UNIT 1 LISTENING 2 ACTIVITIES A, D, AND F Welcome back to Book Talk. There is a saying, don't judge a book by its cover. This tells us that first impressions may sometimes be wrong. Today we're talking with critic Nadia Shore about books on how we think, particularly how we form impressions. Before the break, Nadia, you were telling us about Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Can you remind our listeners what Gladwell wrote about? Sure. Malcolm Gladwell argues that first impressions are often pretty reliable, although there are sometimes problems. He refers to research that says we use our observation of a very thin slice of human behavior to make judgments about people. Our instinctive reaction to people is often right. For example, students in college classrooms have very accurate first impressions of instructors. In one study, students were shown only several seconds of a video of a teacher in the classroom. Then they predicted how effective the teacher would be. After only that quick first impression, they judged the teacher's effectiveness very accurately. So, Nadia, tell us about this next book on your list, Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman covers much of the same ground as Gladwell. Basically, Kahneman says we use two systems of thinking. System one is what we use all the time. It's fast and happens immediately. In system one thinking, we are always assessing the situation. We do this without conscious thought. This thinking can keep us safe. For example, you might walk around a ladder, rather than underneath it, without even thinking about it. Fast thinking can even help us predict what is going to happen. But something might fall from the person standing above you on the ladder. This kind of thinking is based on associations between ideas that we have learned. For instance, if we hear the words slow and gray, we might think old because older people are slower and have gray hair. Sounds like our past experience helps us think fast. What does the second system do? System two is the slow thinking we use when we solve difficult math problems. We need to concentrate, and this takes work and energy. System two thinking controls and checks system one. When we are tired or have too many things to think about, it doesn't work as well. Food and sleep help us do our best slow thinking. Is one system more important than the other in forming first impressions? I think Kahneman is saying that we use system one, or fast thinking, to form first impressions, but we need system two to help us with accuracy. According to Kahneman, there are a number of problems with fast thinking. We often think that what we see is all there is. So if we see one example of good behavior, we think that person is always good. Also, people tend to think that we can trust something just because it seems familiar. If a phrase is repeated enough times, we think it is true, even if it's obviously false. Something as simple as font and color can affect our judgment, too. For example, people are more likely to trust a message in bold font or the color blue than print that is hard to read and gray or yellow. So we often need slow thinking to correct problems caused with fast thinking. Are some people better at fast thinking than others? Both Kahneman and Gladwell discuss the intuitive thinking of experts. An expert is someone who has a great deal of experience, usually at least 10,000 hours of practice with something like playing chess or baseball or even fighting fires. Because of this experience, such experts are often able to form accurate first impressions about their area of expertise very quickly. So practice can improve our fast thinking? Well, at least sometimes, but we still need slower thinking to help us avoid mistakes.