Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, reviews Gladwell’s Blink in You Can Judge This Book by Its Cover — and shares a few factoids about “intuition”:
Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor’s effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. The same effect can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried ‘speed dating’ (a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple ‘dates’ in one evening lasts only six minutes).Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive ‘feel’ in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour.