Gladwell's Thin-Synthesis Essay

Gladwell applies the cognitive perspective of psychology to his book through his explanations of how different situations use the cognitive method of “Thin-slicing.” He describes “Thin-slicing” as “the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 23). The application of “Thin-slicing” is chronicled in how Thomas Hoving and other art experts instinctively knew the Getty Museum’s kouros was fake and in how Lee Goldman developed a heuristic for examining whether patients’ chest pains were indicators of a heart attack or some other ailment. Thomas Hoving’s use of “Thin-slicing” occurred in his thought process when he was examining the Getty kouros. He explains

the analysis by stating, art experts feel “a kind of mental rush, a flurry of visual facts flooding their minds when looking at a work of art” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 50). He uses his art knowledge, stored in his unconscious processing from years of rehearsal, to make an impulsive yet accurate judgement of the fake kouros: a by-the-definition example of “Thin-slicing.” Lee Goldman used “Thin-slicing” in his creation of a method for making quick judgments on a patient’s likelihood of having a heart attack. Lee Goldman’s decision tree - as the method is referred to - bases diagnoses on four things: the patient’s electrocardiogram reading, whether the pain felt by the patient is unstable angina, the presence of fluid in the patient’s lungs, and whether the patient’s systolic blood pressure is below 100. By limiting judgments to these basic four factors, doctors avoid being flooded with unnecessary information. Gladwell (2014) states: “The problem of too much information also comes up in studies of why doctors sometimes make the mistake of missing a heart attack entirely - of failing to recognize when someone is on the brink of or in the midst of a major cardiac complication.” The extra information ends up only overwhelming doctors while their are making their diagnoses.
The cognitive perspective is also represented in describing other thought processes that influence human behavior. In one study discussed by Gladwell, students were able to get more Trivial Pursuit questions right by using the power of thought to change their mind frame when they answered the question. In the study conducted by two Dutch researchers, “half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind…. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 56). The students who thought about professors got 55.6% of the questions right, while the students who thought about soccer hooligans got 42.6% of the questions right. The results were attributed to the fact that the “professor” group of students associated professors with intelligence and connected that association with themselves in order to be in a “smart” frame of mind while they answered the questions.
The experiment of Psychologist Norman R. F. Maier demonstrates how we pick up retrieval cues to come to instant solutions. In the experiment, Maier asked participants to list different manners in which to tie together two ropes that are impossible to hold simultaneously. There are four possible ways to tie the ropes together, but most people were only able to figure out three. “Maier let them sit and stew for ten minutes and then, without saying anything, he walked across the room toward the window and casually brushed one of the ropes, setting it in motion back and forth” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 69). The action prompted the majority to immediately reach the fourth solution: swing one of the ropes to reach the other and tie them together. The “a-ha” moment experienced by these people was a product of the unconscious mind already having the solutions from scanning the room but needing a clue to draw these solutions from the unconscious to the conscious mind. This thought process parallels the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon of memory in that these two processes both use retrieval cues to recall information deep within our minds.
What psychologist Jonathan W. Schooler dubs as “verbal shadowing” explains how describing our visual image of something with words can distort our memory of its appearance. For example if you think of the face of a random stranger you have seen recently, you probably have a good idea in your mind of the appearance of the stranger’s face. However, your memory of that face would alter and your ability to recognize it in a line of people would worsen if you wrote in detail about how the stranger looked. This is because you end up remembering what you wrote about how the stranger looked rather than the image in your head, which is much more accurate than the description in words. Gladwell (2014) elaborates: “Your brain has a part (the left hemisphere) that thinks in words, and a part (the right hemisphere) that thinks in pictures, and what happened when you described the face in words was that your actual visual memory was displaced. Your thinking was bumped from the right to the left hemisphere” (p. 119-120). Verbal shadowing portrays the cognitive perspective of psychology through illustrating how visual memory can be altered by describing what we see in our minds.
The cognitive perspective also describes why the aesthetic of a product plays a role in deciding whether we like or dislike the product. Through sensation transference, the transference of impressions we have about the packaging of the product to the product itself, we unconsciously develop their opinions of the quality of the product. “When we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 165). When Coca-Cola tried to fix its decrease in market shares and rise well above its competition Pepsi, it make a mistake in attributing the decreased sales to the taste of product “because in the real world, no one ever drinks Coca-Cola blind. We transfer to our sensation of the Coca-Cola taste all of the unconscious associations we have of the brand, the image, the can, and even the unmistakable red of the logo” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 166). How much we enjoy a product relies on our perception of and cognitive associations with the product as much as the quality of the product itself.
Social Perspective
Gladwell demonstrates use of the social perspective of psychology in describing applications of the Warren Harding error: “the dark side of rapid cognition” (Gladwell, 2014, p.

