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The Badger Herald

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Author urges ‘snap’ decisions

[media-credit name=’YANA PASKOVA/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′]malcom_yp_416[/media-credit]Best-selling author and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine Malcolm Gladwell spoke Wednesday evening in the Memorial Union about his latest book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.”

Gladwell’s book deals with the subject of snap judgments, which, according to Gladwell, play a central role in the way people make sense of the world.

“Most of what we do is done in the blink of an eye, so we need to understand what’s going on in that time,” said Gladwell.

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He opened by telling a story about a woman auditioning for the first-seat trombone in the Munich Philharmonic, a prestigious classical symphony orchestra that at one time only allowed male musicians.

Once a screen was put up to prevent the maestro from seeing the gender of the musicians, there were vast numbers of women allowed into the symphony.

“We think that when we make up our minds, it is transparent and simple, but we must peel back the layers, because most snap judgments are made without our awareness,” Gladwell said.

In the auditioning process, musicians are subconsciously judged 80 percent on visual aspects and 20 percent on the aural portion of the performance.

This introduced the concept that people are better equipped to make snap judgments when they have less information to work with.

“There is a real benefit to frugality in decision making,” Gladwell said.

Money is often wasted in hospitals because doctors who need to make snap judgments would rather be safe than sorry and admit patients into the emergency room for heart attacks when they may just be experiencing severe heartburn.

In order to remedy this problem, a Chicago hospital allowed some doctors only four pieces of information about the patients rather than an overwhelming medical history. Doctors were much more effective in weeding out the heart attacks from the heartburns with less, rather than more, information.

“We live in a society that says we need more information to make decisions. People say, ‘You should have looked at all the data,’ but rules are different with snap judgments,” Gladwell said.

As a final point, Gladwell said that we cannot change the hearts and minds of people, but we can change the context in which decisions are made.

“We must shift the focus from the terribly difficult task of changing the way people think to the simpler act of changing the environment in which thinking takes place,” Gladwell said.

Some students attending the speech agreed with Gladwell’s theory.

“I think he’s right about the environment having an effect on our decisions. People think what they do is based solely on their personality and beliefs,” UW junior Carrie Wiedner said.

Gladwell’s speech was one of a series of speeches by various New Yorker staffers as part of The New Yorker College Tour promoting the publication. The tour concludes this evening at Luther’s Blues with New Yorker humor writer Andy Borowitz.

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