01:00 AM EST on Thursday, February 17, 2005

BY REBEKAH DENN
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

For plenty of readers coming across Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Blink, a study of the psychology behind first impressions, it will be easy to deconstruct at least one snap judgment: Gladwell's name alone will trigger them into giving the book a try.

A staff writer for the New Yorker, Gladwell has developed into a dream writer for the lazy layman with an interest in science, human nature and even business. He's managed to turn edification into entertainment, unraveling knotty research theories and obscure terms, and spinning them into page-turning stories.

His first book, 2002's The Tipping Point, became an unexpected best seller with its explanations of how little things can cause big changes in society. Blink (Little, Brown, 288 pages, $25.95) takes a similar storytelling approach, with Gladwell turning his psychological magnifying glass to "rapid cognition," the decisions people make in the blink of an eye.

At times, he shows, our instincts are spot-on: He begins with an art expert's snap (and correct) judgment that a $10 million marble statue was actually a fake. Later he shows how instincts go fatally wrong, as with the New York City police officers who shot an unarmed man 41 times. Even University of Washington researcher John Gottman makes an appearance, with Gladwell examining how Gottman analyzes the subtleties of just a few minutes of conversation to predict a married couple's odds of divorce.

If there's an overarching theme, it's that a lot of complexity goes into these seemingly snap decisions -- and that we should all be more aware of them.

"This is not a pro-first impression or an anti-first impression book," Gladwell said by phone from New York recently. "It just says they deserve to be taken seriously, because they really matter. They can be really good, or lead us horribly astray."

The latter moments make up some of the book's most intriguing stories. Most readers know, for instance, that the publicity stunt known as "The Pepsi Challenge," a blind taste test, showed soda fans preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi over the bite of Coca-Cola.

But Gladwell goes on to describe how the research was misinterpreted when Coke developed a sweeter, more Pepsi-like, "New Coke" in response. It flopped, Gladwell said, because the Pepsi Challenge had only measured reactions after a single sip of soda, and human nature tends to favor sweeter flavors in a single sip. But if consumers had drunk the entire glass, the way they would in real life, he said, Coke would have won the test. "Coke was insufficiently skeptical about first impressions."

The book grew out of Gladwell's own head-on collision with rapid cognition, which he encountered after letting his once neatly trimmed hair grow into a wild halo. "Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed," he wrote.

He got speeding tickets. He was pulled out of airport security lines. Then he was confronted by three police officers who thought he resembled a wanted rapist -- a rapist who shared nothing in terms of height, age, weight, skin color or anything except a large head of curly hair.

Worse experiences happen all the time to African-Americans in America, he wrote. But Gladwell's run-in was subtle enough, and absurd enough, he said, to inspire interest more than outrage. "In the end it was a harmless meeting, I was delayed for 15 minutes, they let me go, they were actually quite polite about it," he said. "It was possible to kind of interrogate this moment a little bit."

He ferreted out and translated a wealth of recent research in psychology to help explain the moment to himself and others, and he's now learned enough from his Blink research to illuminate his own life to some degree.

"I'm much more willing to accept ambiguity when it comes to explanations for things in my life," he said. "You can't sit down with a pencil and paper and write out your true feelings about something. Our unconscious is much larger and bigger and more mysterious than we think it is."

But there are times, as he shows in Blink, when that subconscious needs to be decoded and controlled. He wrote about female classical musicians, for instance, who only won rave reviews from colleagues and bosses when they auditioned behind anonymous screens that hid their gender.

"It's really a little depressing, but at the same time that story is extremely hopeful," Gladwell said. "It says that if you can figure out how to correct the bias, you can make the snap judgment pure again."