blink

                                                  

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. "It popularizes research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious; mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls such as stereotypes" - (Wikipedia). I wanted to share a page that I found really interesting, maybe more so because I could relate to it.

This excerpt is from the Acknowledgments chapter.

"A few years ago, before I began Blink, I grew my hair long. It used to be cut very short and conservatively. But I decided, on a whim, to let it grow wild, as it had been when I was a teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets - and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along Fourteenth Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up in the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out a sketch and the description. I looked at it and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that, in fact, the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller and much heavier and about fifteen years younger (and, I added in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking). All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me and let me go. On the grand scale of things, I realize, this was a trivial misunderstanding. African Americans in the United States suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious, such as skin color or age or height or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions. And that thinking led to Blink - so I suppose, before I thank anyone else, I should thank those three police officers."