the BIG five

BIG 5 Inventory

1.    Extroverted

2.    Agreeableness

3.    Consciousness

4.    Emotional Stability

5.    Openness

Friends can identify you quite well

Experiment: random students went into random dorm rooms and answered a series of questions in regards to the 5 factors above about the student. Friends of the students did better on extroverted (1) and agreeableness (2) however strangers did better on consciousness (3), emotional stability (4), and openness (5) which is more than 50%.

This shows how well the BIG 5 works on determining personality

It is possible for someone who has never met us and only looked at our room for 20 minutes to come to a better conclusion than someone who has know us for years

Many people think they are more negative or more forthcoming than they actually act

Love Lab - John Gottmen

Love Lab

-     With one hour of analysis Gottmen can tell with a 95% accuracy if  a couple can will still be married in 15 years

-     With 15mins he has a 90% success rate

-     Gottmen reviews tapes and uses an equation to come to his conclusions. This would be conscious decision making

Thin Slicing: make decisions on a thin slice of knowledge. Rapid Cognition. This type is an example automated unconscious thinking. Thin slicing is what Gottmen does with a machine.

When couples argue and one says, “you have to admit, I’m getting better” In happier marriages the partner will acknowledge that they are getting better but in unhappier marriages they don’t support the fact that their partner is getting better

Measuring positive to negative emotion needs to be 5 to 1

Looking for a part tern easy to see which a couple describes how they met

§  The 4 Horsemen

1.  Defensiveness

2.  Stonewalling – more often men

3.  Criticism – more often women

4.  Contempt – most important of them all one or both partners showing this is the worse

Contempt: any statement made from a higher level. Trying to put the person on a lower level than themselves. For example, "your scum, you're a bitch" it's hierarchy, no gender difference

To me this sounds like common sense, if you partner is calling you scum and a bitch all the time then I would assume NO your marriage is not going to work out. Gladwell uses simple examples to make his points better understood, however he also goes into greater depth to show the complexity marriage would last, why would divorce rate be so high!

Introduction to Blink

A group of students were shown a silent video of a teacher and within 2 seconds came up with the same conclusion as students who had the teacher all semester!

Quality of a decision, we think we need as much information as possible however, our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world

§  Gladwell’s Task

1.   Convince you that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made conscious and deliberate

2.   Know when we should trust out instincts and when we should be weary of them

3.   Convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled

There can be enough knowledge in the blink of an eye, as there is in a month of rational analysis

Gladwell believes everything would be different the way we fight wars, the movies made, police officers are trained and so on

The posts that I will be posting are based on Malcolm Gladwell's studies - I am only summarizing the points I find interesting.

BLINK: New book

The next book I'm reading is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

§  Fast and Frugal – Iowa Experiment

-     10 cards your body sends stress responses but you are not consciously aware of it

-     50 cards you have a hunch

-     80 cards you know what’s up

-     Your body knows whats going on 70 cards before you know!

§  2 ways of making a decision

-     Conscience: think about what you have learned and know and make a decision

-     Fast and Frugal: under conscience state before any conscience thought takes place you don’t know why you know but you do

Adaptive Unconscious: (different from Sigmund Freud’s conscious) This is what warns you if you’re in danger. For example when your body warns you that you are about to be hit a car and you jump out of the way this is your adaptive unconscious helping you outThe Getty was so excited to get a Corouse that they believed it was real, they thought it had to be! Several others that trusted their unconscious knew it was fake within seconds. Goodreads (additional reviews)