The Power of Two Seconds
One of my favorite authors is Malcolm Gladwell. I have read his books Tipping Point and Outliers. It's difficult to describe the type of books he writes. Essentially, they are psychology told in a narrative format. Drawing upon a variety of sources, Gladwell succeeds in blending enlightenment and entertainment.
Most recently, I have been reading another of his works, Blink. In this book, he strives to convey the importance of intuition, the power of a person's gut feelings. He tells the story of psychologist Nalini Ambady, who performed an experiment by giving students three ten-second audio-less videotapes of a professor to watch. The students were asked to judge the effectiveness of the professor. She cut the clips back to two seconds, and the students were consistent in rating the success of a teacher. Then she took those same quick evaluations of the professor and compared them with evaluations made by students who had been in the professor's class a whole semester.
Her findings? The evaluations were essentially the same. Gladwell concludes, "A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher's class for an entire semester."
Never underestimate the power of two seconds!
Most recently, I have been reading another of his works, Blink. In this book, he strives to convey the importance of intuition, the power of a person's gut feelings. He tells the story of psychologist Nalini Ambady, who performed an experiment by giving students three ten-second audio-less videotapes of a professor to watch. The students were asked to judge the effectiveness of the professor. She cut the clips back to two seconds, and the students were consistent in rating the success of a teacher. Then she took those same quick evaluations of the professor and compared them with evaluations made by students who had been in the professor's class a whole semester.
Her findings? The evaluations were essentially the same. Gladwell concludes, "A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher's class for an entire semester."
Never underestimate the power of two seconds!
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