Power of a Glance

The Power of a Glance A mother who sees her child running into the street, a couple out on a blind date, a broker at the stock market, and an interrogator questioning a suspect: what do these people have in common? They are all in a situation where a snap judgment is needed. Their adaptive unconsciousness, the part of the brain which makes quick judgments based on small amounts of information, is rapidly processing the small samplings of data available. In the book Blink, Gladwell, the author, discusses the adaptive unconsciousness. He refers to the process as thin slicing – using small pieces of information to make rapid decisions, which he portrays as an amazing decision making tool. He then addresses the fact that as amazing as thin-slicing is, it has disadvantages too. First impressions are not always accurate. The pattern the brain uses to come to conclusions is based on personal experiences, therefore thin-slicing, is dependent on perception and does not always produce correct snap decisions. However, Gladwell concludes that the downside of snap judgments can be controlled. Through training and expertise one can learn to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the thinnest slice of experience. Gladwell introduces the idea of the power of the glance with the story of the fake statue, called a kouros, which an art dealer tried to sell to the Getty Museum in California for 10 million dollars. Since most kouroi are recovered in fragments from archeological digs, this kouros was a rare find, because it was whole and almost perfectly preserved. After fourteen months of scientific analysis and careful investigation, to determine the authenticity of the kouros, the museum decided to purchase the statue. However, when some experts in the field viewed the kouros they felt an “intuitive repulsion” to the statue. Their blink reaction was correct; the statue was a modern forgery. “In the first two seconds of looking, in a single glance, these