Split Second Stats #1: Thin-slicing vs. unlimited time

A big inspiration for Split Second: Indian Paintings was the book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink introduced the general public to the idea of “thin-slicing,” the notion that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” This idea has been widely studied and applied, in tasks as banal as deciding who to “friend” on Facebook, or as serious as recognizing potential terrorists at airports.

In this, the first in a series of posts about the Split Second experiment and our findings, I’m going to describe the first part of the experiment, and then say something about what some of the results might tell us about thin-slicing.

In the first part of the experiment, participants were presented with a series of pairs of Indian paintings, making snap decisions about which of each pair they liked best. We called this the “Split Second” task. Decisions made during the Split Second task were “thin” in two ways: First, each decision had a time limit of 4 seconds. Second, participants had no extra information about the painting, and had to “go from their gut.” The results from the Split Second task told us which paintings did better in thin-sliced conditions.

But looking at thin-slicing alone wasn’t quite enough for us. In order to really learn about how thin-slicing works, we needed to compare thin-sliced decisions to other kinds of decisions. To do this, we split off a number of participants into a “control group.” Rather than completing the second section of the experiment like the rest of the participants, the control group completed a neutral, unlimited time task with which we could compare all of the other tasks (like the Split Second task). The control group was presented with a series of individual paintings, with no additional information, and given unlimited time to rank each painting on a linear scale from “Meh…” to “Amazing!”

The result of each of these tasks came in the form of a ranking. The first ranking was based on thin-sliced decisions, and the second was based on decisions made with unlimited time. When we analyzed the two rankings, this is what we found:

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