Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [90]
Was this officer mind-reading? Not at all. Mind-reading allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others. In the scene in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolff where Martha is flirting with Nick while George lurks jealously in the background, our eyes bounce from Martha’s eyes to George’s to Nick’s and around and around again because we don’t know what George is going to do. We keep gathering information on him because we want to find out. But Ami Klin’s autistic patient looked at Nick’s mouth and then at his drink and then at Martha’s brooch. In his mind he processed human beings and objects in the same way. He didn’t see individuals, with their own emotions and thoughts. He saw a collection of inanimate objects in the room and constructed a system to explain them — a system that he interpreted with such rigid and impoverished logic that when George fires his shotgun at Martha and an umbrella pops out, he laughed out loud. This, in a way, is what that officer on the Dan Ryan Expressway did as well. In the extreme excitement of the chase, he stopped reading Russ’s mind. His vision and his thinking narrowed. He constructed a rigid system that said that a young black man in a car running from the police had to be a dangerous criminal, and all evidence to the contrary that would ordinarily have been factored into his thinking — the fact that Russ was just sitting in his car and that he had never gone above seventy miles per hour — did not register at all. Arousal leaves us mind-blind.
6. Running Out of White Space
Have you ever seen the videotape of the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan? It’s the afternoon of March 30, 1981. Reagan has just given a speech at the Washington Hilton Hotel and is walking out a side door toward his limousine. He waves to the crowd. Voices cry out: “President Reagan! President Reagan!” Then a young man named John Hinckley lunges forward with a .22-caliber pistol in his hand and fires six bullets at Reagan’s entourage at point-blank range before being wrestled to the ground. One of the bullets hits Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, in the head. A second bullet hits a police officer, Thomas Delahanty, in the back. A third hits Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy in the chest, and a fourth ricochets off the limousine and pierces Reagan’s lung, missing his heart by inches. The puzzle of the Hinckley shooting, of course, is how he managed to get at Reagan so easily. Presidents are surrounded by bodyguards, and bodyguards are supposed to be on the lookout for people like John Hinckley. The kind of people who typically stand outside a hotel on a cold spring day waiting for a glimpse of their President are well-wishers, and the job of the bodyguard is to scan the crowd and look for the person who doesn’t fit, the one who doesn’t wish well at all. Part of what bodyguards have to do is read faces. They have to mind-read. So why didn’t they read Hinckley’s mind? The answer is obvious if you watch the video — and it’s the second critical cause of mind-blindnesss: there is no time.
Gavin de Becker, who runs a security firm in Los Angeles and is the author of the book The Gift of Fear, says that the central fact in protection is the amount of “white space,” which is what he calls the distance between the target and any potential assailant. The more white space there is,