pantsfarm

A while ago I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. One of the things I remember from it was about this guy who could predict very well very quickly whether or not a married couple would stay married in the long term, by listening to them interact. I forget if he was an academic researcher or a counselor or what. What I do remember was that when he saw people talking, he looked for a very small number of things that were especially revealing about the long term prospects for the relationship.

If I’m remembering correctly, the one thing this guy would look for before anything else was contempt. If he found that there was a pattern of contempt in the interaction he’d expect the marriage to fail. From that alone, he’d be able to predict with impressive accuracy whether or not a marriage would stick together some decade or more later.

The reason I remembered this recently was because I was thinking about what makes a person act or react with contempt? The whole focus of Blink was about the power of the unconscious, both in how much it can deduce but also how much it reveals (there was a section on Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System too I think).

So if I’m talking with somebody and I think that maybe I said something contemptuously, it’s a pretty strong sign things aren’t going to well. But the question then is, what can I do about that? If I find myself reacting in such a way how much can I do to consciously change that? Do I expect to fall away from people I interact with in that way? I don’t like the idea of being so resigned to my unconscious actions.

Update: I did find what I believe is an excerpt about the contempt stuff, here.