Just Five Seconds To Decide

Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink : The Power of Thinking without Thinking’, is a great book. Gladwell has an easy style and big ideas. Here he talks about the way that we make decisions ‘in the blink of an eye’. This is a pre-cognitive activity, not available for introspection. Or in other words, we get an impression, make an opinion, but we don’t know why.

He calls this magic moment ‘thin-slicing’ and proves through the book with anecdotal and experimental evidence that this effect is real and frequently deployed by individuals, knowingly or unknowingly. It’s an unconscious process, quick and often righter than a slower more conscious and more logical processes.

We do a hell of a lot more with our unconscious than we currently accept

What does this mean? Well, it means that ‘sensible and logical’ ideas might easily fail if they do not stand up to the blink test. It means that we do a hell of a lot more with our unconscious than we currently accept. It means that we judge more quickly than we admit. There has been a recent study from Carleton University in Canada, reported by the BBC that says that we made judgments about whether we ‘like’ or ‘don’t like’ websites in very short times. It seems to me that much web activity is carried out in the blink of an eye.

We did some research on the choice of Google search listings for a major high street bank a little time ago using what we rather grandly called a Blink Usability Protocol based on flashing up different manipulations of SERPS listings and we got some fascinating results, but now I see that that idea has been taken to a logical conclusion – crowdsourcing the research. Fivesecondtest now provides a way to do this just like that, in five seconds. I suggest you take a look. Quickly. See what you think.