Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [38]
Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions — we can alter the way we thin-slice — by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions. If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way — who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites — it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously — acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives — requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions. In the next section of this book, I’m going to tell three stories about people who confronted the consequences of first impressions and snap judgments. Some were successful. Some were not. But all, I think, provide us with critical lessons of how we can better understand and come to terms with the extraordinary power of thin-slicing.
FOUR
Paul Van Riper’s Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity
Paul Van Riper is tall and lean with a gleaming bald dome and wire-rimmed glasses. He walks with his shoulders square and has a gruff, commanding voice. His friends call him Rip. Once when he and his twin brother were twelve, they were sitting in a car with their father as he read a newspaper story about the Korean War. “Well, boys,” he said, “the war’s about to be over. Truman’s sending in the marines.” That’s when Van Riper decided that when he grew up, he would join the Marine Corps. In his first tour in Vietnam, he was almost cut in half by gunfire while taking out a North Vietnamese machine gun in a rice paddy outside Saigon. In 1968, he returned to Vietnam, and this time he was the commander of Mike Company (Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, First Marine Division) in the rice-paddy-and-hill country of South Vietnam between two treacherous regions the marines called Dodge City and the Arizona Territory. There his task was to stop the North Vietnamese from firing rockets into Danang. Before he got there, the rocket attacks in his patrol area were happening once or even twice a week. In the three months he was in the bush, there was only one.
“I remember when I first met him like it was yesterday,” says Richard Gregory, who was Van Riper’s gunnery sergeant in Mike Company. “It was between Hill Fifty-five and Hill Ten, just southeast of Danang. We shook hands. He had that crisp voice, low to middle tones. Very direct. Concise. Confident, without a lot of icing on the cake. That’s how he was, and he maintained that every day of the war. He had an office in our combat area — a hooch — but I never saw him in there. He was always out in the field or out near his bunker, figuring out what to do next. If he had an idea and he had a scrap of paper in his pocket, he would write that idea on the scrap, and then, when we had a meeting, he would pull out seven or eight little pieces of paper. Once he and I were in the jungle a few yards away from a river, and he wanted to reconnoiter over certain areas, but he couldn’t get the view he wanted. The bush was in the way. Damned if he didn’t take off his shoes, dive into the river, swim out to the middle, and tread water so he could see downstream.”
In the first week of November of 1968, Mike Company was engaged in heavy fighting with a much larger North Vietnamese regiment. “At one point we called in a medevac to take out some wounded. The helicopter was landing, and the North Vietnamese army was shooting rockets and killing everybody in the command post,” remembers John Mason, who was one of the company’s platoon commanders. “We suddenly had twelve dead marines. It was bad. We