Is America performing to its greatest potential? Are too many decisions being made in haste? Has permissive parenting and lower standards of expectation caused an academic crisis among our children?
According to Michael LeGault, author of the recently released book Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye, the answer to those questions and so many others is a resounding yes. The harder questions, however, are do we care enough to change the answer and, if we do, what can we do?
Offering the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling phenomenon, Blink, which theorized that our best decision-making is done on impulse, without knowledge or critical analysis, LeGault makes the case that a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Recently LeGault joined CFIF Senior Vice President & Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino to discuss his new book and how we can save our culture and society one mind at a time. What follows are excerpts from the interview that aired on "Your Turn - Meeting Nonsense With Common Sense" on WEBY 1330AM, Northwest Florida's Talk Radio.
GIACHINO: Researching the facts, getting the information and applying critical thinking and getting the right answers - that's what we are going to talk about for the next half hour. My next guest is Michael LeGault. He is an award-winning editor and writer, and a former columnist for The Washington Times. He is an American citizen based in Toronto. He has worked for and been a consultant to major U.S. companies on health, safety, environmental and quality issues. LeGault received his B.S. from the University of Michigan and his M.S. from the University of Miami, Florida. Currently, he is an editor at the National Post (Canada).
Mr. LeGault thank you so much for joining us to talk about your new book: Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can't be Made in the Blink of an Eye.
LEGAULT: My pleasure to be here Renee.
GIACHINO: This book is sort of a flip side of the book that many listeners may be familiar with because it was a bestseller. The book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I have to confess that I have not read Blink, but I did read your book. I think I get the gist of it nonetheless. For the listeners, can you summarize Malcolm Gladwell's philosophy espoused in Blink?
LEGAULT: Certainly. What Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is about is Mr. Gladwell's premise that the best way to make decisions and solve problems many times is by a rapid intuitive process which he calls thin slicing. And he proposes that just by taking in large amounts of sensory perception and data that we can somehow subconsciously process that and reach valid conclusions about what we are seeing.
Some of the examples that the gives in the book are some art experts who looked at a statute and immediately came to the conclusion that it was a fraud. I don't have a problem with some of his stories - it really is a collection of stories and anecdotes, which in and of themselves don't prove anything, it's like saying your aunt's cancer went into remission after she drank green tea, doesn't really prove anything. I don't have any problem with these types of stories, it's just the way that they are presented, and he makes really no mention of how an art expert makes a rapid conclusion other than saying it's just practice. He sidesteps it all. These art experts were people who had studied the art for many, many years and they might have been able to reach a conclusion very rapidly but a real test would have been to bring some folks in off the street who did not know anything about art in order to test his premise and see if they could have detected it was a fake. And I don't think they could have of course. So it really does not prove anything.
GIACHINO: So in essence Blink claims that the best way to make decisions and solve problems is very rapidly and using instinct and intuition?
LEGAULT: Yes. The thing about Malcolm - he is a bestselling author and he is very good at packaging ideas that really have been out there a long time and talked about, this is really another one of those. What he is talking about, the power of thinking without thinking or making snap judgments, has been studied by psychologists for years. It is sometimes called the eureka moment when after you have been engaged in a problem for many, many years and you suddenly reach the solution if you are a scientist or whatever. So he re-packages that and turns it into a blanket statement about the way we should view the world in terms of our thinking. To me, it is not just Blink vs. Think, it is sort of what I believe has become a lighter trend in society to go on emotion and gut instincts rather than critical thinking and that is the main issue that I am addressing in my book.
GIACHINO: In a nutshell, what do you mean when you say critical thinking?
LEGAULT: Critical thinking is just simply really using reasoning and factual evidence to evaluate or test claims that are made and we always have claims put to us in some way, shape or fashion during the day and we read things in the newspaper. So it's a process by which you evaluate what is being said to determine whether it is valid and true. As someone once said, it is our only guarantee against deception, delusion and superstition.
GIACHINO: Have you spoken with Mr. Gladwell since your book was published? Do you think he will offer a rebuttal?
LEGAULT: No, I have not. I am sure something will be arranged down the road. As of right now a joint interview or debate has not happened, but we are trying to work on that.
GIACHINO: Good. What do you think he would offer as a rebuttal?
LEGAULT: I think he would fall back on some of his anecdotes that he has in the book saying that what he is really implying is what I am saying and that the reason these people can come to rapid conclusions is because they have experience. But I don't see within the book, and I read it very carefully, where he actually comes out and says anything about critical thinking, reasoning or the importance of knowledge and study in school. It's sort of all washed over and swept under the rug. There are points where he says that the best way to come to conclusions very rapidly is practice but he doesn't go into any more detail than that. I am waiting for that call and I have some arguments and questions for him.
