? The next big anecdote is about a psychologist, John Gottman, who specializes in analyzing couples. Oh yeah, he's at the University of Washington. He's kind of famous in Seattle.

He does this marriage lab stuff, yeah. Yeah, you know about the marriage lab. All right, perfect. Gladwell tells a story where a young couple visits Gottman's lab and he hooks them up to some equipment to monitor their movements. They have a videotaped counseling session where they talk about little things like whether they want a dog for about 15 minutes. So this is what Gladwell says,

Godman has developed a coding system that has 20 separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation. Disgust, for example, is a 1. Contempt is a 2. Anger is seven. Defensiveness is ten. Whining is eleven. On and on. So Gottman has his coding system. He runs all the interactions through it and then this gets translated into a row of 1800 numbers and then he has a system for analyzing those numbers and quote, on the basis of those calculations Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking he can predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will stay married 15 years later if he washes a couple for 15 minutes his success rate is around 90

percent this is very cool this is very interesting it's also definitely not thin slicing right yeah then slicing like in the opening anecdote, is about these very fast, almost split-second reactions we have to certain things. And then here, Gottman is using a ton of prior experience and information to create complex heuristics for evaluating marriages in a short period of time. And so I'm reading this and I'm like,

well, this is just like a different thing. Right, because a thin slicing version of this would be like someone who doesn't know anything watches a couple and then they predict it. If an expert watched a couple for 15 seconds and was able to be like they're gonna get divorced with 75% accuracy, that would be thin slicing in my mind. But this is actually quite scientific. You're actually like doing a discourse analysis of the way that they're interacting with each other. Right. And you're testing it over time and you're developing a model that presumably becomes

more predictive as you refine it. So I'm gonna send you what Gladwell says about this. It's funny, this all comes back to before we were recording, I was telling you about I met a guy online and he gave me his phone number and I was putting it in my phone and it turned out he was already in my phone as Martin Bad Vibes. Now I feel good about making that determination. That's how I know that your marriage will not work. I was thin slicing. I was like, something's off, man.

Using the incredible power of my brain, I figured out that the giant spider tattoo on this man's neck makes him unlikely to be a winning candidate. He says, thin slicing is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling, but it's also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How is it possible to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time? The answer is that when our unconscious engages

in thin slicing, what we're doing is an automated, accelerated, unconscious version of what Gottman does with his videotapes and equations. Can a marriage really be understood in one sitting? Yes, it can. And so can lots of other seemingly complex situations. What Gottman has done is to show us how. Oh yeah, he's basically saying like, isn't it the same thing when you're like, Martin has bad vibes, and also when you spend years refining a model to predict marriage dissolution. I guess what Gladwell is saying is like maybe your brain can also condense a ton of information down, right? In ways that we can't really see which I guess is true, but yeah like many Gladwell anecdotes

It sort of feels like he was like I'm gonna put this anecdote here because I love it right and then later He's like and and here's my reason at the very end I'll add my reasoning afterwards. Yeah, they're both good stories. Only a few of the examples that he gives in his book are really thin slicing. So before we keep going, I want to do a little dive into the idea of thin slicing and specifically into what I think is really the thesis of the book, which is that intuition is very powerful, especially when combined with expertise.

Oh, okay. So somewhat ironically, some of the clearest work I found on this was written by another airport book author, Daniel Kahneman, who's a psychologist who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow. Future Ibica episode? He wrote a paper in 2009 alongside another researcher, Gary Klein. They basically conclude that it's true that experts can develop extremely reliable intuition even when handling very complex problems, but only under certain conditions.

First, the environment has to be what they call high validity. In layman's terms, it means that there are reliable cues that an expert can depend on. Right, the statue is fake or the statue is not fake. That's something that you can confirm. And then second, there needs to be an adequate opportunity for the expert to actually learn those cues, like practice, right? You need your 10,000 hours, folks. It's all one book.

To give some examples, a lot of the early research on expert intuition involved chess masters. Chess has both of these qualities. It's very high validity. The player can see the entire board. The pieces can only move in very specific ways. And also experts can play many, many games over their lifetimes, allowing them to learn all of the relevant patterns. Right. And there's a clear outcome too, right? You win or you lose. Yeah. That's right. A less obvious one is firefighters. Gladwell touches on this too and

there's a good amount of research on it. There's research showing that experienced firefighters make very effective quick decisions about where fire will spread, whether a structure might collapse, etc. And part of that is because the environment is high-validity. There are reliable environmental cues for them to use even though a lot of researchers were sort of baffled about What exactly they were seeing right and the firefighters were not always able to articulate it I think a counter example would be something like you know you often hear cops say something like I know when someone's guilty But the problem is the way that you measure someone's guilt versus innocence like you can measure whether they went to jail

