Who do you think know you best? A close friend or a total stranger with a very minimal clue? A psychologist Samuel Gosling has proofed the effectiveness of thin slicing by using the cases of judging peoples’ personality.
A personality workup on a group of 80 college students is conducted using the big five inventories (a very specialized multi-item questionnaire that measures personality across five categories). 1. Extraversion: are you social or retiring 2. Agreeableness: are you sociable or retiring 3. Conscientious: are you organized or disorganized 4. Emotional stability: are you worried or calm 5. Openness to new experience: are you imaginative or down to earth.
In one group Gosling has made close friends of those 80 students to fill the questioner. Gosling wanted to know how closely they come to reality. Not surprisingly, our friends describe us accurately. They have a thick slice of who we are that translate into our real being. Gosling repeat the same process but this time with total strangers who have never met the students they are judging. Gosling gave them a clipboard and told them they have fifteen minutes to look at their dorm rooms and answer a serious of questions about the occupants of the room. On a scale of 1 to 5 does the inhabitants of the room talkative? Tend to find fault with others? Does a thorough job? Is original? Is reserved? Is helpful and unselfish with others and so on. Gosling is careful not to tell the subjects what to do. He is just trying to study every impression. With that regard he tells his subject “here is your questionnaire. Go into the room and drink it in”. He is just trying to investigate intuitive judgment process.
And the result? the dorm room observants are not nearly as good as friends in measuring extraversion. This makes sense. If you want to know whether someone is animated, talkative and outgoing you need to meet him or her in person. The friends also did better in accurately predicting agreeableness. This also makes sense according to Malcom Gladwell. However, on the other 3 of the five measures, dorm room observants stand out on the top. They were more accurate at measuring a student’s conscientious. And they are even more accurate at measuring both a student’s emotional stability and openness to new experience. On overall then the strangers are doing better.
This suggest that it is quite possible for strangers who have never met us but only spent 20 min thinking about us to come to know us much better than people who spend years with us. Hence, Malcom argues to forget the endless getting to know meetings and lunches. If you want to get a good idea of whether I would make a good employee, drop by one day in my house and look around.
Two Examples of thin slicing at work
Example two
Around 1980's the market share of Coca Cola is diminishing while Pepsi is gaining more of it and Coca Cola and Pepsi are in fierce competition. during this time Pepsi open a program known as a "Pepsi Challenge" in which people are blindfolded and given two cups, one filled with Pepsi and another with Coca Cola. Surprisingly, most people who takes a sip from both cups chooses Pepsi be their favorite (56% to 44%). After repeating the same experiment themselves, Coke people believe that Pepsi beat Coke in product quality. Hence Coke laboratory experts go back to the root product composition and flicker it a bit to make it sweeter and lighter. However, after Coke release the new product, called "New coke”, people all over north America protest and go on riots. After spending huge amount of money on the new product, Coca Cola is forced to switch back to its original product. What is wrong here? Is thin slicing at failure in this case? Not at all! The trick here is that thin slicing works in the right context. Having a sip test is very different from the whole can drink test. as Malcom Gladwell succinctly put it "When we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it taste good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eye and memories and imagination an, and it is foolish of a company to service one dimension and ignore the other".
Source:Blink:the power of thinking without thinkingbyMalcomGladwellwithlittlemodificationby Abiy Getachew.
Two Examples of thin slicing at work 