Rapid Cognitions

I just finished reading Gladwell's Blink, and it is a fascinating book indeed. One part mentioned the capability of rapid cognition, and I think it is a rather good insight on why people do the strange things they do. Humans are very capable processors and can produce rapid cognitions at incredible speeds. Examples of rapid cognitions include evaluating whether someone is a threat who is about to attack, and evaluating someone for friendship potential.

However, rapid cognitions can be overridden, as proven by the experiment whereby people seen performing poorly are evaluated as poor performers regardless of their context. This was mentioned in Gladwell's Tipping Point. The combination of the two explains why snap judgements can go so wrong, even when people would not consciously act that way. For example, a person may not be consciously racist, yet still associate racial minorities with crime simply because crimes perpetrated by minorities appear in the papers pretty often. That rapid cognition also proves resistant to facts to the contrary, like statistics that can be completely contrary to those beliefs.

While rapid cognitions are certainly useful in situations where snap decisions are essential, those situations are comparatively rare in urban life (except perhaps in the case of a mugging or potential car accident) and time can in fact be taken to rethink snap decisions. The problem, perhaps, is an inability or unwillingness to consider information to the contrary. Understandably, some may argue that feelings (a part of rapid cognition) are an intrinsic part of being human, and one should not be living like a machine thinking everything rationally over. However, part of the quest to be a fully realized human also involves not blindly following those "feelings" like some dumb animal. Doing so would likely maximize the potential of human cognitions, and prove greatly beneficial when truly integrated into daily life.