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The world of professional sports is full of examples of people who intuitively do certain things, but can’t put into words why they do them-for example, the tennis great Andre Agassi always claimed that he “rolled” his wrist when he returned a shot, even though experts have determined that he did no such thing. For example, psychologists have found that people’s actual tastes in romantic partners are very different from what they think their tastes are: put another way, people can’t explain what they want. But in Chapter Two, he introduces a strange problem: even if people are good at making snap judgments about the world, they’re bad at explaining their own judgments. Gladwell has shown that rapid cognition allows people to make often surprisingly accurate judgments about the world. While Gottman is an expert at thin-slicing, Gladwell argues that all human beings are innately good at thin-slicing. By studying the conversational patterns and facial cues of a couple for just a few minutes, Gottman can predict to a near-certainty whether or not the couple will still be married in 15 years.

The psychologist John Gottman has trained himself to thin slice interactions between married couples. In the case of the Getty’s statue, the art historians who immediately thought that the statue was a fake may have thin sliced the available evidence (the statue’s appearance) and drawn the conclusion that the statue was a fake. In the first chapter of the book, Gladwell introduces some of the basic rules of snap judgment, or “rapid cognition.” Humans are capable of making complex, rational judgments about the world, but they’re also capable of something called “thin-slicing”-taking a very small, specific amount of evidence about the world and then drawing big conclusions from this “thin slice” of reality, using a combination of experience and intuition. Blink is a book about intuitive feelings and snap judgments-judgments which are often (though not necessarily) more accurate and insightful than months of analysis. Sure enough, the statue turned out to be a likely forgery, sold on the black market. After looking at the statue for just a couple seconds, they had an intuitive feeling that something was wrong about the statue. But other people, including some renowned art historians, thought otherwise. Experts spent months confirming that the statue was, indeed, ancient-eventually, they concluded that it was. In the 1980s, the Getty Museum of Art in California purchased an ancient Greek statue.