Blink: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Paul Van Riper is a tall, elderly man. He fought in the Vietnam War as a commander, and was involved in some of the toughest fighting of the entire war. Soldiers remember Van Riper being a charismatic, intensely fair commander who sometimes took dangerous risks with his soldiers, but who was willing to risk his own life for the good of his company.

In 2000, a group of Pentagon officials recruited Van Riper for a highly expensive “war game” designed to train American troops and test new theories about military strategy. In this war game, known as the Millennium Challenge, soldiers would fight against a fictional Middle Eastern military commander who was threatening to pull the entire region into war. Van Riper was cast as that military commander. In most Pentagon war games, the battles (between a heroic Blue Team and a villainous Red Team) take place in a remote part of Suffolk, Virginia. For two and a half weeks in 2000, Van Riper and other commanders participated in the war game, fighting in highly realistic “battles.” Although nobody knew it at the time, the war game anticipated the literal war that the U.S. would fight in Iraq a few years later—except that, instead of a fictional Middle-Eastern dictator played by Van Riper, the U.S. would be fighting a real-life dictator, Saddam Hussein.

The Millennium Challenge yielded some interesting results. To begin with, the Blue Team fought the war game with the help of a tool called Operation Net Assessment—a decision-making procedure that broke down all military decisions into its economic, social, and political factors. By contrast, the Red Team used improvisational, unpredictable tactics. Casting Paul Van Riper as the enemy commander was a clever choice, because Van Riper had always believed that war was inherently unpredictable—that it was based on commanders making intuitive snap judgments. Van Riper maintained that conventional decision-making strategies—i.e., weighing all options carefully—were too slow for the military.

As the war game began, the Blue Team, representing the U.S., sent the Red Team (led by Van Riper) terms of surrender. When Van Riper refused to surrender, the Blue Team tried to disable the Red Team’s communications with bombs. Much to the Blue Team’s surprise, Van Riper improvised a series of complex codes for communicating with his red soldiers. The Blue Team assumed that it would be easy to predict what the Red Team would do next—but it quickly found that its predictions weren’t accurate. Then, in a single day, Van Riper struck out against the Blue Team and disabled the vast majority of its ships and aircraft. Despite the fact that the Red Team was badly outnumbered, it crushed the Blue Team. Somewhat like the Getty officials being unable to predict that their Greek statue was a fake, the Blue Team leaders were unable to predict that Van Riper would be able to override their predictions and defeat them.

A good example of spontaneous thinking is the art of humorous improvisation. In an improv group, members ask for audience suggestions, and then use these suggestions to create a skit. Improvisation seems incredibly difficult, since it apparently involves making up an entire skit on the spot. But, upon close inspection, it turns out that improvisation isn't as “random” as it might appear. After each show, members of a good improv troupe critique one another’s performances and determine how to improve in the future. Improv might seem random, but in fact, it’s governed by a series of rules.

The crucial lesson of improvisation comedy, and of the Millennium Challenge in which Paul Van Riper participated, is that spontaneity isn’t random. When people are in a high-stakes situation (war, performance, etc.), they act quickly and make snap judgments, but they also follow certain intuitive rules. A good example of a “rule of spontaneity” is the “yes, and” rule in improv: the rule that, when a performer offers a suggestion or new idea, the other performers immediately agree with that idea and use it to “move the scene forward.” It’s important to notice that the “yes, and” rule doesn’t offer any advice for what to do or say in an improv performance; rather it creates the optimal conditions for a good performance. By the same logic, Van Riper’s behavior during the war game might have seemed random a to the Blue Team—and yet, he was careful to “create the conditions for successful spontaneity.”

When Van Riper was fighting in Vietnam, he often heard gunshots in the distance. At first, he made the mistake of radioing his troops in the field to ask about the gunfire. But gradually, Van Riper realized that his troops didn't necessarily know anything more about the gunfire than he did. From then on, whenever Van Riper heard gunfire in the distance, he would “stop and do nothing” for five full minutes. It was better, he decided, to let the soldiers firing the shots resolve the situation themselves than it was to create a potential panic by alerting everyone of the danger.

Van Riper also applied the lessons he’d learned in Vietnam to the war game. He made an effort to cut down on long meetings and introspective explanations. He also warned his troops to cut down on military jargon words like “effects.” In short, Van Riper’s management technique was to encourage people to use rapid cognition.

While rapid cognition isn’t perfect, it has some clear advantages over conventional thought. For example, Gladwell says, if someone asked you to identify the person who served you coffee this morning, you could probably do it. However, if someone asked you to describe this same person, or draw their face, you’d probably struggle to remember specific details of their appearance. And then, if you were asked to pick the person out of a police lineup, you’d (presumably) have a much harder time doing so. In short, conscious thought can impede rapid cognition.

The phenomenon by which conscious thought can interfere with rapid cognition is called “verbal overshadowing.” In general, rational thought can overshadow rapid cognition. In brainteasers, rational thought isn’t always enough to solve the puzzle—either you have a “eureka” moment and see the answer, or you don’t see it at all. Furthermore, when people are asked to “talk through” their attempts to solve the brainteaser, they become less likely to solve it successfully. In other words, when people try to verbalize their thoughts, they sometimes sabotage their chances of making an insightful snap judgment.