That's like a that's like an objective metric. But it might just be you're good at telling the kind of person who will go to jail later, which is not the same as somebody who's guilty. Yeah, cops don't have blank cops. Cops have something else. It's called bonk. And it's where your brain barely works. There are actual examples of environments that are not high-validity. A good one is politics. There was a researcher who tracked the long-term forecasts of political and economics experts and found that they were no more accurate than like casual newspaper readers over a long period. This is probably because politics and economics are low-validity environments. There are too many variables which means

there are very few reliable cues that experts can learn from. There was a review from the early 90s showing that expertise was found, quote, in livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, soil judges, chess masters, physicists, mathematicians, accountants, grain inspectors, photo interpreters, and insurance analysts. In contrast, there is poor performance by experienced professionals in stockbrokers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, college admissions officers, court judges, personnel selectors, and intelligence analysts. It is a little bleak that the blink professions are like livestock inspectors and then the

bonk professions are like who goesors and then the bonk professions are like who goes to college and who goes to jail. You could think of more broadly applicable scenarios where you are a quote-unquote expert because you encounter these situations all of the time. Like gay men on the internet. I know the vibes. I know about Martin. To simplify all of this a bit, intuitions stem from pattern recognition. If you have the skill to recognize a pattern and the opportunity to practice identifying it, over time you can develop this sort of seemingly magical intuition. You're blinking.

Bad intuitions can be the result of having inadequate information or inadequate practice, right? Which results in your brain drawing on unhelpful or irrelevant information. So like a lot of the biases that we know are real, like anchoring biases, right? The idea that like, if I put a certain number into your brain and then ask you how much a car costs,

you're slightly more likely to move toward that number, right? That bias is because you're not pulling on accurate information in your brain and so your brain is just sort of reaching around, right? If I tried to do that same experiment with someone who is an expert in cars, it wouldn't have any effect on them because they have accurate information to draw on, right? This is a really interesting example of like how science is supposed to work, right? Because the

TED Talk airport book version of this idea is like did you know that your first impression is always correct but then once you get into the actual data it's like well your first impression is correct under very specific circumstances so first of all you have to be an expert second of all you have to be an expert in a domain where you can reliably measure over the course of your career whether or not your expertise is correct. It's like, there's this broad sort of fun fact like cocktail party fact, but then actually the actual rule or the actual science tells us it's far more conditional. Right. It's like, well, sometimes.

Another early chapter is about the concept of priming, social priming or behavioral priming in this context. A concept I'm actually kind of skeptical of. Oh? You just blinked the shit out of this right now. Just because you come across so many of these studies and some of the findings are pretty implausible. Let's talk about it. So priming is the idea that you can influence behavior by exposing people to an idea or even just a word, right? Gladwell talks about an experiment devised by a psychologist named John Barg. I'm gonna send you something. He says, imagine that I'm a professor and I've asked you to come and see me in my office. You walk down a long corridor, come

through the doorway, and sit down at a table. In front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five word sets. I want you to make a grammatical four-word sentence as quickly as possible out of each set. It's called scrambled sentence test. Ready? I feel like you're going to make me do this right now and I don't want to do it. I'm not going to make you do it. I thought about it and then I was like, that's too much of a dumb ass podcasting gimmick even for me. I do feel like you would make me do it and I want to say that. I would absolutely make you do it. This is why I thought it was coming because I would make me do it and I want to say that I would absolutely This is why I thought it was coming cuz I would make you do it so I'm just gonna read a bunch of

Again, these are five word sets and the idea is that you lose one word and develop a sentence from the other four, right? Okay, him was worried. She always From our Florida orange temperature. Okay ball the throw toss silently Shoes give replace old the he observes occasionally people watches be will sweat lonely they Sky the seamless gray is should now withdraw forgetful we us bingo sing play let Sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins. Are you priming me to think of old people? Holy shit. You got it, dude Are you got it? Because it's like wrinkle Florida. Wow you're fucking blinking like crazy right now. Boom, boom got him. You can't blink me son. All right just I just sent you that.

This seems straightforward right? Actually it wasn't. After you finished that test believe it or not you would have walked out of my office and back down the hall more slowly than you walked in. With that test I affected the way you behaved. How? Well, look back at that list. Scattered throughout it are certain words such as worried, Florida, old, lonely, gray, bingo, and wrinkle. You thought that I was just making you take a language test. But in fact, what I was also doing is making the big computer in your brain, your adaptive unconscious, think about the state of being old. It didn't inform the rest of your brain about its sudden obsession, but it took all of his talk of old age so seriously that by the time you finished and walked down the corridor,

you acted old, you walked slowly. This is why I'm a little skeptical. Yeah, dude. Like the concept of old people, like being introduced to that, I don't know that that would make me walk slower. He references a bunch of comparable experiments. There's one where priming people to think about aggression

makes them more likely to interrupt a conversation, for example. Similar to you, I was blinking my ass off reading this part. It just feels a little too stupid. People walk more slowly after hearing the word Florida. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And lo and behold, the science here is very shaky.

