Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: Endorsing the Hunch and the Gut-Level Decision

In his popular new book Blink Malcolm Gladwell posits the idea that people take two separate approaches to making a decision. Either a person makes a concerted conscious effort to weigh all the information at his disposal before arriving at a logical conclusion, or he makes a lightning-fast decision based entirely on that nebulous emotional feeling most often referred to as a "hunch." An important point that Gladwell makes is that those hunches very often turn out better than decisions that are labored over. The problem, of course, is that society is often suspicious of gut decisions made without resorting to logical conclusions of the evidence. It is integrity of the hunch and the gut decision that is called into question.

Gladwell's thesis is that our brain employs a system he refers to "thin slicing"; or the mysterious capability of the unconscious to quickly filter through any irrelevant information in a given situation. All filters that employ rational consideration are excised during the process of "thin slicing" and it also is evolutionary as each new circumstance arises. Gladwell makes the assertion in Blink that thin slicing creates biases deep within the subconscious. The eventual result involves a process best described as subconscious stereotyping.

One example of this effect involves a survey taken of the Fortune 500 companies. The survey is quite revealing: The average CEO is a few inches taller than the average height of the overall population. While you would probably find precious few Board of Directors members who would tell you that height as any influence on managerial ability the facts contradict that assumption. The statistical probability of so many CEOs being taller than average is off the chart. For Gladwell, the fact that the average height of CEOs is well above the national average indicates that a subconscious correlation between height and leadership abilities exists among those making hiring decisions.