“There once was,” Gladwell says, a group of firefighters who’d been sent to put out a fire in the kitchen of a house. The firefighters tried to put out the fire, but found that the fire kept burning. Suddenly, one of the firefighters had a sudden impulse to get out of the building—so he shouted for his friends to leave with him. Seconds after they’d left, the floor they’d been standing on collapsed—it turned out that the fire was in the basement. This story is a great example of thin-slicing in action—without being consciously aware of what the danger was, the firefighter was able to make a rapid judgment from behind the “locked door” of his mind, and save his friends’ lives. During the 2000 war game, the Blue Team’s mistake was to rely too excessively on slow, rational deliberation. The Blue Team underestimated Van Riper’s ability to improvise under pressure (e.g., using codes to communicate in secret); also, the Blue Team itself was unable to improvise well—instead, it held long meetings, full of complicated plans and arguments. The Blue Team “extinguished” its ability to make snap judgments.

Another good example of the importance of snap judgments is the Cook County Hospital in Chicago—the hospital that inspired the TV show ER. Until the late 1990s, the hospital was extremely disorganized: it was loud, poorly lit, and underserviced (there were too many patients, and never enough nurses). Because of hospital conditions, nurses had a tough time diagnosing patients with potential heart disease problems. The standard procedure for diagnosing heart disease involves asking lots of questions (such as “Do you have diabetes?” and “What’s your cholesterol level?”). But nurses didn’t always have time to ask these questions. So, in order to avoid malpractice suits and help as many people as possible, the nurses at the Cook County hospital were forced to admit many patients who might be suffering from heart disease—even though only a small fraction of these patients did, in fact, have heart disease.

In 1996, a man named Brendan Reilly became the chairman of the Cook County Hospital. Reilly had been a professor at Dartmouth University, but he wanted to pass on his experience and education to an underfunded hospital like Cook County. One of the first things Reilly did to reorganize the hospital was to use the work of a cardiologist named Lee Goldman. Goldman developed an algorithm, or “decision tree,” for how to treat heart disease patients as efficiently as possible and with the greatest level of success.

Goldman’s method of diagnosis involved asking the patient only a small number of questions. It was controversial, however, because 1) doctors believed that more time was needed to perfect the “decision tree” and 2) doctors believed that individual doctors should use their own training and observations to diagnose heart disease, instead of using a fixed algorithm. Reilly chose to use Goldman’s decision tree because he had to act fast to improve hospital conditions. He first instituted Goldman’s heart disease treatment methods in only half of the hospital, in order to compare Goldman’s methods to the norm. After a month, it became clear that Goldman’s methods were far safer and more reliable than traditional methods for diagnosing heart disease. A doctor, using their own training and decision-making methods, could correctly diagnose heart disease about 80 percent of the time; Goldman’s decision tree could do so 95 percent of the time.

The Cook County Hospital experiment is important because it suggests that sometimes the more information doctors have, the less they know. Intuitively, we might imagine that more evidence is the best way to reach the right decision. But in fact, it’s often better to limit the evidence to a few main points—in the case of Goldman’s decision tree, “the evidence of the ECG, blood pressure, fluid in the lungs, and unstable angina.” Goldman’s ideas have been controversial, because they contradict people’s instinctive trust for information and rationality. Doctors in particular think that a life-or-death decision “must be a difficult decision.” But in reality, Gladwell claims, life-or-death decisions are often the simplest decisions—and, as the Cook County Hospital experiment suggests, there are some clear dangers in overthinking such decisions.

There was a psychological study in which different psychologists were asked to consider the mental health of a war veteran named Joseph Kidd. Different psychologists were presented with different amounts of information about Kidd—some were given his basic medical records, some were given long interviews with his parents, some were given detailed reports of Kidd’s experiences in the army, etc. Finally, all the psychologists were asked to make predictions about Kidd’s behavior. The psychologists who had more information were more certain about their responses than psychologists with less information, and yet the psychologists were all more or less equally accurate in their predictions.

There are a couple of important lessons to learn from this chapter, Gladwell says. First, “truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.” Snap judgments can be helpful at times and prejudicial at others; similarly, deliberate thinking can be helpful in some situations, but it can also cloud the decision making process. Another key lesson is that “in good decision making, frugality matters.” Excessive information and deliberation might sound good, but they can also interfere with the intuitive cognition of thin-slicing.

There was a famous experiment in which grocery store shoppers were offered six different kinds of jam, while other shoppers were offered many dozens of kinds. The shoppers who were offered six different kinds of jam bought considerably more jam than those who were offered many more kinds—the reason why is that buying jam is a snap judgment, and the more choices people are offered, the less likely they are to reach a final decision. By the same token, Paul Van Riper tried to limit the amount of excessive information that reached his soldiers in the war game. While the Blue Team weighed down its soldiers with “perfect information,” Van Riper encouraged his Red Team to balance information with intuition—and as a result, he devastated the Blue Team.

Toward the end of the war game, the Pentagon stepped in to undo some of the “damage” the Red Team had done. Although it was clear that the Red Team was winning the war, the Pentagon officials ordered for the war game to revert to an earlier stage—the ships Van Riper had destroyed were “un-sunk” and the Blue Team leaders Van Riper had assassinated were “un-killed.” Van Riper was allowed to continue with his war against the Blue Team—but he was forbidden from improvising. As a result, the Blue Team beat the Red Team handily. Pentagon officials rejoiced, thinking that they’d proven that perfect information and deliberation were the keys to winning a war. Then, a couple months after the war game was over, the Pentagon received word of a real-life Middle-Eastern dictator who was opposed to the United States. Using the strategy it had developed for the war game, the Pentagon eagerly began to plan a real-life attack on this dictator—and “how hard could that be?”