Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [11]
The key thing about fists is that they emerge naturally. Radio operators don’t deliberately try to sound distinctive. They simply end up sounding distinctive, because some part of their personality appears to express itself automatically and unconsciously in the way they work the Morse code keys. The other thing about a fist is that it reveals itself in even the smallest sample of Morse code. We have to listen to only a few characters to pick out an individual’s pattern. It doesn’t change or disappear for stretches or show up only in certain words or phrases. That’s why the British interceptors could listen to just a few bursts and say, with absolute certainty, “It’s Oscar, which means that yes, his unit is now definitely outside of Tobruk.” An operator’s fist is stable.
What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity — whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone — has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition.
“People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative. In the negative sentiment override state, people draw lasting conclusions about each other. If their spouse does something positive, it’s a selfish person doing a positive thing. It’s really hard to change those states, and those states determine whether when one party tries to repair things, the other party sees that as repair or hostile manipulation. For example, I’m talking with my wife, and she says, ‘Will you shut up and let me finish?’ In positive sentiment override, I say, ‘Sorry, go ahead.’ I’m not very happy, but I recognize the repair. In negative sentiment override, I say, ‘To hell with you, I’m not getting a chance to finish either. You’re such a bitch, you remind me of your mother.’ ”
As he was talking, Gottman drew a graph on a piece of paper that looked a lot like a chart of the ups and downs of the stock market over the course of a typical day. What he does, he explains, is track the ups and downs of a couple’s level of positive and negative emotion, and he’s found that it doesn’t take very long to figure out which way the line on the graph is going. “Some go up, some go down,” he says. “But once they start going down, toward negative emotion, ninety-four percent will continue going down. They start on a bad course and they can’t correct it. I don’t think of this as just a slice in time. It’s an indication of how they view their whole relationship.”
3. The Importance of Contempt
Let’s dig a little deeper into the secret of Gottman’s success rate. Gottman has discovered that marriages have distinctive signatures, and we can find that signature by collecting very detailed emotional information from the interaction of a couple. But there’s something else that is very interesting about Gottman’s system, and that is the way in which he manages to simplify the task of prediction. I hadn’t realized how much of an issue this was until I tried thin-slicing couples myself. I got one of Gottman’s tapes, which had on it ten three-minute clips of different couples talking. Half the couples, I was told, split up at some point in the fifteen years