What we need to see? And read?

I have just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. The book closes with a new Afterword that I don't think appeared in the original version and tries to frame a 'social agenda' for the book.

As a basis, he looks at the introduction of screens into classical music auditions and shows how this resulted in there being more woman in classical orchestras without the need for affirmative action targets. Then, he applies this to conviction rates for different race groups in the US and suggests that we need to be able to remove the consideration of race from the consideration of guilt.

This argument, for me, brings into opposition two of the arguments in the book. The first is that regardless of our perception of ourselves and how open-minded we may be, evidence shows that all of us make rascist and sexist snap judgments. As part of the argument, Malcolm Gladwell outlined how people can be 'primed' and how this affects us. And his argument makes sense. I've heard from many friends who've studied psychology that it is dangerously naive to believe we can assume we are free of prejudice.

The second argument that comes into contradiction is his chapter on the importance of 'mind-reading' and how good - and uniform - humans are in terms of signalling emotion with facial expressions. This suggests that to test someone's inherent honesty, visual cues are important. So, the question is which is more important - do sub-consciouscous biases overwhelm our ability to read people? The statistics cited suggested they do.

So, then, should we remove any indicators or bias from the justice system?

I'm not sure what the answer is. One thing which occurs to me is that abstracting from visual cues in the case of classical musicians makes sense because the most important information is aural. This plays to Gladwell's argument on the need to select the significant information. It seems easy to carry over in certain cases - for instance, in choosing a researcher reading research samples without names seems a clear way to go. But what information provides cues for guilt versus innocence?

This reminded me of a story I recently read by Ken Liu called Real Faces (reviewed below). In this case, it wasn't about abstracting in the case of guilt, but in the case of hiring an individual. Though a different context, it occured to me that the story could be a direct response to Gladwell's closing Afterword and while it doesn't offer a conclusion to the argument, it certainly raised a lot of interesting questions about the role context plays and how perceptions can be manipulated.

It also reminded me how important story-telling is. I read once that CS Lewis always felt furthest from God right after participating in a debate to defend his existence and closest when writing his Narnia stories. Sometimes, a cogent argument is far less powerful and sheds far less light than the same point as part of a narrative.

Another author that reminds me of this is NK Jemisin. I must be honest, whenever I have read her prose, I find it so deeply veined with anger that I struggle to focus on her argument. However, I loved her series, The Inheritance Trilogy and have dived into the first book of her new series. Her books make me think and because they are couched in stories, I find myself far more open into delving into her ideas through narrative than argument.