Instant assessments

Great review of Malcom Gladwell's Blink from Richard Posner which manages to encapsulate my thoughts about Gladwell's opening anecdote:

As Exhibit A for the superiority of intuitive to articulate thinking, Gladwell offers the case of a purported ancient Greek statue that was offered to the Getty Museum for $10 million. Months of careful study by a geologist (to determine the age of the statue) and by the museum's lawyers (to trace the statue's provenance) convinced the museum that it was genuine. But when historians of ancient art looked at it, they experienced an "intuitive revulsion," and indeed it was eventually proved to be a fake.

[...]

Practice may not make perfect, but it enables an experienced person to arrive at conclusions more quickly than a neophyte. The expert's snap judgment is the result of a deliberative process made unconscious through habituation. 

Quite. This is not any kind of evidence for the superiority of first impressions per se. Rather it demonstrates the extent to which experts, particularly in those fields related to visual information, can internalise the judgment process so that it becomes second nature. This would be obvious to any, say, graphic designer or architect. All designers make instant aesthetic assessments as part of the design process and it is frequently the case that the judgement precedes the explanation/post rationalisation for it. But this ability, though it appears subconscious, is not innate but acquired.

Comments

[Peter Nolan]

"All designers make instant aesthetic assessments as part of the design process and it is frequently the case that the judgement precedes the explanation/post rationalisation for it. But this ability, though it appears subconscious, is not innate but acquired."

Is that so, Leonardo?

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