Learning to trust your gut

Every time I conduct a job interview, an inadvertent pre-evaluation of the candidate pops up in my mind, hardly a few minutes into the discussion. Trying hard to dispel this ‘preconception’ from influencing my evaluation, I end up getting surprised with the outcome, which 90% of the time ends up being same as the ‘initial bias’.

Many a time, the interview process becomes a conscious struggle to try and disprove this snap judgement. There are those (very) few occasions when I’ve battled this emotion and went ahead selecting a candidate, ignoring the gut feel. In each of those instances, I’ve lived to regret the decision, ending up with a set of mishires.

After 10 years of interviewing, I’ve reached some sort of truce with the ‘gut feel’, learning to lean on it at times of conflict. However, there is this nagging question inside me, often searching for rationality in the decisioning process.

I was glad to lay my hands on ‘Blink’, the book by Malcom Gladwell that addresses this very same subject. Reading this right after finishing his other bestseller, ‘Outliers’, I was looking for actionability — is it okay to trust the gut and if yes, how do you cultivate & leverage this faculty. I’m listing the take-aways, more as a note-to-self.

Blink: The power of thinking without thinking

Gladwell cites enough examples to drive home the fact that ‘snap judgement’ or ‘thin slicing’ as he calls it, is perfectly rational & scientific. However, he calls this a ‘closed door’, since one cannot fathom how it functions on the inside.

Having proven its existence, he also cautions that it could be easily manipulated to lead one astray with faulty decisions. The author then cites three things that could impair this ability:

1. An individual’s bias and stereotypes can work against this, and give one a false sense of coming up with the ‘right intuition’
2. The very fact of trying to analyze a snap-judgement threadbare could destroy it, through what is often called ‘verbal overshadowing’
3. Acting under extreme stress or acute paucity of time could lead to temporary suspension of the emotional faculties & hence, snap judgement

Gladwell also has some suggestions to sharpen this innate skill. As one can imagine, its avoiding the above pitfalls, apart from cultivating a few habits:

1. Deliberate conditioning of oneself against stereotypes and repeatedly priming against these, to limit its influence on the unconscious
2. Cultivating years of expertise by immersing oneself in an area can bestow an uncanny ability to start psycho-analysing your ‘thin-slicing’ decisions
3. Deliberate practice by re-creating such real-life conditions (stress / sense of danger) can help shield oneself against temporary loss of this ability

In conclusion, do not view your snap judgement or power of unconscious thinking as a magical force. View it as something that can be protected, learned and leveraged for exemplary decision-making.