In A Blink/Live It!

Another lesson in how to treat others…
From Malcolm Gladwell’s book called “blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”.

Although this book is about how we can “thin slice” people and situations to make quicker, better decisions, I find many lessons on relationships and how they are impacted by various emotions.

Such a lesson came to me through Gladwell’s discussion of an insurance company that sells physicians malpractice insurance. They wanted to find out whom, among the doctors that they insured, would be more likely to be sued.

You would think that the best way to find this out would be to research each doctor’s training and credentials. But, no, they found their best information came from observing how each doctor interacted with his or her patients. Why? Because the prospect of being sued is less about the mistakes that were made and more about how well the doctor was liked by his patients.

A medical researcher observed and recorded hundreds of conversations between physicians and their patients. According to Gladwell, roughly half of the doctors had never been sued. Those doctors spent on average more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did. The physicians that hadn’t been sued also used more “orienting” comments, which let the patient know what they were about to do and how the examination would be conducted, the outcomes expected, and when the patient would be able to ask questions.

What it all boiled down to is that the doctors who were never sued communicated respect to their patients very effectively. R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as the song goes, is an essential emotion to building solid connections with other individuals. And a lack of respect is the quickest way to destroy all prospects of a good relationship.

According to Gladwell, “…the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corrosive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone.”
So let’s take some lessons from this research and apply then to our daily dealings with other individuals.

• Tone of voice is so important. People around you pick up on your tone in a flash. Ask someone close to you if your tone of voice ever communicates disrespect. Then listen. Any time you communicate dominance, contempt, superiority, or impatience, you communicate a lack of respect.
• Time translates into respect, especially when it involves listening. If you don’t rush someone, if you make eye contact and respond to what’s being said with nods and eye acknowledgements, you are showing respect.
• The content of your comments also communicates respect. Do you lay out options for others to choose rather than dictating what everyone will do? When you are in someone else’s territory, do you ask them permission before doing something? Are you careful to not treat adults as if they are children?

Do this and you will build solid bridges with other individuals, which always positions you for success in whatever endeavor you pursue.

In A Blink/Go Deep

Remember the "Most Likely To Succeed" title in school?
There is a psychologist who for years has been perfecting a method for pinpointing married couples who are "Most Likely To NOT."

Business writer Malcolm Gladwell discusses this phenomenal work in his book, "Blink." He points to John Gottman's research close to the University of Washington where analysts tape a couple discussing an issue they are facing in their marriage.

The analysts look for signs of certain emotions in each individual and then apply a score to those emotions. Based on the scores, Gottman's team can watch one hour of video and predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married 15 years later! They've so perfected their system, that they can actually predict with 90 percent accuracy after only 15 minutes.

How have they achieved such success? They've isolated the four key emotions that, if present, spell real trouble for a married couple.

Gottman calls them the "Four Horsemen:" defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Now the first three are bad because they tend to create a downward, repeating cycle that impedes problem solving. Whenever a couple starts discussing a problem, the man tends to get defensive and starts to stonewall; then, the woman criticizes, which makes the man defensive, and so on.

You would think that criticism would be the most destructive. But not according to Gottman. The presence of contempt is the single most important sign that a marriage is in trouble. The reason, Gottman says, is that contempt happens when one person speaks "from a higher plane" to dump on the other.

Contempt generally shows itself in the form of a put down like, "You're scum!" So powerful is contempt that Gottman says the stress of being treated this way impacts the functioning of a person's immune system (Gottman can even predict that a person is likely to get sick based on the presence of contempt).

Gladwell quotes Gottman here: "Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community."

Hopefully, you're taking notes because you want to succeed in your relationships and you've committed yourself to never show contempt to another person, ever! (This falls under the "easy to say, hard to do" category.) Here's a tip: talk with your significant other about all four of these destructive behaviors and agree to hold each other accountable, especially when it comes to contempt.

Couples that succeed work together to make their relationship better. Improving the duet, though, requires self-improvement. But that often doesn't come without the give-and-take of true accountability. It requires maturity and, I would say, it involves a sacrificial and selfless type of love that hopes for the very best for a partner.

Consider it, carefully.
Friday, we'll talk about the emotion most likely to cause a patient to sue his doctor.

In A Blink/Think About It

What if some psychologists could watch a man and his wife interact for just 60 minutes and be able to tell you, with 95 percent accuracy, whether or not they will still be married in 15 years?

They can.

I'm reading an interesting book called "Blink" by business writer Malcolm Gladwell. I thought it was a book about making decisions with less information. It is, sort of. But a lot of it is about relationships, at least at the beginning.

Malcolm introduces the concept of "thin slicing," where scientists consciously (and people unconsciously) study small signals that others send and interpret those into long-term behavioral predictions. The key to being accurate in your predictions is to identify the proper signals.

If you ID the important indicators, you can basically "cut to the chase" in terms of predicting future behavior.

Why am I sharing this? In Malcolm's research for this book, he came across a variety of examples of thin slicing, including some interesting research, like the marriage study I mentioned above.

In the studies he encountered, specialists have identified certain emotions that, if present in a relationship, have a devastatingly negative impact on that relationship.

We can learn a lot from researchers who have made observing people interacting their life study. What do you think are the emotions most likely to break up a relationship? Think about it and we'll look at the first few on Wednesday.