Gladwell and Gottman
Nov. 10th, 2008 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnParents-in-law just finished up a visit. I clearly absolutely won the parents-in-law lottery.
In other news, right before the in-laws came, I inhaled Blink (Malcolm Gladwell), a book about our snap reactions to things. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did. Oh, it's got the same issues his earlier book The Tipping Point had and which most pop-social-science books have: he cites studies that observe X and conclude Y and I am all, "But wouldn't the hypothesis Z also explain the observation X"? I mean, I'm perfectly willing to believe that the studies did think about Z and excluded it for some reason, but he doesn't tell me why! Also, sometimes I feel that he's not entirely clear about what point he's making (although I can usually figure out what he intended to say). I also feel like he doesn't necessarily draw conclusions that are interesting enough. For example, he talks about a car salesman who is very good partially because he can size up his customers quickly (using his snap reactions) but also because he does not make pre-judgements based on gender or clothes or what-have-you (not using possibly-erroneous snap reactions). This turns into a somewhat sanctimonious lecture on How We Should Not Judge Based on Race and Gender-- but the more interesting thing to me is that what the salesman uses presumably depends on the goal he is trying to accomplish. For him, a false alarm, in which he spends time on someone who doesn't turn out to be a customer, has very little cost, whereas a missed detection (someone he doesn't spend time on who would be a customer) has a huge cost-- and so he has refined the way he uses his information to take that into account. Presumably a different cost function would result in a very different worldview. But maybe if Gladwell had gotten into topics like that it would've been a different book.
I think I like it better than Tipping Point because a lot of the findings are things that I can think about myself and say, "yeah, that makes sense with what I know about myself," which I really enjoy. (This is one of the main reasons I totally love reading music-psych books.) Although at one point he talks about Coke and Pepsi and a three-way taste test-- apparently unless you are trained in analyzing tastes, if you ask your subjects to taste two samples of Coke and one of Pepsi, or vice versa, and ask which one is different, it is really hard to do! D totally did not think he would fail this test. I'm gonna have to buy some Coke so we can try it out.
If the only lesson I learned from the book was "People's subconsciouses make decisions that they have a really hard time analyzing and often analyze incorrectly unless they're trained in that particular sort of analysis," it would have been worth it. I think that's a really valuable lesson, actually-- even when, or perhaps especially when, applied to relationships (both romantic and non), even though Gladwell so doesn't go there.
(Another corollary to this "People suck at analyzing their subconscious" point, as Gladwell points out, is that focus groups don't always do a good job. At the risk of bringing politics into it, I really feel that this happened with Prop 8. I can totally buy that focus groups said, and really believed, that anti-Prop-8'ers should not dwell on gay relationships but should focus on equality. Heck, if someone had asked me, I would've said the same thing. And yet, when it came down to visceral reactions, the blue signs with the red "Equality for all" just didn't make me feel warm and fuzzy the way the cute little pro-8 family-icons did. On the bright side for their campaign, the "We're just like you" flyers we started getting two days before the election were much better in this regard.)
Also, I can't help but like a book that references Gottman's work. John Gottman is this amazing relationship researcher who can watch people for an hour, thoroughly analyze their behavior, and then predict with 90% accuracy whether they'll be together 15 years later. Ninety percent! I first became familiar with his work when I was engaged and was reading all the relationship/marriage books the library had, and pretty much all of them were complete crap except for Gottman's work, which was both interesting and useful. I think he should be required reading for anyone who is planning on getting married. I bought my sister one of his books when she was thinking of marrying the ex-boyfriend because they exhibited every single one of the danger signals. (B is just about infinitely better for her in these ways.)
In other news, right before the in-laws came, I inhaled Blink (Malcolm Gladwell), a book about our snap reactions to things. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did. Oh, it's got the same issues his earlier book The Tipping Point had and which most pop-social-science books have: he cites studies that observe X and conclude Y and I am all, "But wouldn't the hypothesis Z also explain the observation X"? I mean, I'm perfectly willing to believe that the studies did think about Z and excluded it for some reason, but he doesn't tell me why! Also, sometimes I feel that he's not entirely clear about what point he's making (although I can usually figure out what he intended to say). I also feel like he doesn't necessarily draw conclusions that are interesting enough. For example, he talks about a car salesman who is very good partially because he can size up his customers quickly (using his snap reactions) but also because he does not make pre-judgements based on gender or clothes or what-have-you (not using possibly-erroneous snap reactions). This turns into a somewhat sanctimonious lecture on How We Should Not Judge Based on Race and Gender-- but the more interesting thing to me is that what the salesman uses presumably depends on the goal he is trying to accomplish. For him, a false alarm, in which he spends time on someone who doesn't turn out to be a customer, has very little cost, whereas a missed detection (someone he doesn't spend time on who would be a customer) has a huge cost-- and so he has refined the way he uses his information to take that into account. Presumably a different cost function would result in a very different worldview. But maybe if Gladwell had gotten into topics like that it would've been a different book.
I think I like it better than Tipping Point because a lot of the findings are things that I can think about myself and say, "yeah, that makes sense with what I know about myself," which I really enjoy. (This is one of the main reasons I totally love reading music-psych books.) Although at one point he talks about Coke and Pepsi and a three-way taste test-- apparently unless you are trained in analyzing tastes, if you ask your subjects to taste two samples of Coke and one of Pepsi, or vice versa, and ask which one is different, it is really hard to do! D totally did not think he would fail this test. I'm gonna have to buy some Coke so we can try it out.
If the only lesson I learned from the book was "People's subconsciouses make decisions that they have a really hard time analyzing and often analyze incorrectly unless they're trained in that particular sort of analysis," it would have been worth it. I think that's a really valuable lesson, actually-- even when, or perhaps especially when, applied to relationships (both romantic and non), even though Gladwell so doesn't go there.
(Another corollary to this "People suck at analyzing their subconscious" point, as Gladwell points out, is that focus groups don't always do a good job. At the risk of bringing politics into it, I really feel that this happened with Prop 8. I can totally buy that focus groups said, and really believed, that anti-Prop-8'ers should not dwell on gay relationships but should focus on equality. Heck, if someone had asked me, I would've said the same thing. And yet, when it came down to visceral reactions, the blue signs with the red "Equality for all" just didn't make me feel warm and fuzzy the way the cute little pro-8 family-icons did. On the bright side for their campaign, the "We're just like you" flyers we started getting two days before the election were much better in this regard.)
Also, I can't help but like a book that references Gottman's work. John Gottman is this amazing relationship researcher who can watch people for an hour, thoroughly analyze their behavior, and then predict with 90% accuracy whether they'll be together 15 years later. Ninety percent! I first became familiar with his work when I was engaged and was reading all the relationship/marriage books the library had, and pretty much all of them were complete crap except for Gottman's work, which was both interesting and useful. I think he should be required reading for anyone who is planning on getting married. I bought my sister one of his books when she was thinking of marrying the ex-boyfriend because they exhibited every single one of the danger signals. (B is just about infinitely better for her in these ways.)