GIACHINO: As I read your book, one thing that kept coming to my mind is that with the demise of critical thinking we have become a society of black and white - I think people have not had to or they have been afraid to live in the gray zone. And some of that simply is because they no longer have the skills necessary to make their own decisions. They do not have to make their own decisions any longer but simply wait for entitlement after entitlement from the government. And the government seems to be happy to step in and play parent. There are so many situations where people do not have to make difficult decisions and so they do not have to apply critical thinking. Do you think that is a fair analysis?
LEGAULT: Well I think you are exactly right. There has become a perception that we do not need to practice critical thinking and I think that yes, there are signs that we are becoming a society of greater dependency. And I go into that in the book. So this is a chicken or an egg situation? Is the lack of critical thinking causing dependency or is dependency causing the lack of critical thinking? I think it is a little of both.
We are a very affluent society and as we become more affluent and as we have grown and you follow the trends after World War II, with the American economy still the largest in the world, perhaps we became alienated from our roots. In other words, we used to be a very can-do, objective society which valued critical knowledge and know-how. We still are but you see trends that are troubling and some are the increase in therapy, the rise in emphasizing self-esteem over actual achievement, and the broken bureaucracy in the government - even with emphasis on containing government it has continued to grow and continued to expand. So I think this all points to the fact that we are not as good at thinking for ourselves and we are becoming more and more dependent. And we are a society that is emphasizing social skills now more importantly than know-how.
GIACHINO: Is that what you mean when you say the age of reason has morphed into the age of emotion?
LEGAULT: Yes, that is what I am referring to there. It is that trend which I believe started in the late 1950s with then up through the 60s and counter-culture movement in the 70s, which has come to place more importance on emotion and emotional intelligence and intuition than critical thinking. And it is also a trend which I think has sort of institutionalized this view that emotional knowledge is associated with creativity and the bohemian life and is non-conformist and original whereas critical thinking books or knowledge - going to college or university, is conformist and conventional. And in fact what I found in researching my book is that most creative artists and so many creative artists and some of the best thinkers in history have been very good at critical thinking in creating their artwork. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci codified his paintings very exactly. He wrote it all out.
We forget how important critical thinking and reasoning is to achieving our individual goals in life and in society.
GIACHINO: And in the book you go through a number of winners who have made us an amazing society. I want to turn now to another trend that you write quite a bit about in the book and that is the polarization American politics. Can you give us your thoughts on why the loss of reason and critical thinking has caused or inflated the polarization of American politics?
LEGAULT: That is one of the general things about my book that I would like to mention. That is the unique thing that I have done here is connect the threads of our individual thought process with our social and cultural trends and I have concluded that these trends are in fact the result of not only different ways of looking at society and rights that are divergent from let's say the way American society traditionally looked at them. But also you boil it all down and it comes down to the way we think and the decisions we make. In looking at something like political partisanship, which seems to be rampant these days in the United States, I start with the observation that first of all as we become less adept at critical thinking we have to rely more on received knowledge from other people and emotional knowledge rather knowledge from our own reasoning processes.
And so a lot of people today simply believe what they want to believe. They don't really have a basis that they can say that they have looked into it themselves and believe, for instance, global warming. There are a lot of people who believe in global warming, but have they done their homework? Do they actually believe in it because they come to a conclusion based on evidence or is it because they believe it in the media and that is what is happening? And so there are those sorts of things that I believe contribute to the great divide which has created this sort of stand-off, if you will conservatives against liberals with no middle ground. I hold out the possibility and the hope that we can return to that and reasoning and critical thinking is sort of a middle ground in which we can come in and meet at, investigate these problems and find solutions, even if the solutions are not perfect solutions but it is better than spinning your wheels and fighting this political cat-fight all of the time.
GIACHINO: Michael, we only have about a minute left and I still have a number of questions that I would like to ask of you so what I would like to do, and this is sort of unprecedented, is I would like to submit the questions to you and we could post them with your answers on our website?
LEGAULT: Yes, I would be happy to. I would be honored.
GIACHINO: Great. That way the listeners can get the rest of the picture about the book and we can make sure we get more in. But in the last minute that we have left, I do want to get one question in because it is Valentine's Day. I know there are a lot of people out there looking for a sweetheart. I recently read an article about the latest dating craze - the 6 minute date. Do you know what I am talking about?
LEGAULT: Yes, I have heard of that.
