Madeleine Van Hecke’s new book Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things encourages smart people to avoid doing dumb things by using thoughtful reflection to detect their blind spots.

But is thoughtful reflection necessarily better than hasty judgments?

Not according to Malcolm Gladwell who argued in his best-selling book, Blink, that the decisions people make in a blink are often not only just as accurate, but MORE accurate, than the conclusions they draw after painstaking analysis.

So, should we blink, or think?

When we make judgments based on a thin slice of time—a few minutes talking with someone in a speed dating situation, for example—are our judgments really as accurate as when we analyze endless reams of data?

Gladwell says sure “that’s why Blink is called ‘the power of thinking without thinking.’” Gladwell tells some compelling stories to demonstrate that power, including his opening gambit about the Greek kouros sculpture that two experts accurately detected as a fake within a few moments perusal, after months of scientific testing had deemed it genuine.

But Gladwell’s own examples show that people are most likely to be correct in their “blink” judgments when they are like the two art experts—when their judgments rest on a mother lode of background experience or information. So a “blink” judgment might serve you well at those times—but the rest of the time, you need Blind Spots. Blind Spots has tactics to help you make better decisions because they help you sidestep the pitfalls that your blind spots keep you from seeing.

You say blink decisions “might” serve you well in areas where you’re an expert?

Right, they don’t always serve us well even then, for two reasons. First, because in highly-charged, emotional situations—such as when a police officer becomes suspicious of someone and fears danger—blink decisions can result in tragedy. Gladwell acknowledges this… he notes that some police departments have adopted one-officer squad cars. Why? Because an officer alone will act more slowly, often wait for back-up. This delays the time between becoming suspicious and taking action, and it apparently reduces the number of inaccurate blink-decisions that officers make.

In Blind Spots, I point out that failing to stop and think is a blind spot—we don’t think because we don’t recognize “this is a situation in which I really need to step back from what’s going on and figure out what to do.” As a result we shoot off an e-mail that we later regret, or exuberantly embrace a flawed marketing plan. Every time you have ever said “I realize now,” you’re recognizing an earlier time where you failed to stop and think.

The second reason that expert blink decisions can go astray is because sometimes our very expertise blinds us to new, more creative perspectives. Why, for example, did people design early train cars with no central aisles, and with brakes that had to be operated by a conductor seated outside, on top of the train car—a dangerous practice? Because these early cars were almost exact replicas of what the expert designers were most familiar with: the stagecoach. So our expertise can sometimes trap us.

But isn’t intuition important, and too often disregarded by people who stress logical thinking and reasoning?

I think intuition is important, and one of the good things about Blink is that it’s kind of a corrective book, one that celebrates the value of intuitive thinking and pokes fun a bit at careful, analytic reasoning. But Blink oversimplifies the issue. Blind Spots reflects more deeply on the tension between analytic thought and intuition. It’s a mistake to enthrone logic as the sole and sure-fire way to Truth, but it’s also a mistake to blithely accept every whim as inspired. A better slogan might be “Don’t believe everything that you think.” The strategies in Blind Spots help you figure out what you should and shouldn’t believe.

But don’t you think that our minds work in mysterious ways? Aren’t some of the stories that Gladwell tells testimony to that mystery?

I absolutely agree that our minds work in mysterious ways. But that mystery goes way beyond the nature of intuition. Take the evidence that children can be incredibly logical in their thinking. One three-year-old girl was being teased by her Aunt, who was nibbling at the child’s toes and threatening “I’m going to eat you up!” “No!” said the little girl, “I’m going to eat you up!” “Aha,” said the Aunt, “but I’m bigger than you, so I’ll eat you up first.” “Uh-uh” retorted this youngster: “because I’ll eat your mouth first.” The logic of this preschooler is quite breathtaking. How did she do that?

On the other hand, there’s also research that raises the opposite question: the “How could anyone be so dumb?” question. Some studies, for example, show that intelligent adults consistently make mistakes in reasoning. How do you explain that? To me, the apparent stupidity of adults — the enigma of why smart people do dumb things — is a puzzle to be solved. Blind Spots offers one solution to that mystery—and offers practical tips to help people overcome the blind spots that stifle both creative and critical thinking.

So why DO smart people do dumb things?

Smart people do dumb things because our minds work FOR us — 80 or 90 percent of the time. But the rest of the time they work against us: they create blind spots that trip us up. Some of these blind spots are familiar to us, like “my-side bias” – not seeing another point of view. One smart fellow told me what he did to get a squirrel out of his basement. He opened a window, piled up some planks and boxes to create a road, and set down a trail of nuts, ending with a heap on the patio. Now that MIGHT have been a smart thing to do – but it could have backfired. Because that trail went both ways — possibly leading the troublesome squirrel out of the basement, but possibly leading other squirrels INTO the basement. Some smart plans fail because of my-side bias. Forgetting that there’s another point of view is one of the natural blind spots that work against us.

And you believe that Blind Spots can help people when their minds are working against them?

I do. One of the differences between Blind Spots and Blink is that Gladwell’s book isn’t intended as a self-improvement text, so he offers only a couple of suggestions about how to make better decisions. He basically says, well, since experts make better judgments, acquire more expertise. And since we can really goof up in high-pressure, emotional situations, put the brakes on in those settings. I wanted to go much further in helping people make better decisions.

In Blind Spots, I give people tools to identify and counterbalance the ten blind spots that make the best of us blunder. One reader of Blind Spots was a fellow who realized that as his company had downsized, his own focus had shrunk as well — to what was most immediate, most pressing. As a result, he lost sight of “the big picture,” something that he had been adept as grasping before the downsizing. After reading Blind Spots, he was able to help his company take advantage of the changes occurring in his industry at that point in time because he stopped missing the forest for the trees.

It takes some time, it takes some effort — it takes more than a blink — but Blind Spots can help you think more critically and more creatively.

Madeleine Van Hecke, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, speaker, consultant, and author. She is the author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things (Prometheus Books, Inc., 2007) and the developer of the You Can Do Something Different training program. Want to know what to do when other people’s blind spots drive you crazy? Download Madeleine’s best advice in a free article at www.overcomeblindspots.com.

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Questions or comments? E-mail Madeleine at info@overcomeblindspots.com or call 630-341-5066.