Now, I will say, this is not really a gladwell error Yeah from what I can tell at the time blink was published. This was not particularly controversial Yeah in thinking fast and slow the Danielle Kahneman book. That's 2011 And in that book he said that the evidence for this was such that quote disbelief is not an option Oh since then social priming has gotten caught up in what's often called the that the evidence for this was such that, quote, disbelief is not an option. Since then, social priming has gotten caught up in what's often called the replication crisis. The replication crisis is referring to a situation

in many scientific fields, but particularly in psychology, where there's been a widespread inability to replicate the findings of prior research. In 2011, there was an experiment by a guy named Daryl Bem, where he brought some students into a room. There were two doors. Behind one was an erotic picture. And he said that they were able, with statistical significance, to predict which door it was

behind. Fuck yes. A lot of people saw this and said, there are some results bad enough, weird enough, that you should assume that there has been a methods error somewhere. Yeah, there's also the one about how female hurricanes, hurricanes with female names do more damage. That was in the famous one where people were like, no! What the fuck are we doing here? I mean, look, when a psychologist is just like, yeah I can see a pussy through a door, what are you talking about?

This hurricane's named after my bitch ex-wife. That's how you know it's bad. You're like, whoa, I don't think this is real. I never looked into the hurricane thing. I always thought there was some plausibility in that we were maybe just naming the bad ones, female names, but are they alternating though? Do they alternate male and female?

I don't know. Okay, so then it can't be that. They go up through the alphabet by letter, the first letter of a name, and they alternate. Got it, got it, got it. It's totally at random. So then in 2012, some researchers wanted to highlight the potential for errors in priming studies,

and they conducted a study intended to lead to a ridiculous result, where they found that people who listened to When I'm 64 by the Beatles became literally younger than the control group. What? They basically just looked at the data in different ways, found a statistically significant result by fluke, and they said, look, this approach is common in the field. And we just used it intentionally to come up with a result where you can show like oh people who listen to this group are just are gonna be younger on

average right right this causes people to perk up some researchers try to replicate John Barg's original study the original one where people walk slower when they're being primed to think about age they could not accept when the people observing the experiment were told about the expected result. Which of course suggests that they are probably without really realizing it, manipulating the data to produce the result. On top of this, around the same time a well-known social psychologist, Dierdrich Stoppel, was found to be faking data, including in studies involving priming.

From there, you had researchers undertaking larger scale efforts to replicate involving priming. From there you had researchers undertaking larger scale efforts to replicate social priming studies and finding that very few of them actually did replicate. To give you a sense of where the consensus is now, the way that one researcher put it was a good example is that people can be primed with words like diet on a menu to make lighter food choices, but only if those people are trying to eat lighter. It's not like this magic thing. It's just sort of like serving as a reminder, right? The sort of real version of this that I've heard

is in the order of polling questions. Where if you ask people like, what do you think about immigration? Do you think immigration is out of control? How do you feel about immigration? And then you're like, what are your top 10 priorities for the United States? Like people are more likely to put immigration at the top

because you've like reminded them that that is an issue, right? I keep thinking about walking slower after saying Florida. But why am I, I'm just like, I'm wearing like fucking bifocals going 15 miles an hour down the road. Slow down! You're like all of a sudden doing anal

after it's Pride Month. You're like, I don't know why I just have the urge to do this. Did you know that for two hours after watching Fire Island a straight man will walk like a little fairy? You become 6% more likely to go Yaaas in your daily life. Girl! Damn I've been primed. That's priming, baby. There is another theme that Gladwell taps into that's basically the idea that people who are making these split-second decisions and determinations are generally unable to

articulate why they're making them. So I'm going to send you a little bit. Not long ago, one of the world's top tennis coaches, a man named Vic Braden, began to notice something strange whenever he watched a tennis match. In tennis, players are given two chances to successfully hit a serve and if they miss on their second chance they're said to double fault and what Braden realized was that he always knew when a player was about to double fault. A player would toss the ball up in the air and draw his racket back and just as he was about to make contact,

Braden would blurt out, oh no, double fault, and, sure enough, the ball would go wide or long or it would hit the net. One year, at the big professional tennis tournament at Indian Wells near Braden's house in Southern California, he decided to keep track and found he correctly predicted 16 out of 17 double faults in the matches he watched. Okayyy We don't have to dig into this particular example. This guy's claim has not been rigorously tested. I'm also a little bit confused about why he can catch double faults but not faults, since they're basically the same thing. But it's not totally impossible. Maybe something about the player's body, maybe the player realizes and he can see that.

