Or to put it another way, we of all the animals, probably find it the hardest to learn new things – much harder than do the other animals. Why? Because thinking gets in the way. Thinking and having feelings about what we are being ‘taught’. Oh, and there’s that problem of reflexivity too – we can think about ourselves, or to be more accurate, about our ’selves’.  Because of that we end up also wasting quite a lot of time thinking about what other people think of us. All of these capacities  – they’re not skills because we don’t choose to have them or seek to practise them – result in us getting very caught up in ourselves and our thoughts. As time passes and we grow up (or at least grow old) all these thoughts and the feelings that accompany them shape our repertoire of thoughts, feelings and actions. Every time we are faced with a situation, we more or less pull our feeling, thinking and behaviour ‘pattern’ out of the bag and do it without a thought.

Training is supposed to interrupt these patterns – does it? A good question – Can you train someone not to be aggressive for example? Go and read about that. Mostly it does not because it only very rarely addresses what is going on in our heads and ‘hearts’. The other animals, however, can learn the new tricks much more easily because they have all that internal stuff going on. Animals react and ‘do’. Plain and simple. We are much more like them when we are frightened or angry – then we do ‘think’ with something more akin to their level of sophistication. If you can remember what it was like the last time you were angry or frightened or very sad you will realise that functioning at that level is indeed to experience functioning at a very basic level. Straightforward alright; quick; reactive; brutal. We could even say ‘thoughtless’. Not nasty or uncaring, just free from thought, in the human sense.

So why should you give a fig about any of this? Perhaps for two reasons:

1.    So that you can realise that it’s not your fault that the course on emotional intelligence you were sent on had little or no effect (just as the course on ‘developing your  assertiveness’, ‘listening skills training for managers’ and ‘developing leadership skills’ didn’t either). You’re not being thick – in fact, quite the reverse.
2.    So that you can spot yourself more easily in a situation when you are behaving like one of the other animals – in the nicest possible way of course. You might just notice in time to get your humanity back before it’s too late.

Hmm…

Some things just look right don’t they? They look like they are going to work. Some medicines look powerful. Some people seem plausible, like they are going to be dependable or creative or knowledgeable. Some graphs look really informative, you just know they are telling the truth. Sometimes you come across an argument or line of reasoning that strikes you as logical, truthful, accurate, honest, helpful. This is what psychologists call face validity.

Face validity.

It’s what something has when it looks ‘right’. Face validity is the thing that makes us trust a particular thing, person, piece of paper, concept or whatever. It is probably something that most people don’t acknowledge as being present in their decision-making processes – chiefly because it doesn’t have much to do with supportable logic

An example: Tomorrow morning you walk into a car showroom on the way to the service desk of your car’s brand dealership. You spot a car you really like the look of. Crikey, it’s just so, well, shiny. It smells so new and the doors – ooh, so heavy and clunky. I think I’ll open and shut it again. Clunk! CLUNK! Ooh, “I want it” you think. Then you ask for a brochure. You are given a badly photocopied sheaf of pages, stapled at the top right-hand corner. No, this isn’t a photocopy, you are assured, this is what the marketing department has sent us. This is a £25,000 car you protest. Oh, yes, the salesman retorts, and worth every penny. We’ve decided to put all our effort into the car and not really bother with marketing blurb – we thought the car should speak for itself. Do you take it for a test drive?

‘Thin slicing’.

Face validity, and our tendency to judge things against this subtle criterion taps directly into what the author of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, refers to as ‘thin slicing’. It is about picking up lots of data subliminally and putting it to good (and bad) use in making complex assessments very fast. Experienced soldiers thin slice all the time in battle. Racing drivers do it a hundred times a lap. Art dealers do it with every major painting they examine; gamblers when sizing up every new opponent. So, the problem with this thin slicing is not that we do it or don’t do it.

A face validity – good or bad?

The problem is that we either don’t know we are doing it or choose not to own up to it. If we are unaware of how we are making a decision then thin slicing and the corresponding face validity ‘rating’ of what we are judging can get the better of us. So, ‘thin slicing’ + self awareness = good quality deciding. As for face validity itself – just remember about books and covers.