Individuals have been in doubt about the validity of the quick decisions, snap judgments, or simply following their intuition (i.e., rapid cognition) for several reasons, such as Gladwell states, people assume that "the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it". Gladwell in his book "Blink" tries to propose three points: the first is to demonstrate that these quick unconscious decisions are good, valid, and, in some cases, superior in quality to decisions reached by more methodical deliberation. The second purpose is to acknowledge the reverse proposition. The third purpose is to show that "our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled."
While on one hand, there are many research instances when rapid cognition has been beneficial to my activities as a scholar and when quick judgments have worked and been correct, even more so than decisions produced by careful deliberation. For example, when I looked for material for a design research project related to GPS, I immediately thought about combining PAN (Personal Area Network), sensor technology with GPS to enable parents and police locate lost children. I then looked further into these areas and found my intuition was right, there are few research studies on this and a few inventions with similar idea have just emerge to a niche market.
On the other hand, as Gladwell has shown, an equal number of cases where rapid cognition has produced important errors in judgment. Some of these failures have been costly and fatal. This occurred to me for a few times. I figured out that my original research idea already been taken after spending hours or days of researching in the related area. I have to admit, IS is one of the most extensive research fields, yet each subject can be so deep. As a IS researcher, it is therefore particularly important to take advantage of "rapid cognition", while learn to educate, control, and ultimately improve our own abilities for rapid cognition.
Gladwell cites of good instantaneous decisions and judgments are drawn from people who have extensive training and experience in a particular field, such as the art historians who instantly recognized that the purported ancient Greek statue was a forgery, the gamblers who get sweaty palms, the successful car salesman, and the professional food tasters. It is really hard to pick only one as the most favorite story. I learn from the book that with these varied types of training and expertise, one key in making rapid decisions is knowing what to look for and how to edit down larger amounts of information. As Gladwell says: "This is the gift of training and expertise--the ability to extract an enormous amount of information from the very thinnest slice of experience." Based on the above, a proper approach is to identify the components in a situation that are the most important for thin-slicing and then, using those components, to create a structure within which rapid decision making can function.
Stuart Oskamp