08-24-2005, 08:38 PM
I had a friend recommend this book because she said it contained some material on autism. After reading some of the reviews, I see the author uses people like us to show how impaired people's decision making ability can get in certain situations. He calls it momentary autism. I don't like this. It makes us look impaired all the time because we have constant autism. It seems to be very popular reading among business and government people.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05023/446202.stm
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05023/446202.stm
Quote:
In a wide-ranging collection of anecdotes, Gladwell discusses our innate ability to make a decision, sense an outcome or size up a situation without lengthy pondering and gathering information.
Gladwell calls the process "thin-slicing," or how a small sampling of data is often enough to produce the right answer.
Curiously, autistic people lack the ability to intuit the emotions of others -- mind-reading, he calls it -- because they group faces with inanimate objects and miss the meaning of facial expressions.
In one of the most intriguing speculations in the book, Gladwell proposes that all of us can be guilty of "temporary autism," incidents when we completely misread the situation and react incorrectly.
His examples, though, are extreme, involving the reactions of police officers under stress, most notably the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets fired by undercover New York cops.
The four white officers became "autistic" when facing a black man acting suspiciously in a high-crime neighborhood.
They were "blind," Gladwell says, and mistook the wallet in Diallo's hand for a gun.
Cops can be trained to appraise situations more accurately and objectively, he says.
"When our powers of rapid cognition go awry, they go awry for a very specific and consistent set of reasons, and those reasons can be identified and understood.
"Our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. We can teach ourselves to make better snap judgments."
Studies and training programs are now under way to improve that education, including a system where police partners are being replaced by individual officers.
Apparently, well-trained people acting alone are better able to make good decisions when they are not influenced by others.
Gladwell calls the process "thin-slicing," or how a small sampling of data is often enough to produce the right answer.
Curiously, autistic people lack the ability to intuit the emotions of others -- mind-reading, he calls it -- because they group faces with inanimate objects and miss the meaning of facial expressions.
In one of the most intriguing speculations in the book, Gladwell proposes that all of us can be guilty of "temporary autism," incidents when we completely misread the situation and react incorrectly.
His examples, though, are extreme, involving the reactions of police officers under stress, most notably the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo in a hail of bullets fired by undercover New York cops.
The four white officers became "autistic" when facing a black man acting suspiciously in a high-crime neighborhood.
They were "blind," Gladwell says, and mistook the wallet in Diallo's hand for a gun.
Cops can be trained to appraise situations more accurately and objectively, he says.
"When our powers of rapid cognition go awry, they go awry for a very specific and consistent set of reasons, and those reasons can be identified and understood.
"Our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. We can teach ourselves to make better snap judgments."
Studies and training programs are now under way to improve that education, including a system where police partners are being replaced by individual officers.
Apparently, well-trained people acting alone are better able to make good decisions when they are not influenced by others.