Rapid Cognition and Prejudice Theme Analysis

One of the most evident problems with rapid cognition is that it can be prejudicial. By definition, rapid cognition involves making judgments (often about other people) in the absence of all the information—something we’re usually taught not to do from an early age. Furthermore, rapid cognition is prejudicial in the sense that, over a lifetime, the adaptive unconscious can “accumulate” stereotypes and bigotry, with the result that rapid cognition sometimes motivates bigoted behavior. But while Gladwell acknowledges that rapid cognition is prejudicial, he argues that it’s also possible for people to use rapid cognition to fight racism and other forms of prejudice.

In the first half of Blink, Gladwell shows how the adaptive unconscious accumulates bigotry, sometimes causing bigoted behavior. Over the course of a lifetime, people experience bigoted or stereotypical representations of other people. For example, films, TV shows, and other media portray African Americans as dangerous and criminal to an unfair and unrealistic degree. While people may be consciously aware that these kinds of stereotypes are just stereotypes, the adaptive unconscious may internalize the same stereotypes and respond to them. The result is that the same person may be consciously aware that racism is immoral, and yet act racist, due to the power of the adaptive unconscious. For instance, Gladwell shows that when people are asked to pair dangerous objects with photographs of either black or white people, they’re quicker to associate the objects with black people, perhaps reflecting the racist stereotypes accumulated in the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious acts intuitively, and often falls back on quick, heavily reinforced mental associations; therefore, in a society where the media ascribes negative stereotypes to certain groups of people, the adaptive unconscious will trigger some bigoted behavior.

While freely admitting that the adaptive unconscious sometimes triggers bigotry, Gladwell goes on to argue that most bigotry results from the absence of rapid cognition, and that rapid cognition can be used to fight bigotry. Although rapid cognition involves making assessments based on limited evidence, it also involves simultaneously assessing many different kinds of evidence, such as facial cues, clothing, age, race, etc. Therefore, a bigot, it could be argued, is someone who focuses on only one form of evidence—a person’s race, age, gender, etc.—and ignores all other available evidence. To make his point, Gladwell discusses Bob Golomb, a highly successful car salesman. Golomb sells a huge number of cars each month because he’s adept at sizing up his clients—“thin-slicing” their facial cues, their gestures, etc. Where many other car salesmen focus most of their attention on older, white, male clients, Golomb claims to treat all his clients the same, regardless of their age, race, or gender, instead of letting these factors cloud his judgment. In short, Golomb uses thin-slicing to overcome the bigotry common in his profession—because he focuses on small but important details about his clients’ behavior, he makes perceptive, accurate judgments about the people who walk into his car dealership.

Gladwell arrives at the strange conclusion that, while some bigotry results from rapid cognition, not all rapid cognition is bigoted, and in fact, rapid cognition can stave off some forms of bigotry. Most people are taught not to “judge a book by its cover,” because it’s morally wrong to presume things about other people; or, put another way, because the “cover” isn’t always representative of what’s inside the book. Gladwell offers an interesting reinterpretation of the old saying: he argues that it is, in fact, possible to learn a lot about a book by thin-slicing its cover. To extend the analogy, a bigot isn’t someone who judges a book by its cover; rather, a bigot is someone who focuses on only one small aspect of the “cover” (for example, race, gender, age, etc.), and ignores the rest of the “cover” (facial cues, gestures, intelligence, conversational style, etc.). Thus, Blink argues that there’s nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about thin-slicing, provided that we use the adaptive conscious to its full potential.