I don't know. Right. Low confidence, something, yeah, sure. But there's a degree to which we all know that our brain makes decisions without our conscious input Right. Yeah, if I throw a ball at your head, you're not thinking like oh, no, there's a ball coming towards me I should get out of the way you just duck Right If I asked you why you ducked after I threw the ball you would probably say I ducked because the ball was gonna hit me

Right, but there's a real question of whether you know that or whether you're backfilling a plausible explanation for what you did, right? So back in the 70s, there's a very famous paper published by Richard Nesbitt and Timothy Wilson called Telling More Than We Know Verbal Reports on Mental Processes. They do a series of experiments where they ask the subjects questions,

but then manipulated some of their responses. So for example, they ran an experiment where they asked consumers to rate several identical products based on quality. People would choose one and then when asked for their reasoning, the people would provide a reasoning despite the fact that the products were identical. They consistently found that people were unable to reliably identify the sources of their decision-making Yeah, I think that's all the time people are very bad narrators of like why they do the things that they do right the thing about That experiment where they give the identical products is they found out that people were choosing the rightmost product nice Frequently when they were looking at it nice. Yeah, and then they would ask people Are you just choosing that because that's on the right and they were like no no no yeah, of course

They said well, hey, they don't know it, but they're choosing it because it's the right most. And we don't know why, but that's what they're doing. And then some other folks postulated, actually, what's probably happening is that they're going through these left to right. And because they're identical, they're just choosing the most recent one that they looked at. Yeah. Right. Because like they trust themselves more or whatever. So it's not that it's to the right. It's that it's the most recent one that they looked at Do you know the thing about nuclear submarines they do on public polls? I don't think so There's a thing where you take online polls that pollsters use where people will just fill out the first bubble of every question

And so now they include a question Are you licensed to pilot a nuclear submarine and the first answer is yes? And that way if somebody just clicks the first answer for every single one It'll come up with that and then they can throw out the rest of the test because they're submarine and the first answer is yes. And that way, if somebody just clicks the first answer for every single one, it'll come up with that and then they can throw out the rest of the tests because they're just clicking the first one. That's interesting, yeah, yeah. So in 2005, there's some good follow up on this idea

by some researchers who use the term choice blindness. They showed people two pictures of women and asked them to choose the one that they felt was more attractive. Because in 2005, even scientific research was doing hot or not. Most of society was just hot or not in various forms. But the twist is they're both behind a door. You can't tell how the women look. So you just have to pick one.

So then what they would do is show them the picture again and ask them to explain their choice, except they would show them the wrong picture. They would show them the one that they didn't choose Okay less than a quarter of people caught the error and the ones that did not Provided an explanation for the choice that they did not actually make so you show them the less hot one And then you're like why do you think she's the hotter one and they're like well? I just love her hair like whatever right that's so this is something that gladwell pretty consistently pokes at This is something that Gladwell pretty consistently pokes at and that he's basically right about, that there's this disconnect between our subconscious decision-making process and our conscious mind.

There's also evidence, which Gladwell talks about a little bit, that actually trying to articulate the reasons for your decisions can make your decision-making worse. This is called verbal overshadowing. Gladwell talks about Jonathan Schoohler who publishes about this in 1990. He showed people video of a robbery and he found that they were less likely to pick the robber out of a lineup accurately if they were asked to verbally describe him first. There's another very famous experiment by Schoohler that Gladwell references. I'm going to send you this. By the way, I know I'm sending you brutally long

Gladwell excerpts, and I promise you that each one of these is edited down. I feel like you're including excerpts with as many proper names as possible to catch me in a mispronunciation. No, this is just what he does. He loves a character. So he won't just be like, there's this study

and do a dry rendition of the study. He's like, it was a windy day in Chicago. All right here you go. He says, consumer reports put together a panel of food experts and had them rank 44 different brands of strawberry jam from top to bottom according to very specific measures of texture and taste. Wilson and Schouler took the first, 11th, 24th, 32nd, and 44th ranking jams and gave them to a group of college students. Their question was, how close would the students' rankings come to the experts? The answer is pretty close.