GIACHINO: Yes, it is a situation where about a dozen women go into a room and each at their own table and then a dozen men come in and rotate around the tables, each staying about 6 minutes. They claim that after 6 minutes you know whether there is or is not a spark. Is that crazy or is it just me?
LEGAULT: What I have read is that often the expectation is that you want something, a certain quality in a person, and it turns out not to be what the expectation was - whether it was that you are attracted to someone who is outgoing and this person is more introverted, but I think I would like a little more than 6 minutes to determine whether I want to go out with someone. But maybe that makes me old fashion. Can it work?
GIACHINO: I agree. I think it is perhaps too much Blink and not enough Think.
Michael LeGault, thank you very much for your time today and thank you for agreeing to respond to the rest of the questions which will be put up with the rest of the transcript on our website. The book is called Think: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye.
Thank you for your time and thank you for writing this very well-thought out book. We appreciate it very much.
LEGAULT: Thank you for having me. It was my pleasure.
The following questions were submitted to the author for written response:
GIACHINO: Your book is not just about whining about the woes of America. You also provide logical, well-reasoned solutions. Is it too late to save ourselves? What can and should we do to reverse this downward spiral of American intellect and culture?
LeGault: At a social, cultural and political level we need to reconnect with our roots as a rational, empirical risk-taking society. People such as Jefferson, Paine and Madison believed that man's ability to reason, as documented by the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment, could be the foundation of a totally new method of government and society. Today, we need to take the agenda away from various sorts of non-elected officials who have assumed greater and greater power in the vacuum created by a decline of critical thinking.
GIACHINO: Is it just us Americans who have lost the ability or desire to think critically?
LeGault: No, but because we are at the top of our game and (still) have a constitution based on limited government, we have more to lose. It seems everyone in the Western world is beholden to some ideology or another. In Europe and Canada the ideology and rhetoric is as thick as or thicker than it is in the United States. In these countries there are no possible solutions for problems other than those provided by the government. Around the world people have become disengaged and completely lost the capacity, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, to dispassionately and rationally consider evidence, logic. Everything has become political.
GIACHINO: You have a chapter in the book in the section on fixes to help us parents. What kinds of things should we be doing to reverse the trend of permissive parenting? Is television ruining my children? Should I make them throw out their I Pod Shuffles?
LeGault: Technology is like wine--one or two glasses a day may be good for you, a bottle or two is not so good. We need to become more intrusive in our kid's lives as to the amounts of time they devote to certain activities, such as surfing the Web, emailing, playing video games etc. The average teenage American boy now plays about 13 hours of video games and watches 25 hours of TV each week, according to statistics published in the Economist. Parents need to be mentors, not just self-esteem coaches.
GIACHINO: If men are from Mars and women are from Venus do you think one sex is more a Blink and the other a Think?
LeGault: I think there are profound differences between the way women and men think, perceive and interact with the world. Everyone knows men have trouble expressing their feelings, and women have trouble with directions and spatial orientation. That's common sense. MRI scans have confirmed differences in men's and women's brains. But there's no preset pattern--women can often be more rational than men in many respects, and men more emotional and Blink-like: it depends on the individual. By studying language development of small children, cognitive scientists have found the ability to make logical inferences is both universal and innate. This argues against the post-modernist view that reason is an instrument of the power-elite of a given society.
GIACHINO: In the book you write how things could have been different after Hurricane Katrina if quick-draw decision-making had not occurred. Please share with the listeners your thoughts on that.
LeGault: What happened before, during and after Katrina was not simply the result of bad critical thinking; it was the result of a paralysis of will to act on one's thinking. It was very Hamlet-like -- for instance Mayor Nagin's decision not to order evacuation for fear of being sued by hotels. It demonstrated how politicized this country has become.
GIACHINO: Later in the book you write about the importance of reading and writing and you applaud the SAT for adding an essay portion. Your research shows long-term benefits of reading and writing. Can you share these with the listeners?
LeGault: If you've ever watched the British parliamentary debates on C-Span you'll immediately see the benefits of reading and writing. British parliamentarians, on the whole, are well-read, articulate and able to reason and debate on their feet with cunning and wit. Reading, writing and speaking are all interconnected, although each is a separate practice. In post 9/11 America we need leaders and citizens who are able to articulate and counter much of the rampant anti-American mythology found around the world.
GIACHINO: You now live in Canada. Any chance you would ever come back?
LeGault: Absolutely. I live in Canada because of work and family obligations. My dream is to some day have a house within walking distance of Michigan stadium.
March 9, 2006