The Dark Side

Several years ago, I worked as a project manager for a regional cell phone company. I was in charge of building their new cell sites in the Northeast US. It was an ideal job. Company truck. Freedom. As long as the site went up on time and under budget, no one cared where I was. My office was the front seat of that truck and with my cellular modem, I was always online. (This was the day before wi-fi McDonalds). If I needed something, I got it. I loved that job… heck, they even paid me to do it! Alas, like all good things though, it came to an end. My company was bought out by one of the biggies (who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) and they had their own project managers. Being a training guy, I found another job that I thought would be equally ideal for me.

My new job was in customer service with a company that does HR consulting. The president was a charismatic kind of guy. I'll call him Jack. Jack could make you think he was an expert at just about anything. He could talk about anything and sound knowledgeable, or he could manipulate the discussion to things he did know. He could make promises and when they failed, easily could shift the blame, or he would move on to another scheme and leave someone else cleaning up the mess. As time wore on, however, the reality of it was that he was actually a sick fellow with a penchant toward pathological lying yet in the short term, he could impress the socks off most people.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Warren Harding. Harding was a newspaper editor and lackluster politician when he met Harry Daugherty. Daugherty was a lawyer and lobbyist. He was a behind the scenes political opportunist. Daugherty was stunned by the features of the 35 year old Harding. He said that he looked like a senator. Daugherty knew that Harding had potential despite the fact that his speeches were described as "an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea." With Daugherty and Harding's wife pushing behind him, he quickly rose in Ohio politics. He was tall, dark and had just enough gray hair to make him look experienced. He looked forceful and presidential. Harding died after just two years as president and most historians agree that he was one of the worst presidents ever.

It is our biases that make people vote for a guy like Harding or initially support guys like Jack. They impress us with short appearances of brilliance, yet disappoint us with their true mediocrity. Sometimes, this bias isn't even conscious. Gladwell tells of a test called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT provides the taker with a list of information like common names, for example. The objective is to go through the list as quickly as possible, assigning them to one of two lists, in this case, Male names or Female names. That is usually easy, until our biases come into play. Change the list to include jobs now. Make the categories Male and Career, and Female and Family. We generally still find it easy to slide words such as Entrepreneur and Capitalist to the Male/Career list and words such as Laundry and siblings to the Female/Family side. The real twist comes when we change the categories. Make the one Male & Family and the other Female and Career. Our biases are such that there is a difference in timing. It takes longer to categorize words. It may only be a few milliseconds, but we do have to stop to think. The harder we try to resist the bias, the more the delay. The key to making the best of thin-slicing is understanding our biases and being aware of how they can effect our decision making.

So, how do we overcome these biases? Gladwell suggests our first impressions and our biases are a product of our environment. He believes that if we alter our environment, we can alter our biases. He tells the story of one student who took the IAT day after day trying to improve his scores. This was a racial IAT and not that the student was particularly prejudiced against blacks, but he tried and tried to change his scores. One day, there was a dramatic difference. Assessing his environment, the student realized that just before he took the IAT, he had been watching the Olympic Track and Field events where black athletes had been presented in a very positive light. The unconscious associations that we all have, had been altered. We can change our biases by altering our environment.

Did Barack Obama repeat the Harding victory? Did he understand this dark side of thin-slicing and exploit it? With sound bites and spreading news through "Tweets" is our society more or less susceptible to the dark side?

Can we alter our biases as Gladwell suggests?

In an educational environment, how does this effect the way we teach? How does it effect the way we learn?