The students put Knott's Berry Farm second and Alpha Beta first, reversing the order of the first two jams. The experts and the students both agreed that featherweight was number three. Overall, the students' ratings correlated with the experts' ratings by.55, which is quite a high correlation. What this says in other words is that our jam reactions are quite good. But what would happen if I were to give you a questionnaire and ask you to enumerate your reasons for preferring one jam to another? Disaster. Wilson and Schooler had another group of students provide a written explanation for their rankings and they put Knott's Berry Farm,

the best jam of all according to the experts, second to last, and Sorrell Ridge, the expert's worst jam, third. The overall correlation was now down to.11, which for all intents and purposes means that the students' evaluations had almost nothing at all to do with the experts' evaluations. So basically all of the kids are testing the jam, tasting the jam, but some kids just taste it and immediately are like one, two, three, four, five. And the second group taste the jam and then they're like, okay, this one's like a little bit more sweet, this one's like a little bit more sour. And the ones that are describing the jams end up scrambling it compared to the expert assessments.

So what is this explanation of this effect? It's not entirely clear. We don't know exactly why this happens. I'm sort of prone intuitively, if I'm just blanking it, to the idea that the verbalization is sort of interfering with your memory. We don't really know why we do or feel things. And so being asked to describe it, it's just like, it's fucking you up. It gets you thinking about these different factors that you weren't thinking about before. And then you're trying to map your instinct onto this framework and it just gets cluttered in your brain.

Right. It's like hearing somebody try to describe like why a joke is funny. Right. Like ultimately you're talking about an involuntary response. You're talking about something totally subjective and by trying to intellectualize it, you can sort of convince yourself of anything or you can talk yourself out of your gut level of response. I was a little bit skeptical of this stuff. Probably the most established version of this phenomenon is in that facial recognition context, like the robbery example. And after the replication crisis drama unfolded, they attempted a replication of that study that actually did manage to replicate an effect. I think it was smaller than in the earlier studies, however. So at least in certain circumstances,

it does seem like this is a real replicable phenomenon. Gladwell does dedicate a good amount of time to talking about how our intuitions can fail us. I mentioned that Kahneman had said, in situations where you don't have experience, your intuitions are not necessarily going to be reliable. Right? And Gladwell basically arrives at the same place.

He does not do this whole intuition is magic thing. And he talks about a bunch of areas where your intuitions might lead you astray. Some very serious and dark, some not at all. One of his simplest explanations is the Pepsi challenge. And now you remember the Pepsi challenge Yeah, you you they blindfold you and they give you coke and Pepsi and you're like which one tastes better and Allegedly like more people like Pepsi. That's it. So this is right

so in they started doing this as a marketing ploy in the 80s and then it continued into the 90s Pepsi is getting people on the street giving them a little sip of coke little sip of Pepsi and they are choosing Pepsi Coke does internal testing and they find the same thing people prefer Pepsi by like 15 percent margins like crazy crazy margins. Yeah coke freaks out right? Yeah, very famously This leads to new coke. Oh, yeah, they change the formula make it a little sweeter. Everyone gets mad grotesque humiliation yeah right what happened here it turns out the advantage that Pepsi had only lasted a couple of sips right people's initial reaction was to prefer it but

for drinking entire cans or bottles or whatever the advantage dissipates yeah again I thought this was interesting it's also like are we talking about intuition or is this about like sugar I've noticed it's like every single thing they give you at like Larry's market You get like a little thing of smoked salmon like a little tiny dollop of it And then you buy the whole thing of smoked salmon. It just isn't as good when you have more of it Yeah, it's like every little fucking snack at Trader Joe's one bite and you're like nice. Yeah, you're like Jesus Christ Bag of this shit. It's like too much. Yeah, I don't think that's blink Jesus Christ, a whole bag of this shit? It's like too much, yeah.

I don't think that's Blink. Yeah, that's not, yeah. Okay, that's like a cute little story about Coke and Pepsi. Oh, Blink, I ate too many s'mores. What are you talking about? God damn you, Gladwell. So he points out how intuition can result in stereotyping. His big example is the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999, a black

immigrant murdered by NYPD. He was mistaken for a rape suspect or a robber. The officers used both justifications. He was confronted in a hallway. Officers say he didn't comply. They confused his wallet for a gun. He is shot many times. Gladwell basically posits a theory of the case where the officers were not explicitly racist probably but made a series of misjudgments that may well have been influenced by Diallo's race. The more problematic portion of this is just a complete curveball. Gladwell starts talking about autism. His basic premise is that most people are

able to intuitively read people's faces and gestures very quickly, blink style, while people with autism struggle with that. He calls it mind blindness because they are purportedly unable to read the intentions of other people, right? I don't think that's true, anyway. It's not true. It's a grotesque oversimplification. Is this in the last couple chapters of the book Peter? Is this where he's putting it? We're in the last chapter and you know. I was halfway through the book and I was like envisioning the episode.

