Wow, Talk About Thin-Slicing

In the book Blink Malcom Gladwell discssed the idea of “thin-slicing” to describe the way experience teaches to make complex judgements and assesments in a short space of time by being attentive to patterns and impressions. Often these judgements can be very accurate, as our mind assembles a small thread of information into a more complete picture based on a kind of information probability.

Church Marketing Sucks , via Cornerstone Church points to a study that gives us a case-study in thin-slicing. It seems that in one twentieth of second, internet users have made their minds up about the websites they visit.

“In the study, researchers discovered that people could rate the visual appeal of sites after seeing them for just one-twentieth of a second. These judgments were not random, the researchers found ‚Äî sites that were flashed up twice were given similar ratings both times.”

The study in question was published in the journal, Behaviour & Information Technology.

[tags] Blogs, Blogging, Web Design, Blink, Thin Slicing [/tags]