Inventing Elephants

The Power of the Glance

We are hard-wired to make certain judgments instantaneously, on the barest minimum of knowledge. These snap decisions based n first impressions happen because the brain pulls everything out of our subconscious and processes it faster than we can be aware of it. They can be surprising accurate or they can be thrown off and irrelevant. 

Factors that Influence our First Impressions

1. What we were doing immediately before

What we were reading, interacting, or doing right before we need to make a snap judgment influences the result of it. Just reading words that make the brain think "old" can change our behavior and make us move measurably slower. Sometimes this is good, as it can help us adapt to an unknown culture, but sometimes it is a contaminant we would like to avoid, such as when we hope something is true and that hope itself skews our gut feeling.

2. What we've been doing all our lives

Garbage in equals garbage out. Our brain can only make judgments based on what we've presented to it. This includes all those things around us we didn't really mean to include, like media stereotypes of race or gender. Long term exposure to experiences that support the snap decisions we want to make and the first impressions we want to feel can shift what actually happens.

3. What we're prepared for

This is something of a subset of the previous factor. We can't always judge what is weird to us. The sense of the unfamiliar swamps the ability to respond and leaves a negative impression. Sometimes this can change over time. On the flip side, this is also the reason why readiness drills and constant practice enable us to react properly in an emergency.

4. What we're really good at

Input is a matter of depth as well as width. The development of expertise in a given area changes our first impressions by giving them more complexity. We become able to discuss them in a way that the untrained can't. It can heighten the intensity of the gut feeling we develop in relation to our field of study.

5. What information is included

If we don't want our first impression to include information that we, in a planning phase, decided was unimportant, then we need to make sure that it's blanked from our perceptions. If the brain perceives it, then it will include it in the subconscious decision making process, whether we want it too or not. This is why orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so that it is impossible to take the candidates appearance into account. 

How We Can Work With our First Impressions

We can deliberately control our short-term environment when we know we're going into a situation where we know that emotional, instantaneous response will matter and influence our future decision making. For example, we can choose to think about different ways to collaborate before going into a complex meeting instead of ways to defend ourselves against attack. Then we might be more likely to see the cues for one action than the other.

We can make a deliberate effort to decide which assumptions we will ignore, like a car salesman who decided to believe that clothing doesn't indicate whether someone is capable of buying a car. Our first impressions may still swing wildly, but we have a mental framework with which to step over them and move on towards our goals.

We can make a choice to use them. Improvisation is dependent on the ability to move with the flow of action around you, whether it's in the comedy club or in the field of battle. Sometimes we need to avoid introspection and allow our first impressions and snap decisions to take the lead.

We can understand them better. This post only touches the surface. It was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking.

Review: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

I came to Blink with a set of preconceptions. Somehow I'd gotten the idea that it was going to be about how and why we should rely on our first impressions because they are based on our truest knowledge.

But that wasn't it at all.

Blink is about how we DO create instant judgments based on first impressiosn, whether we want to or not. It compiles case studies of different situations and how this inherent tendency is sometimes useful and sometimes destructive.

Like the other Malcolm Gladwell books I've read, Blink is highly story based, often referring to scientific studies, but not in a rigorous way. It is fun to read and raises questions worth thinking about, especially when you're trying to take different perspectives into account to create a new whole.