And I was like, yeah, we'll probably talk about some of the science that's outdated. Some of the things that I think he oversimplifies. But a lot of it's just going to be science anecdotes. And then you hit the last chapter and it's Amadou Diallo. And I was like like here we fucking go Now I'm gonna send you this in this in this context He has just told a story about an autistic guy named Peter almost changed the name just to avoid you Taking a little stab. I'm not doing any stabs. I didn't I know I you're too woke

I know, you're too woke. I'm too, exactly. But our listeners are like an autistic guy named Peter, huh? He says, But I can't help wonder if, under certain circumstances, the rest of us could momentarily think like Peter as well. What if it were possible for autism, for mind blindness, to be a temporary condition instead of a chronic one? Could that explain why sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely and catastrophically wrong? Well, if they would ban the vaccines, Peter,

we wouldn't have this problem. So he then goes on to theorize, loosely referring to some science, that certain very high stress situations like confrontations involving firearms cause us to lose our ability to read people's faces and gestures and movements a phenomenon that he calls temporary autism Oh my god And then he says that an important element of police training is to quote avoid the risk of temporary autism Dude, he made up a term mind blindness. Just say temporary mind blindness He created a fake concept, but he used the real one in his term

Just use the fake one. Of course he throws in temporary autism at the end of the book. He's like, he's like, final chapter, it's Malcolm time baby, let's go. He's like, everyone stop reading, it's just you and me. It's like, he's got like this notepad of his most problematic ideas and he's just like, final chapter baby. But also is he using this to kind of exonerate the guys that killed Amadou Diallo that like, well, this is a normal human thing, rather than just like, rank racism, which I think is probably a much stronger factor? I think he's sort of, I mean, I will say that he sort of seems to be implying that like, training can fix this and it's like, all right, yeah, they should be better trained sure but the idea that they were

Unable to like sense Diallo's intentions is Built on an assumption that I don't think you can make yeah, and we've seen a lot of like body cam footage now Where it's not so much that they couldn't read the intentions as they were looking to pull that trigger, right? Now do we know what happened in the Diallo case? No, there's no body cam footage. There are no eyewitnesses besides the cops. So we don't really know what happened there. But like a story that is told based on police testimony, where it's just sort of like, yeah,

they were in this really high stress situation and those are really tough to function in and like yeah, they became autistic suddenly Yeah, and like they actually got autism for a little bit Oh, so it's it's like the perfect TED talk brain thing where it's like you might think this was racist policing But actually there's like a more kind of I guess quote-unquote interesting like scientific explanation of it But it's sort of like I think it was probably just the racism. This is a department with a long history of racist policing. Oh, you think I'm racist? Actually, you are being ableist

because for that one and a half seconds, I was autistic. I was actually. Hmm, you ever think of that? I was as bad at reading faces as Koreans are at flying planes. Malcolm Gladwell's like, yes, we got it. Ship it. Final chapter, baby.

That's where I was basically gonna end this episode. And then I encountered something even worse. I wanna know what your rabbit hole this morning was. Yeah, I had a little bit about this. And then I made a quick discovery at like 9 p.m. last night that sent me down a rabbit hole. And I was, my wife was like, hey, are you coming to bed at like 9 p.m. Last night that sent me down a rabbit hole and I was hell Yeah, my wife was like, hey, are you coming to bed at like at 1230 last night?

And I was like I need a little more time In the diallo chapter in the parts about being able to like read people's expressions and such There's an interview with a guy named Paul Ekman Ekman is a psychologist who claims to be an expert in micro-expressions, little expressions that cross our face, and he has mapped out different types of expressions as he believes that they correlate to different emotions and so forth. This feels like some TikTok body language expert shit. I'm going to send you a very brief excerpt.

Ekman recalled the first time he saw Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic primaries. I was watching his facial expressions, and I said to my wife, this is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar and have us love him for it anyway. I mean, that's kind of true. Yeah, it is true, except it's a pretty convenient little story to tell

after Bill Clinton got caught cheating. Also, he had numerous sex scandals during that campaign. It's not like the Lewinsky thing was like totally impossible to predict. This guy's face looks like he's gonna murder Vince Foster. And endorse a sex pest in New York for some reason, like 25 years later. Ekman claims that he can use this approach

not just to see someone's emotions, but to detect deception, to see when someone is lying. And he got extra popular after the publication of Blink. The TV show Lie to Me revolves around a character that can read facial expressions and so forth, and it's based on Ekman. He starts to sell training modules, primarily to cops and other government agencies. He lands a large contract with the TSA. This ends up being TSA's SPOT program screening of passengers by observation techniques, which launches in 2007. In 2010, the Government Accountability

