RES Columns: Q & A
The World in a Glance: Q+A with Malcolm Gladwell
Words: Jesse Ashlock
Over the past decade, New Yorker readers have grown accustomed to feeling small flutters of anticipation whenever Malcolm Gladwell's name appears in the table of contents. Four years ago, Gladwell received national acclaim for his first book, The Tipping Point, a broad yet coherent examination of social epidemics that combined exhaustive research with an old-fashioned knack for good storytelling. This year, he moves from collective psychology to the power of individual perception with Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (Little, Brown), an intellectual adventure tale that travels seamlessly from the crowded ER of Chicago's Cook County Hospital to the Amadou Diallo shooting, from epic military war games to the rise of the musician Kenna, from speed dating to food marketing, with countless side trips along the way. The stops on this grand tour serve as a road map for dissecting the blessings and perils of rapid-fire decision-making -- what Gladwell calls the blink.
A condensed version of our Q+A with Gladwell appeared in the January/February issue of RES. Read on for the entire interview, conducted last November, in which Gladwell talks about Arnold Schwarzenegger, the War in Iraq and ice cream, among other topics.
RES: Do you feel any discomfort with sending out an uncorrected advance proof to interviewers? There's some irony in [doing that with] a book that's about snap judgments.
Malcolm Gladwell: Because we continued to make quite a lot of changes right up to the very end, there is some not huge -- but to the writer, at least significant -- difference between what you read and what the final looks like. There's just no way around it. Nothing can be done.
RES: How do you feel about, and were you involved in, the decision to have the book by categorized under this self-help category? Do you feel that's an appropriate or profitable designation?
MG: Oh, is it? I didn't even know that it was. I have no idea. I know nothing about the bookselling business. If they think that's the best place for it, then that's where they ought to put it.
RES: Well, to continue on that idea, do you see the set of concepts you explore as a viable toolkit for everyday people to take into their everyday lives, in the sense that a self-help book would?
MG: I guess. Sure. You know, this book, like the last book, is not a recipe book. There are recipe books and this is not one. But it's not to say that just because it's not a recipe book doesn't mean there [aren't] things that people can use. It's just that their input is going to be greater -- people have to sort of creatively use this. When I wrote this book, my thought was, like the last book, I would like to write a book about a cool series of ideas that I think -- that I hope -- will cause people to reexamine the way they think about the world. That's my brief. Going back to the self-help thing, really what matters is the psychology part, 'cause this is actually more explicitly a book about psychology.
RES: At what point did the concept begin germinating? Did you have it in mind already as you were finishing working on The Tipping Point? I'm curious about your research process, as I imagine a lot of people are. There's this chicken-and-egg question, when you corral such a broad range of topics in the service of this one powerful central argument. Is it that you stumble across something that opens a world to you, or do you collect a whole bunch of things before you know what the argument is?
MG: You know, I don't really know! These books happen very organically... I didn't want to write about intuition per se, because I didn't like that word, but I really wanted to write about this rapid thinking, this rapid cognition. And then I just began to read and talk to people and semi-randomly gathered stories. The chapter with the whole thing about Kenna comes from a conversation I had with a guy at a music conference, and the stuff about the [Cook County] doctors, the heart attack, comes from overhearing a talk -- actually, I wasn't there for the talk, I missed the talk, came back and read the abstract... I just see things when I'm in that phase when I'm thinking about the book. I see things and the fun is trying to figure out where they fit. I'm not a structured thinker or writer at all. It's whatever kind of catches my eye in the period where I'm trying to figure out the book.
RES: When I began reading the book, I expected to see some attention to Myers-Briggs and personality typing systems, which you'd written about in The New Yorker, and I wondered when I didn't see it if there was a lot of trial and error about seeing what worked, if you had to leave a lot of material on the cutting room floor.
MG: You're actually right. All that stuff on psychological testing was originally part of the piece and I left it out. There is a lot of trial and error. It's hard to get the balance right. I want to tell longer stories and I want to sketch out the argument and introduce a lot psychological research. If you have too much [psychological research], it overwhelms people, [but] if they have only the stories, then people have no framework of making sense of things. And so figuring out how to balance the two things is hard. So I wound up with a lot more psychology than I could use. I had originally intended to use that stuff, and then I thought, "This doesn't really quite work." And originally there was a lot more military stuff. I realized this book was turning into a book about killing people and I had to stop.
RES: So the balance is sort of about assembling a spine, but not making it too apparent, aestheticizing it with the human interest stories.
MG:Yeah, you're inviting yourself into someone's living room for a day, or two days, or however long. That's an awfully big commitment. Also a lot of the stuff is hard. A lot of the psychology is not easily explained. It can get pretty technical, and so it has to be presented in such a way that you don't bore people. So that takes a lot of thinking and dressing things up.
RES: When you wrote for The Washington Post, you did business and science writing. So you were just following things that you were excited about and that's what took you into the realm of serious psychology? How did that process in your career come about?
