Thin Slicing

The book moves further into the notion of what it describes as “thin slicing”. The book takes a lok at the work of psychologist John Gottman. Gottman’s work with thousands of married couples has brought about research that entails thin slicing of information in order to discover insights into the marriage. In other words, Gottman is able to discern information about the marriage (happiness, loathing, problems, etc) within a very short amount of time based on moments of time and actions of the married people rather than long, drawn out consoling sessions. According to the book, Gottman states he can predict with 95% accuracy whether a couple will still be married after fifteen years using these methods of thin slicing (Gladwell 2005, p 21). Similar to the statue story, a first impression or small bits of information are at times more powerful than the long intricate look at something. The book takes this notion even further. A group a researchers were sent into the dorm rooms of college students as part of a research experiment. Based on cleanness of the room, possessions, cleanliness, etc the researchers would attempt to draw conclusions about personality traits of the students. Not highly sophisticated, but the results were pretty accurate.