Office looks into SPOT and they put out a report where they conclude with this, quote, TSA deployed SPOT nationwide without first validating the scientific basis for identifying suspicious passengers in an airport environment. Yes. A scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes. Unbelievable. This results in congressional hearings. Ekman himself testifies and he claims that his methods can detect deception

with 90% accuracy. Maria Hartwig, a psychologist who specializes in deception detection, testifies that not only is there no research indicating that you can detect lies through analyzing micro expressions, there's no evidence that people consistently exhibit micro expressions at all. Perfection. Ekman's 90% accuracy claim is not verified because he has never Published a study testing the efficacy of his training when asked about that He claims that he cannot publish it for national security purposes. Hell yeah, because now that we're using it Terrorists could try to beat it. That's actually how you know, it's good

Yeah, because there's no evidence for it. In 2015, someone leaked to The Intercept the criteria that TSA was using. It is a 92-point checklist where different behaviors get you either one, two, or three points depending on how risky they are. If you get to four points, you get additional screening. Okay. Sending it to you now. Yeah, please God, yes, yes, yes.

So, the very first one, which gets you one point out of four needed for additional screening, is arriving late for your flight. Hahaha! That doesn't mean you're lying! As an early-to-the-airport guy, I say, go get them, folks. Hahaha! Lock them up! Exaggerated yawning as the individual approaches yawning process how would you even know also people are like oftentimes for flights you're getting up like three in the morning to make your

flight excessive fidgeting clock watching head turning watching at the airport leg shaking imagine looking at your watch at the airport my favorite one Peter these are the ones that are one point each. These aren't even like major stress factors. Three points each. Deception factors. One of them is appears to be in disguise. That's one of my favorite ones because again you need four points for additional screening. As long as everything else is smooth, if the TSA knows that you're in a full-ass disguise you still can't get screened. I got the big fucking fake mustache and they're like, God, we want to screen him, but he's not yawning.

It also has wearing improper attire for location, but if somebody has flown in from Hawaii, they're probably in like shorts and flip-flops. They might be in Detroit. The location's an airport. I'm trying to think of what would be improper location because you could be going anywhere. Yeah, literally. There's no such thing as improper attire for in airport. I'm trying to think of what would be improper location because you could be going anywhere Yeah, literally there's no such thing as improper attire for an airport

It depends on where you're going or where you're coming from You don't know where they're going Powerful grip of a bag Cold penetrating stare. I will I will never get through a security line Bag appears to be heavier than expected Expected sure You haven't found the most overtly racist one. Oh, face pale from recent shaving of beard?

Recently shaved beard is one of the indicators. What the fuck? He's trying to pretend he's not Muslim. Jesus Christ. Nice try. The TSA, by the way, revised its criteria around this time. And then in 2017, the Accountability Office put out a third report saying that there's no evidence for the revised criteria either. Are they still using this? Do you know?

I think that the program still exists in some form, that it indirectly launched a completely fraudulent and possibly racist TSA screening program. Dude, Malcolm Gladwell is so powerful. I know. There had to be congressional hearings because in 2004 when Malcolm Gladwell heard this guy say that he could like read people's faces, he wasn't like, I don't think so, buddy. That's got to be Gladwell thinking it's like a better story if this guy is an expert

rather than just like debunking his claims. Cause debunking his claims doesn't really fit into Gladwell's book. This is why it's so exhausting doing Gladwell shit. Like I told you there's like a hundred anecdotes in this book. I didn't do a deep or even medium dive into most of them because it's just so time consuming.

But it's basically a guarantee that Gladwell did not look enough into any of these. It does make me question the double fault guy to be honest. Before we wrap, I want to talk about some of the bad reviews because I actually thought that a lot of the reviews were sloppy in the same exact way that they accuse Gladwell of being sloppy. The big one was Richard Posner in The New Republic wrote a review called Blinkard. And Richard Posner is a judge, famous conservative libertarian guy Revolutionary and introducing economic analysis into

Judicial opinions in case you thought the law wasn't stupid enough. These are all of my deception factors. These are three points libertarian Preservative judge he passes the threshold. That's more than four if I see if I see a deceptively heavy bag this guy's fucked He writes this scathing review he hits on some well let me let me send you some excerpts hold on. Posner says one of Gladwell's themes is that clear thinking can be overwhelmed by irrelevant information but he revels in the irrelevant an anecdote about food tasters begins one bright summer day I had lunch with two women who run a company in New Jersey called Sensory Spectrum.

