Blink

We don’t deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes, we may not even even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we’ve had, the people we’ve met, the lessons we’ve learned, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.

1. When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature. by Sigmund Freud2. Thin-slicing in thinking: get unconscious for the critical points for judgement.3. What prepares for critical blinking speed decision making is a large amount of practice and experience in life for the subject matter.4. Unconscious bias is rooted in mind.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds; they saw her for who she truly was.

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.

The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition. It is at the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination. It's why, on more occasions than we may care to admit, utter mediocrities sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions — we cab alter the way we thin-slice — by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

But it had one overwhelming advantage allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

"When you start becoming reflective about the process, it undermines your ability. You lose the flow. There are certain kinds of fluid, intuitive, nonverbal kinds of experience that are vulnerable to this process."

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our head. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

In fact — and this is a key point in explaining the breakdown of Blue Team that day in the Gulf — that extra information is more than useless. It's harmful. It confuses the issues. What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.

Truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

In good decision making, frugality matters.

Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.

A bad movie is always a bad movie. The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in the category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to understand that we actually like them.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.

What happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reaction.

Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. But with experience we can become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret — and decode — what lies behind our snap judgments and first impressions.

Whenever we have something that we are good at — something we care about — that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

The information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.

We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. Emotion can also start on the face.

"When you remove time," de Becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction."

"When we make a split-second decision," Payne says, "we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe."

Mind reading, as well, is an ability that improves with practice.

"The face is like the penis!" What he meant was that, the face, to a large extent, a mind of its own.