MG: I don't have any background in psychology or science. I was a history major. It's something I really discovered writing for The Post. And my time at The Post kind of served as my education in a lot of things. Writing for a newspaper is a wonderful way of learning about a large number of things in a very short time. [And] I find academics so generous with their time and their ideas. It's not nearly as hard as it looks to familiarize yourself with contemporary psychology, for example. Even the papers themselves, after you've kind of learned a little bit of the language and mastered a tiny, tiny bit of statistics, they're totally accessible.
RES: Go back once again, briefly, to The Tipping Point. It's easy to see how in certain ways [the two books are] complementary. There are certain ideas you explore in both; you can see the synergy, though that's a book about collective psychology and this is a book about individual psychology. Is it fair to think of them as companions of a sort? I guess one can see how a powerful blink can lead to a tipping point. Was that something you were cognizant of as you were developing the idea?
MG: I suppose there are [complementary], but it's not explicit to me. I mean, I think of them as being similar in a kind of literary way. The books are both structured in similar ways, and they're about this combination of academic research and traditional storytelling. So in that sense I think of them as similar, but contentwise, I didn't really think about that. I felt like I was striking out in a new direction. Now I'm sure there are far more parallels than I'm aware of, but I wasn't explicitly thinking about this as "Son of Tipping Point." I was trying to do something, to my mind, that was kind of new and fresh.
RES: Here's a topical question. The Warren Harding Error [which illustrates the risks of the blink in attempting to evaluate the caliber of a politician] resonated with me, not surprisingly, as I'm sure it will with a lot of people who read this book, because so much attention in the media has been paid over these last two elections to this whole question of likability, and who you most want to have a beer with. What is the difference today from 1920 and how does a candidate and a campaign correct the Warren Harding error?
MG: I'm not sure some candidates or campaigns want to correct it. A lot of people obviously profit.
RES: Well, perhaps the campaign that is at a disadvantage?
MG: Yes. Well, I think that in some cases these things are worse today, because, certainly images of candidates are so much more ubiquitous. There are lots of Americans in 1920 who may not have known what Warren Harding looked like -- certainly never saw him in the flesh or saw him on television. There was no television. What most voters had seen to the extent that they had seen anything about him was simply a newspaper photo. Which you'd think would maybe diminish somewhat the power of [the blink]. In that case, the Warren Harding Error is really operational at the convention, when he gets selected, and within the Senate, and within the closed world of politics, that's really working overtime there.
Now what has happened is that that process has been opened up. And so we're seeing these kinds of biases at play in the general public, not just in the political community. So I think in many cases, things are worse. The person who comes to mind with the Warren Harding error -- though there are significant differences -- is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's much smarter and much more politically capable than Harding, so in that sense, there's no correlation at all. But Schwarzenegger had a very, very, very powerful image and set of associations that he brought with him to that race, which do not have anything really to do with his ability as a politician. He imported them from the movies, from this fictional construct. And he is an extraordinarily charismatic man. And he's incredibly handsome; he's a movie star. Those things are a powerful part of his appeal as a politician. For better or worse -- there are some senses in which it's really helped him as well. He has such a presence and image, and he's able to get lots of things done in the political context. It's a complicated task. But we ought to be at least honest about the extent to which our views of Arnold Schwarzenegger are totally colored by all sorts of things that we're not opening up to.
RES: The other narrative that strongly emerged from this election was that George Bush was a stronger leader because he can make snap decisions, while John Kerry was too nuanced or too considered or, if you want to use Karl Rove's word, too much of a flip-flopper. And that seems counterintuitive -- it seems that like the doctors at Cook County, we should want measured reasoning and careful consideration of the facts from our politicians. Now granted, in a moment of crisis, you want the ability to make a [rapid-fire] decision, but you want it to be based on a carefully honed set of variables. How do you explain the shift, the desire in the public to have a leader who operates that way, and do you think it's a genuine narrative or is it a media construction?
MG: Well, I think what we want is a strong leader. We want a decisive leader as well. Strong and decisive don't necessarily mean someone who makes up his mind instantly. In fact they may mean something quite different. A lot of what happened in the last election was the Republicans proved very powerful in putting a very particular and specific construction of what it means to be a strong leader. Maybe part of being a strong leader and a good leader is admitting when you're wrong and being able to change your mind, to kind of be flexible enough to adjust to the facts. That's also, I would think, part of being a strong leader, but that wasn't part of the definition of strong that was used in the election.
RES: And the Kerry campaign failed to undermine that construction.
MG: Yeah... They clearly lost the battle to define what it means to be an effective leader. But I can think of a million different things you could bring to that definition that would be of relevance and importance. I can also think of lots of cases, for example, in the decision to invade Iraq, you could argue that part of what it meant to be an effective leader there is to be someone who took their time in making a decision. A lot of what it means to be smart about snap judgments is knowing when you need to make them and when you don't. And that part of it perhaps was missing from a lot of our electoral coverage. My book spends more time talking about the problems with snap judgments than it does talking about the strengths of them. So I recognize their power, but their power is what makes me really kind of leery. Their fragility is what really impresses me. And I want doctors to be able to make snap judgments in ERs, but only when I've given them the backing of this incredibly elaborate computer driven structure and analysis. They're safe, but only when they have this sort of support system in place.
