Chapter 1- Thin Slicing
The mind is an amazing thing! Thin slicing is the act of making quick decisions based on small amounts of information. According to Gladwell,"We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person, have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation." We all do it but rarely do we know that we are engaging in thin slicing, often attributing our decisions to logic and facts.
Wikipedia defines thin slicking as "a term used in psychology and philosophy to describe the ability to find patterns in events based only on "thin slices," or narrow windows, of experience.The term seems to have been coined in 1992 by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in a paper in the Psychological Bulletin."
As an instructor I want my students to develop good
critical thinking skills but I also want them to gain knowledge through
experience that can become second nature in application.
The question is, how do we work with students to hone this
ability to cut out the distractions and “thin slice”? Do we get them talking about their snap judgements and intuitions before asking them to find hard evidence to support their opinion?
Jeff Thompson provides a good explanation of thin slicing and how to hone this skill.
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Or, we can take a different approach and apply the term with a slightly different meaning for instructional design. Stephen J. Meyer, CEO of the Rapid Learning Institute explains, "We have hi-jacked the term, altered its meaning a bit, and applied it to learning. Thin slicing is about isolating thin slices of learning and delivering powerful insights from very limited information." Thin slicing can be viewed as a form of chunking information for learners into smaller increments that pack a lot of power. He goes on to explain its application to creating e-learning training in his article: Thin Slicing as a New E-learning Strategy. Check it out!