76). The Warren Harding error explains how making a snap judgment based on the implicit associations made between our expectations and the appearance of a person can lead us to faulty judgments. The social perspective implications of the Warren Harding error come from how the error “is at the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 76). The associations we learn to make between people and the stereotypes we are exposed to by society develop implicit prejudice in our cognition. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) tests measures the strength of these implicit associations to reveal how much they affect our beliefs and behavior. On a racial IAT, “more than 80% of all those who have ever taken the test end up having pro-white associations” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 84), meaning a lot of people have an unconscious bias toward white people. Through this unconscious bias, the Warren Harding error can affect how we impulsively favor white people over black people in job interviews or who we view as a crime suspect. To learn to overcome this bias and improve scores on the racial IAT, we need to immerse ourselves in media and culture that celebrate the positive aspects of black people. Gladwell (2014) explains: “Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our

environment, which means that we can change our first impressions - we can alter the way we thin-slice - by changing the experiences that comprise those impression” (p. 97). We can learn to overcome our implicit prejudice and the Warren Harding error that follows it by changing how we perceive black people in society.
False impressions of people created from the Warren Harding error can also make us reveal our unconscious prejudice through our actions.

For example, an experiment by Ian Ayres involving how car dealers sell to different types of people shows an implicit prejudice of car salesmen. Ayres sent white men, black men, white women, and black women to go to 242 dealership and bargain with a dealer on the price of a car for up to 40 minutes. The results of the experiment revealed that “after lengthy negotiations, Ayres’s black men still ended up with a price that was nearly $800 higher than Ayres’s white men were offered without having to say a word” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 93). The experiment revealed how car dealers used stereotypes from their implicit prejudice to create assumptions of their customers, charging them more or less for the car based on their race and gender. Gladwell (2014) explains this processing saying, “Most salespeople are prone to a classic Warren Harding error. They see someone, and somehow they let the first impression they have about that person’s appearance drown out every other piece of information they manage to gather in that first instant” (p. 91). Part of this erroneous “Thin-slicing” includes falling on stereotypes perpetuated by society, stored as implicit associations in our

cognition.
Unconscious prejudice conveyed through our behavior fuels the self-fulfilling prophecy in terms of racial stereotypes. Gladwell uses the example of a hypothetical interview with a black man to show this concept. Unconscious prejudice against the black man would make us subconsciously create distance and act wary in front of him. The cold, cautious attitude would be conveyed through body language such as: standing a little farther away, smiling a lot less, and being a bit less expressive. Gladwell (2014) explains the impact of these hints of body language, stating, “He’s going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that may well make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, and a little less friendly” (p. 86). Because he is acting this way, we would feel that he is unfit for the job or does not have the passion for it. We develop a self-fulfilling prophecy for the black men because we influence his behavior based on our actions, inspired by stereotypes provided by our unconscious prejudice.
Gladwell’s emphasize on the connection between cognition and issues of racial also illustrates the social perspective of psychology. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson’s experiment on the effect of bubbling in race on the standardized test scores of black college students showed how negative associations induce negative thinking, which impacts the performance of the students. “When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement - and the number of items they got right was cut in half” (Gladwell, 2014, p. 56). The experiment shows how stereotypes harm the cognition of minorities and, therefore, hinder their performance.