Not always right

In an immigrant neighbourhood in South Bronx an innocent man was shot to death by four police officers. It was night, the officers were cruising down the street when they spotted Diallo sitting outside alone. To the officers, a black man sitting alone outside at night in a crime ridden neighbourhood was something that immediately made them suspect that he was up to no good. In truth Diallo was an innocent man who was simply taking in the night. The four officers got out of their cars and confronted Diallo (who could understand very little English) . Diallo panicked and ran. The officers chased down the frightened man, who ran towards his apartment. As Diallo was pulling out his wallet to get his keys, the officers mistook it as a gun and immediately opened fire, shooting Diallo to death.

These four officers were inexperienced, straight out of the police-academy. What occurred here was that the assumptions the officers made were completely wrong and due to their inexperience they could not mind-read Diallo. From the moment they saw Diallo sitting outside alone, he was a criminal in their eyes. When the man ran, the officers assumed it was because he was guilty of a crime and not because he was frightened. When Diallo tried to pull out his wallet, in the eyes of the officers he was pulling out his gun. In the adrenaline filled situation the officers were forced to act quick and fast, and as the action escalated, they abandoned their reasoning and decided to shoot Diallo.

"Mind-reading failures happen to all of us. They lie at the root of countless arguments, disagreements, and misunderstandings. And yet, because these failures are so instantaneous and so mysterious, we don't really know how to understand them." (Gladwell 196)

What Gladwell is saying is that our instinctive ability to judge people with our sub-consciousness is prone to mistakes. In many circumstances it can be biased and if we decide to act upon these false readings we can surely make the wrong decisions. Failures that occur beneath our consciousness are hard to recognize and understand. I believe its similar to when you have a negative first impression or a bad "hunch" about someone which turns out to be completely false as you get to know the person. When you try to figure out why you got the negative assumption about the person, it is often impossible to understand why.

I think this is why many impulsive decisions we make can be harmful and this is the reason why we don't see everyone in the world making decisions on the whim, its simply unreliable and risky. No matter how amazing the capabilities of our sub-consciousness and quick judging can be, we can't always adhere to it because without the right experiences it is vulnerable to mistakes.