The weather, the season, and the state are all irrelevant. And likewise, that hospital chairman, Brendan Reilly, is a tall man with a runner slender build, or, inside JFcom, looks like a very ordinary office building. The business of JFcom, however, is anything but ordinary. These are typical examples of Gladwell's style, which is bland and padded with cliches. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I kind of, I also find descriptions like this annoying, but they're fairly standard for this kind of nonfiction writing. I'm not saying you have to like this style of writing. I agree that it's a little cliche. But like, these are just examples of Gladwell painting a picture for his audience, right?

Yeah, yeah. Sorry that it's not written like a judicial opinion. Like, otherwise the book is just a series of descriptions of studies, right exactly Yeah, you have to have some of this and you're not constantly do this They're like we met in his office where he was wearing a blue polo shirt and his hair in a ponytail Like this is just like part of nonfiction storytelling you make a scene Well, the color of her hair is not relevant to the final conclusion here You love that voice. That's your Posner voice.

I know. Yeah. That was actually a recording of Richard Posner that I played as a trick. Gladwell talks at one point about an experiment by a law professor who sent a different mix of white and black men and women to car dealerships to negotiate deals for cars. And he found that black people, especially black men men ended up being quoted higher prices even after negotiation. He says look this probably isn't conscious racism because why would the salesman purposefully price something inefficiently? That's Gladwell's thesis right? And so guess what Posner's objection to this is? It's not exonerative enough. He says

it would not occur to Gladwell, a good liberal, that an auto salesman's discriminating on the basis of race or sex might be a rational form of the rapid cognition that he admires. What? If two groups happen to differ on average, even though there is considerable overlap between the groups, it may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group, even though one knows that many members deviate from the average. So Gladwell's being like low-key racist and he's like, no, no, it should have been high-key racist. Gladwell is like, look, these guys are accidentally doing racism, which definitely does not give enough credit to how racism operates in reality. Yeah. And then you get the objection from Posner, which is like, well, maybe black people are just worse at negotiating.

Yeah, like they were racist and that's chill I love this mostly because to go through this entire book and pick this out as like a Specific thing that irritates you to the point where you dedicate like three paragraphs to it It's the most libertarian judge thing you could possibly do Remember when you were talking about people thinking that like tall and handsome people are more honest and I told you that Gladwell sort of pokes at that too. Here's Richard Posner addressing that. The average male CEO of a Fortune 500 company is significantly taller than the average American male and Gladwell offers this as yet another example of stereotypical

thinking. That is not very plausible. A CEO is selected only after a careful search to determine the candidates individual characteristics. Gladwell ignores the possibility that tall men are disproportionately selected for leadership positions because of personality characteristics that are correlated with height, notably self-confidence and a sense of superiority perhaps derived from experiences in childhood

when tall boys lord it over short ones. Has he considered that tall people are better? The idea that decision makers at large companies might be subject to biases rather than like perfectly efficient market machines is offensive to Poster. He's like, how dare you question the wisdom of fortune 500 companies? This is such good like insight into the conservative brain because someone is just like, people have a rational biases biases and then he's like maybe maybe there's a slightly more rational explanation like Maybe maybe society is ordered exactly as it should be do that do not question Also, it's like why even do this like just admit that there's a little bit of bias in favor of tall people like I'm you

Know me. I'm a miniature gentleman I don't really care that much but it's like you have to be able to at least admit like yeah discrimination exists Also the I poked around at this a little bit. It seems pretty well established I have to say I didn't I didn't dig too deep because this is just fucking a Richard Posner who gives a shit But like there are various contexts in which tall people seem to have an irrational advantage. Yeah, they're just like cooler Part of the reason I wanted to talk about the Posner review is because I hate Richard Posner. I don't care that he got more liberal in his old age. He wasted his entire life, so it doesn't matter to me. In a vacuum, it's good that you saw this sort of reaction to pop science, right?

Where people are like, hey, this stuff is sort of bullshit, right? But the fact that the New Republic is like, well, why don't we let a federal judge have at it? You couldn't find a psychologist? This is so bizarre and like speaks to how like even in our rejections of anti-intellectualism, we don't really know what intellectualism is. It's also part of this like this era of the New Republic and sort of like liberal magazines writ large. Absolutely. It's also part of this like this era of the New Republic and sort of like liberal magazines writ large Absolutely, you might think you're like liberal values are correct But have you heard from the worst person you've ever met next time you theorize? Why don't you show a little respect for fortune 500 companies? I wanted to put this at the end because even if Malcolm Gladwell accidentally got thousands of

Malcolm Gladwell accidentally got thousands of Muslim presenting people detained. I still feel a little bit angrier towards Richard Posner. The enemy of our enemy is not our friend. We're a hater podcast. That doesn't mean you can get on our good side by hating on a book that we hate. Nice try, Richard. Still hate you, nerd. He's in my phone as Richard Bad Vibes.