Blink and The Paradox of Choice

I know I’m really slow at review­ing Mal­colm Glad­well’s Blink: The Power of Think­ing Without Think­ing, since it’s been out for a couple of years now. I finally read it just in the last few weeks, after a col­leagure recom­men­ded that I read it and Barry Schwarz’s The Para­dox of Choice: Why More Is Less for a pro­ject I’m work­ing on.

I’d read a few sum­mar­ies of Blink, and some­how what stuck in my memory was the sound-bite that snap decisions are often the best ones. Wrong! The book shows that imme­di­ate reac­tions are worth listen­ing to, if you’re an expert in that par­tic­u­lar field. If you aren’t, your snap decision may be right, or it may be wrong. Mal­colm Glad­well talks about times when your first, snap decisions are right (speed dat­ing, but only if you don’t try to ana­lyze what people like), and times when they’re wrong (the Pep­si taste test shows what you like when you get only a few sips, not what you like when you’re drink­ing an entire glass). He also goes into depth about people’s inbuilt or sub­con­scious assump­tions, and how they can influ­ence a per­son into mak­ing mis­takes, some­times with tra­gic con­sequences. A good example, one that’s been repor­ted widely, is that orches­tras only star­ted hir­ing women in large num­bers after intro­du­cing blind audi­tions, where the oth­er orches­tra mem­bers could­n’t be influ­enced by wheth­er the play­er was male or female, white or black, tall or short (all poten­tial bases for bias). All they heard was the music, and since they were experts in music, a short audi­tion con­cen­trat­ing only on that was all they needed. More tra­gic con­sequences come when police or sur­geons make snap decisions that may not be the right ones.

In sum­mary, Blink is well worth read­ing, and most pub­lic lib­rar­ies should have it on hand if you don’t want to buy it.

I read Para­dox of Choice shortly after­wards and found it amus­ing how the same research is used in both books (and Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness) to illus­trate dif­fer­ent points. Barry Schwar­z’s main mes­sage is that if you are con­fron­ted with too many choices, you either spend a lot of time mak­ing the abso­lute best choice, and then will often still be unhappy since you’re not sure that you really made the best choice, or you settle for some­thing that’s “good enough”. Which is often the bet­ter strategy, as most times it is good enough, and it frees up your time and men­tal band­width to con­cen­trate on things that mat­ter more to you. It’s abso­lutely true that in many places there is too much choice; I went into the loc­al pet store the oth­er day to pick up some more cat food. Every time I go in there seem to be more choices for dry cat food, all said to be good and healthy, with the con­sequence that I end up pick­ing some­thing off the shelf that looks reas­on­able because I have no way of decid­ing which is the best. And if the cats eat it, I buy that brand again next time as it’s as good a meth­od as any for mak­ing a choice.

There is also a deep­er point to the book — if your choices are unlim­ited, then if you fail, it’s your fault. So the bur­den of hav­ing to prove at all times that you are doing the abso­lute best, that you are as thin as you should be, or as rich, or as well-read, puts a lot of pres­sure on people. The author points out that the Amer­ic­an “hap­pi­ness quo­tient” has been going down over the last couple of dec­ades; as people have had more choices they have become more unhappy, per­haps as a res­ult of feel­ing like they made bad choices, or per­haps because of not meet­ing their own stead­ily increas­ing expect­a­tions. The counter-intu­it­ive idea that if you have less, you might be hap­pi­er, is not one that would make the con­sumer­ist bene­fi­ciar­ies happy, but is worth think­ing about. In sum­mary, The Para­dox of Choice is worth read­ing, and it might even help make you hap­pi­er with your life.