• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

You’ve just started to read this column. In about two seconds you made the decision that this piece of writing might be worth spending the next five minutes on. Believe it or not, somebody actually wrote a book about these two seconds.

I stumbled upon this book – it’s called “Blink” – while killing time between classes in the Ackerman bookstore. With theories about making snap judgments in the blink of an eye, Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, seems to have struck the right note with a wide readership.

I personally agree that it’s sometimes good to trust your gut rather than your brain, but I highly doubt that this approach works in tough situations.

The main argument of his best-selling book, Gladwell writes, is that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately,” because “there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.”

After reading some of the examples in his book, I knew exactly what Gladwell was talking about. Picture yourself flipping through all the channels on your home TV in search of something to watch. How long does it take you to determine whether or not you like the program on any given channel? Five seconds? Two? I pride myself in being able to check all 80 cable channels in less than one minute (only to find out that nothing’s on). So basically, within a second, we know all we need to know about a two-hour show or movie.

Even in politics, snap judgments have an impact. Just think of President Bush, whose shoot-from-the-hip attitude arguably makes him sympathetic to a lot of people.

This made me wonder how we as college students can use “Blink”-decisions in our daily lives. After all, “thinking without thinking,” as the subtitle of Gladwell’s book suggests, certainly has great appeal for students fed up with all the thinking that comes with college. The book itself already provides one good example. Gladwell describes an experiment in which the psychologist Dr. Nalini Ambady showed students three 10-second videotapes of a teacher lecturing. The videotapes didn’t even have sound. She then asked the students to rate the teacher based on the 10-second snippets they saw. Their ratings almost exactly matched the ratings of those students who had sat through an entire class with that teacher. Even when Ambady cut down the tapes to five or two seconds, the ratings stayed the same.

They should show these results to the people who design the end-of-quarter professor evaluations. Why don’t we just fill them out during the first class and get it over with?

I wanted to see if Gladwell presented this study accurately or if he was stretching the truth a little to fit his book, so I blinked once and decided to talk to assistant psychology Professor Matthew Lieberman to get a second opinion.

Lieberman agreed that looking at a professor lecturing for a couple of seconds is enough to determine if you should take a class with that person. “We have this saying: ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’” Liebermann said. “But in some cases, judging the book by its cover can be better than reading the whole book.”

It seems like “blinking” your way through life could make things so much easier. You wouldn’t need to visit counselors anymore or do tons of research to determine what you want to do with your future. Not sure about med school? You could just peep into a doctor’s office and know if this career is right for you.

Unfortunately, snap judgments do not work well for this kind of decision. Lieberman explained: “The things that we are good at are things that we’ve done thousands and thousands of times.” While we’ve probably evaluated thousands of people with one look, choices about our careers are pretty rare. However, Lieberman had some advice for students who are having a difficult time in choosing the right grad school, major and so on: “Flip a coin and let it make the decision for you,” he suggested. “Then just see how you feel.”

Generally people should listen to their gut feelings more often, Lieberman said. A lot of students seem to choose majors because of external pressures rather than their own will, so if your major somehow feels wrong, you should really think about the reasons.

The next time you’re choosing a class, just listen to your instincts a little more. But, please, don’t skip that meeting with the career counselor in favor of blinking.

Starre is a third-year English student. E-mail him at astarre@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.