Think vs. Blink: Intuition’s Role in Decision-Making

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about rapid cognition: the first few seconds of mental acrobatics that go on when you’re exposed to something new, whether it’s another human being, a house you’re thinking of buying, or a movie synopsis.  According to Gladwell, “those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good”.  These aren’t gut-feelings or emotions, but rapid-fire bursts of thinking, and yet they’re different than the kind of deliberative, meditative decision-making we do consciously.

Photo from Flickr.com by Roger Blackwell

Blink, to me, advocates the kind of decision-making style that will probably resonate with most inhabitants of the 21^st century.   In our frenetic, fast-paced world, we make decisions at breakneck speed and are given results immediately.  There’s little time to slow down and evaluate our decisions because there is constant pressure to keep moving.  We make judgments based on the first three-seconds of a half-minute sample on iTunes and the ninety seconds that we have to wait for food to heat up in the microwave sometimes drags.  I would maintain, however, that there is something to be spoken for beyond instantaneous impressions and fraught, hurried, verdicts.  Perhaps by pressing ourselves to continually evaluate and act, we are losing sight of the value of meditation and patience in decision-making.

To deliberate is a skill.  To honestly acknowledge the necessity of delay, to pause and think before acting – even afterwards – is an art increasingly neglected in favor of rapid, mechanical progress.  So many of my fellow students have no idea what they want to do, but have signed up for a major so they can graduate on-time.  A friend whose only desire was to take a gap year before college, to work out her goals and earn tuition money, was pressured into starting immediately merely for the sake of forward movement.  Though I recognize Gladwell’s ideas as valid and compelling, if we expect to know ourselves in the blink of an eye, to know what will make us happiest or in which direction we should proceed, we are setting ourselves up for a life that, at the end of it, will look very different from what we might have hoped for or imagined.