Books for late summer: from genius genes to tyrannosaur musings

Science News,  August 5, 2006  by J.A. Miller

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A friend recommended Tyrannosaur Canyon to me because of the author's keen eye for geological detail, but it's the rollicking yet suspenseful story that should earn this novel a spot in your travel bag.--S. PERKINS

Decoding Decision Makers BLINK

MALCOLM GLADWELL Little, Brown, 2005

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

JAMES SUROWIECKI Doubleday, 2004

Two New Yorker staff writers wrote books in the past few years about decision making. One volume sold big. The other didn't. Guess which book says something profound about how we think. Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller Blink celebrates snap judgments and selected psychological research on rapid thinking. The author rightly points out that much thinking takes place in the blink of an eye. His anecdotes, however, add up to an unsatisfying theme: Sometimes snap judgments work out great, sometimes they fizzle.

It's interesting to read Gladwell's account of bigwigs at a major museum getting suckered into buying an allegedly 6th-century B.C. Greek statue that a few art authorities later recognized as a fake with just a glance. But experts in various areas, including art authentication, frequently disagree in their determinations. Why do some achieve more accuracy than others do, both in deliberative and intuitive judgments? What about the many complex decisions for which no clear answer exists? Gladwell's anecdotes yield no answers.

Part of the problem lies with his assumption that the unconscious mind works like a monolithic computer, quickly processing all of a person's relevant prior experiences and knowledge to foster snap judgments. Research not mentioned in this book suggests that rapid decisions don't result from instant number-crunching in the brain but from unconscious learning over time that makes it possible to, say, discern when your boss is angry at you or whether the guy in the green convertible is about to change lanes.

Gladwell also extols the Implicit Association Test as a gauge of unconscious racial attitudes without mentioning that social psychologists heatedly disagree about what that test actually measures and how the mind makes the rapid associations that the test traffics in.

In its favor, this book is written dearly and jargonfree. Like a late-afternoon latte, Blink goes down smooth but leaves the reader hungering for something substantial.

Satisfaction comes in the form of The Wisdom of Crowds. Its author deftly blends research and anecdotes to defend the beleaguered notion of collective intelligence. He argues that under the right conditions, groups are smarter than the sharpest individuals. Collective insight thrives when group members possess a diversity of relevant knowledge and insight, make independent decisions, draw on personal experience without any direction from above, and tabulate their private judgements into a collective verdict by some consensus-achieving method.

Surowiecki shows how, on the day in 1986 when the space shuttle Challenger exploded, group intelligence enabled the stock market, through its determination of a reduced stock price, to label one company as responsible for the disaster. That company, Morton Thiokol, was eventually found to have made defective seals for the shuttle's booster rockets.