RES: You just mentioned Iraq and in the book you talk about the Millennium Challenge [a massive Pentagon-funded military game] as a dress rehearsal for subsequent military conflict. In certain ways [what's going on with] the insurgency is analogous to the way that game played out. How would you apply the lessons of the Millennium Challenge to the situation there and to any other potential military engagement in other parts of the world we've talked about being in?
MG: Yeah. Well, you know, I steer clear of a lot of this kind of stuff, because it's complicated. But I guess, what that story is all about is humility. It's about understanding that superiority in numbers and weapons and knowledge does not necessarily equal superiority on the ground, in the battle... I think the American forces in Iraq know that. They're not dumb. So that whole story is just a kind of reminder that there are more factors in the equation than we sometimes think. We think we're done and that we've won, when we have these conventional measures of superiority on our side. But if you have people who can think on their feet and are creative, you can go along way. That sort of understanding of the importance is something that we occasionally forget about. And I think that in Iraq, we're being reminded that smart people making snap decisions who have a lot of local knowledge can be an awfully persistent foe. They're not trivial.
RES: Shifting away from politics, we've recently been seeing the emergence and increasing attention paid by corporations to branded entertainment. So these innovative creative people are being given budgets to make these films that don't have to conform to a specific corporate agenda but are evocative. The BMW short film project is maybe the biggest example of that of late. What do you think is the role of this phenomenon in constructing a cult of personality that doesn't necessarily in any way explicitly refer to the products? How does that color the blink, as something that's much more removed than packaging?
MG: That's interesting. I think that a lot of these associations -- we clearly have all kinds of powerful associations with things that are operating entirely on an unconscious level, and that are shaped by things that we're not entirely aware of... You know, we have a part of our brain that we use for faces and a part for objects. You show a car lover, a male car lover, a Porsche 911 and his face part lights up. Clearly something has happened at some point to move the Porsche from the standard place to the face part in his brain. Now why did it move? Well, I don't know if we know, or if we could ever figure it out. But I suspect that things like the BMW films, they do play a role in a way that may not be measurable in shaping our associations with things, and it's probably not consistent from person to person, and it's probably a very different kind of process than you get by advertising in a magazine. I don't think you can definitively answer the question of "is it worth doing?" [It] can't be definitively answered, but I think you have to do a kind of gut feel thing on it. Certainly if you're one of the first people to do it, it would be a good idea, I think. If you're the tenth person to do it, maybe not.
RES: It seems that more big companies have embraced this kind of risky projection of an image, that isn't measurable, quantifiable in any way. That seems radically different from the way that companies went about constructing the image of a product decades ago. To what do you attribute the shift?
MG: Well, probably just frustration with the effects, but more than that, it's just gotten so costly to do traditional kinds of brand promotion. To play the game on television has just gotten prohibitively expensive. That's priced a lot of people out of the market. And the clutter is such that even if you do play that game, can you really make your voice heard above 75 other ads on prime time? So I just think it's a natural reaction to look for ways to cut through all the clutter.
RES: You touch on this when you talk about packaging, when you talk about the transference, how we genuinely do enjoy the taste of something more when it's packaged in a way that pleases us. That opens a question about whether you feel any sense of discomfort about writing at the intersection of business and psychology, about the implications of these persuasive marketing tactics. Does the way that these things turn us ever more into a consumer society make you uneasy?
MG: No, not really. I understand that there are implications. Consumer culture may be as bad as people think, but it's not powerful as people think. The observation that if marketers put ice cream in a round container people will think it tastes better and they can charge more for it doesn't trouble me at all. If it does taste better, then they should be able to charge more for it. Just 'cause it tastes better for reasons that don't have to do with the ice cream itself is irrelevant. It tastes better. I mean, why does it matter? Restaurants have great d?cor for this very reason, right? It's part of the experience. But also, even if you did concede it was troubling, so what? It's ice cream. It doesn't change the really key things in my life -- my friends, my family, the joy I feel in X, Y and Z. On this level, on the marketing level, I find this stuff to be more cool than disturbing, because ultimately its reach is not that profound. At the end of the day, we're still just talking about ice cream, and the world does not stand or fall on ice cream. It doesn't stand or fall on movies, it doesn't stand or fall on whether I buy a BMW or an Infiniti. I'm much more interested and concerned about these judgments when they are around things that truly do matter, like what doctors or generals do, or when they affect hiring or racial decisions. Marketing is marketing. At the end of the day, it is not a huge deal.
RES: Is that the key to what drives you to explore these things, that carnivorous curiosity, that fascination with how strange we all are in our passions and perceptions?
MG: I guess more broadly, I'm motivated by [the fact that] there just seems to be so much below the surface. We all know there are things below the surface, but what got me going on this book was how much there was. I feel like I dramatically underestimated the magnitude of what goes on outside of awareness. I knew that my mind was a complex thing. I didn't know that it was this complex! That's the turn I take in this book.
RES: What would you like to pursue over the length of a book next?
MG: I don't know. I don't have an idea in mind. I'm totally open at this point. If you have any ideas, let me know.
