Quotes About Analysis

Everything that can be tested must be tested

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

The Power of the Glance Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.

That's not because journalists know more about Japan. It's because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.

It's a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to get a sense of how their mind works. Heylmun and Civille have done the same thing — only they haven't psychoanalyzed their feelings; they've psychoanalyzed their feelings for mayonnaise and Oreo cookies.

Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.

presenting long rows of data arrayed in complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they themselves were talking instead about the mysterious and

If you think about the class-size puzzle this way, then what seems baffling starts to make a little more sense.

One side made the discussion about racism—looking down at the case from ten thousand feet. The other side examined each detail of each case with a magnifying glass. What was the police officer like? What did he do, precisely? One side saw a forest, but no trees. The other side saw trees and no forest.

As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, "painting with a broad brush" is "an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.

Thin-slicing refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns ins situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity — whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone — has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.

You may have noticed that I called the Dijksterguis study a partial answer to the question of when to draw on our instincts and when to rely on conscious analysis. The truth it that this is not a question that I - or anyone else, for that matter - can answer definitively. It's just too complicated. The best we can do, I think, is try to puzzle out the right mix of conscious and unconscious analysis on a case-by-base basis.

n good decision making, frugality matters; take a complex problem and reduce it to its simplest elements.

FACS, which stands for Facial Action Coding System.

Now let's do the same kind of analysis for people like

When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated—when we have to juggle many different variables—then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.

Estaban tan concentrados en la mecánica y en los procesos, que eran incapaces de ver el problema desde una perspectiva holística. Cuando se descompone una cosa, se pierde su significado».

Business, to be successful, must be based on science, for demand and supply are matters of mathematics, not guesswork.

Things get done only if the data we gather can inform and inspire those in a position to make difference.

Thinking is simply an orderly process of asking yourself questions.

If you meet a number of failures the causes of which are not known, look for something that is common for each failure and that is never present when there is a success.