n Wait: The Art and Science of Delay, Frank Partnoy takes issue with the “go with your gut” approach to decision-making that Malcolm
Gladwell’s bestseller Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking seems to have enshrined. While calling Blink “brilliant and accessible,” Partnoy sug- gests that we have overly fixated on Gladwell’s radi- cal interpretation of “thin slicing” — the idea that you can discern a profound truth about something from your first two seconds of exposure to it:
So how thin should a thin slice be? The answer is rarely two seconds. If we are judging whether someone is dangerous, our brains and bodies are wired to react very quickly, within milliseconds. We assess race, gender, and age in a fraction of a second. We aren’t as good at guessing sexual ori- entation, but, to the extent we see it, we see it right away: When students are shown a photo of a man and asked if he is gay, they are about as accurate within one hundred milliseconds as they are after longer periods. For these reactions, we don’t need anything close to two seconds. But for other questions, two seconds isn’t
nearly long enough. If we are asked to tell whether someone is friendly or dangerous, we do better with more time. To accurately assess whether someone is sociable, we need at least a minute, preferably five. The same is true if we are judging complex aspects of personality, such as neuroti- cism or open-mindedness. For these decisions, our impressions during the first two seconds fail us. We need more time. For many judgments, thin slicing has a kind of
learning curve, steep at first as we quickly gather information about what we are watching and then flatter as we process that information. Although some people describe thin slicing as a snap judg- ment, it is really more of an acceleration than a snap, more like a car climbing a hill than a light bulb going on. Sometimes we do reasonably well within a few seconds, but we often do better with a minute or longer. It depends on the difficulty of the assessment — the steepness of the hill. Usually thin slicing isn’t as easy as flipping a switch.
More than 1,400 Astellas Pharma US Inc. employees participated in the largest-ever single-group CSR activity for Give Kids the World.
This past summer, Astellas employees took time out from their annual national sales meet- ing at the Orlando World Center Marriott to ply their painting, land- scaping, and gift-wrapping skills at Give Kids the World’s Village, a 70-acre resort with more than 140 villas, entertainment attractions, and fun activities for children with special needs. The turnout was the largest single group of volunteers in the Village’s history. During the course of the meeting, an impromptu initiative called
“Wear Jeans Thursday” allowed employees who made a gift to Give Kids the World — dedicated to helping fulfill the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses — to wear jeans instead of typical business attire during the conference.