Landon Julson
Period 4
10/16/12

Self-Reflection and Blink


    In the chapter Listening With Your Eyes they talked about how people tend to thin slice with little information before they actually receive all of the information or all of what they came to hear/get.  In the first chapter they talked about thin slicing and what it is and how it works.  Strangely enough we all do it on a daily basis without thinking about it.  In my chapter they talked about how there was an orchestra tryout and they wanted to have the player’s separated from the judges so the judges would only be able to judge on what was heard not seen.  This was in a time where you wouldn’t find a woman winning or getting 1st place in anything like this.  The best part was that when the performers were behind a curtain the judges picked a woman to play their lead role.  They were stunned when they saw her step out from behind it.  If they wouldn’t have had the curtain between them the woman wouldn’t have been chosen because the judges would’ve thin sliced and booted her out without hearing what she really had.
    I’ll be honest I connect to this chapter because I thin slice people all the time.  I’m not perfect but we all thin slice without knowing it.  An example I’ll share is sophomore year.  I was in an electricity class and the only other sophomore that I knew came in and sat next to me and was my partner.  At first I had first though judgmental thoughts of him and they lasted for a week or so.  Once I really got to know him it turned out that me and him were very much alike and we’ve been friends since that class.  He still is one of my best friends to this day.  I think this shows a point that when people thin slice they actually miss the reality or the things in people that they would never see unless they learned something about them.  If  I would’ve thin sliced I would be down someone who is a brother to me. The main lesson is don’t thin slice, and try not to be prejudice against others.
    The film I choose is Miracle because in this one small snippet it shows how thin slicing affected the players and they main point of the game.  Incase you don’t know what Miracle is it is a movie about the U.S.A. hockey team and how they go on to beat the Canadians in the biggest game of the Olympics.  Anyways, two of the characters were college rivals, whose names I cannot remember.  They had this grudge against one another and they decided that in practice they would fight it out in the middle of a play they were running.  The coach let them duke it out until he came over and yelled at them, showing them that they are no different from each other than they think they are.  They looked at each other in the eyes and noticed that they are the same person just with a different upcoming and college.  In the end they became good team mates and were on each others line.  This shows that thin slicing just because of a cross town rivalry can lead to a negative impact on a team or group of people.