Blink #2

The other day in English class we talked about if the things we do affect our behaviour. We talked about how the military uses the video games we play to train soldiers to go to war, to get use to killing people. And yet many video game makers, and movie directors claim their violent video games and movies do not affect how we think. There was an incident of a little boy who played a shooting game and shot his dad thinking he would come back to life.

In the book Blink, I just finished reading the Warren Harding Error, the chapter talks about the first impressions our subconscious makes, and how our first impressions are generated by our experiences. In the chapter there is a test that Gladwell talks about called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is a test designed to measure the strength of automatic association between mental representations of objects in the memory. The IAT requires the rapid categorization of various objects, such that easier pairings and faster responses are interpreted as being more strongly associated in memory than more difficult pairings with slower responses. Here is a site where you can try an IAT https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.

"Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions- we can alter the way we thinslice- by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.” (p. 97)

In this chapter Gladwell concludes that what we do affects our thoughts composed by our subconscious. He also says to change our first impressions we need to change our environments.