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When Gladwell visited the marital researcher Gottman in Blink, was Gottman able to predict marital outcomes with accuracy? Were Gladwell's...

In Chapter One of Blink, Gladwell discusses the work of University of Washington researcher John Gottman, who claims he can predict marital outcome with 95% accuracy after coding a one-hour videotape of a married couple talking (the rate is reduced to 90% if the tape is 15 minutes) (page 10). Gladwell writes of Gottman:






"He’s gotten so good at thin-slicing marriages that he says he can be in a restaurant and eavesdrop on the couple one table over and get a pretty good sense of whether they need to start thinking about hiring lawyers and dividing up custody of the children" (page 15).



Gladwell says that Gottman can take a very small sample of a marriage, what he refers to as "thin-slicing," and understand its totality, or signature. Gladwell believes that Gottman's predictions about the outcome of a marriage are accurate.


However, according to an article in Slate by Laurie Abraham (March 8, 2010), Gottman's results were misleading. Gottman knew in advance whether a couple had been divorced or not, and he fed that data into a computer to determine the formula for whether a couple would get divorced or not after six years. In other words, he wasn't so much predicting as performing a retrospective analysis. Abraham uses false-positive and false-negative rates (using Gottman's statement that he has about 80% accuracy) applied to Gottman's data from 1998 to determine that Gottman's accuracy in predicting marital outcomes is about 43%, much less than what he stated. 




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