Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (15 page)

Did you make a decision? Before you read on, jot down either Phone A or Phone B. Now I’m going to describe the phones one more time. No information has been changed, but some has been added.

Which phone would you rather purchase now? Again, write down your answer. I’m now going to present the options a third time, again adding one new element.

Now, which of the two would you prefer?

Chances are, somewhere between the second and third lists of data, you switched your allegiance from Phone B to Phone A. And yet the two phones didn’t change in the least. All that did was the information that you were aware of. This is known as omission neglect. We fail to note what we do not perceive up front, and we fail to inquire further or to take the missing pieces into account as we make our decision. Some information is always available, but some is always silent—and it will remain silent unless we actively stir it up. And here I used only visual information. As we move from two to three dimensions, from a list to the real world, each sense comes into play and becomes fair game. The potential for neglecting the omitted increases correspondingly—but so does the potential for gleaning more about a situation, if we engage actively and strive for inclusion.

Now let’s go back to that curious dog. He could have barked or not. He didn’t. One way to look at that is to say, as the inspector does, he did nothing at all. But another is to say, as Holmes does, that the dog actively chose not to bark. The result of the two lines of reasoning is identical: a silent dog. But the implications are diametrically opposed: passively doing nothing, or actively doing something.

Nonchoices are choices, too. And they are very telling choices at that. Each nonaction denotes a parallel action; each nonchoice, a parallel choice; each absence, a presence. Take the well-known default effect: more
often than not, we stick to default options and don’t expend the energy to change, even if another option is in fact better for us. We don’t choose to contribute to a retirement fund—even if our company will match the contributions—unless the default is set up for contributing. We don’t become organ donors unless we are by default considered donors. And the list goes on. It’s simply easier to do nothing. But that doesn’t mean we’ve actually not done anything. We have. We’ve chosen, in a way, to remain silent.

To pay Attention means to pay attention to it all, to engage actively, to use all of our senses, to take in everything around us, including those things that don’t appear when they rightly should. It means asking questions and making sure we get answers. (Before I even go to buy that car or cell phone, I should ask: what are the features I care about most? And then I should be sure that I am paying attention to those features—and not to something else entirely.) It means realizing that the world is three-dimensional and multi-sensory and that, like it or not, we will be influenced by our environment, so our best bet is to take control of that influence by paying attention to everything that surrounds us. We may not be able to emerge with the entire situation in hand, and we may end up making a choice that, upon further reflection, is not the right one after all. But it won’t be for lack of trying. All we can do is observe to the best of our abilities and never assume anything, including that absence is the same as nothing.

4. Be Engaged

Even Sherlock Holmes makes the occasional mistake. But normally these are mistakes of misestimation—of a person, in the case of Irene Adler; a horse’s ability to stay hidden in “Silver Blaze”; a man’s ability to stay the same in “The Case of the Crooked Lip.” It is rare indeed that the mistake is a more fundamental one: a failure of engagement. Indeed, it is only on one occasion, as far as I’m aware, that the great detective is negligent in embodying that final element of attentiveness, an active, present interest and involvement, an engagement in what he is doing—and it almost costs him his suspect’s life.

The incident takes place toward the end of “The Stock Broker’s Clerk.” In the story, the clerk of the title, Hall Pycroft, is offered a position as the business manager of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company by a certain Mr. Arthur Pinner. Pycroft has never heard of the firm and is slated to begin work the following week at a respected stockbrokerage—but the pay is simply too good to pass up. And so he agrees to begin work the next day. His suspicions are aroused, however, when his new employer, Mr. Pinner’s brother Harry, looks suspiciously like Mr. Arthur. What’s more, he finds that his so-called office employs no other man and doesn’t even have a sign on the wall to alert potential visitors of its existence. To top it off, Pycroft’s task is nothing like that of a clerk: he is to copy listings out of a thick phone book. When, a week later, he sees that Mr. Harry has the same gold tooth as did Mr. Arthur, he can stand the strangeness no more and so sets the problem before Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes and Watson proceed to accompany Hall Pycroft to the Midlands, to the office of his employer. Holmes thinks he knows just what has gone on, and the plan is to visit the man on the pretense of looking for work, and then confront him as Holmes is wont to do. Every detail is in place. Every aspect of the situation is clear to the detective. It’s not like those cases where he actually needs the criminal to fill in major blanks. He knows what to expect. The only thing he requires is the man himself.

But when the trio enters the offices, Mr. Pinner’s demeanor is not at all as expected. Watson describes the scene.

At the single table sat the man whom we had seen in the street, with his evening paper spread out in front of him, and as he looked up at us it seemed to me that I had never looked upon a face which bore such marks of grief, and of something beyond grief—of a horror such as comes to few men in a lifetime. His brow glistened with perspiration, his cheeks were of the dull, dead white of a fish’s belly, and his eyes were wild and staring. He looked at his clerk as though he failed to recognize him, and I could see by the astonishment depicted upon our conductor’s face that this was by no means the usual appearance of his employer.

But what happens next is even more unexpected—and threatens to foil Holmes’s plans entirely. Mr. Pinner attempts to commit suicide.

Holmes is at a loss. This he had not anticipated. Everything up to then is “clear enough, but what is not so clear is why at the sight of us the rogue should instantly walk out of the room and hang himself,” he says.

The answer comes soon enough. The man is revived by the good Dr. Watson and provides it himself: the paper. He had been reading a newspaper—or rather, something quite specific in that paper, something that has caused him to lose his emotional equilibrium entirely—when he was interrupted by Sherlock and company. Holmes reacts to the news with uncharacteristic vigor. “‘The paper! Of course!’ yelled Holmes in a paroxysm of excitement. ‘Idiot that I was! I thought so much of our visit that the paper never entered my head for an instant.’”

The moment the paper is mentioned, Holmes knows at once what it means and why it had the effect that it did. But why did he fail to note it in the first place, committing an error that even Watson would have hung his head in shame at making? How did the System Holmes machine become . . . a System Watson? Simple. Holmes says it himself: he had lost interest in the case. In his mind, it was already solved, down to the last detail—the visit, of which he thought so much that he decided it would be fine to disengage from everything else. And that’s a mistake he doesn’t normally make.

Holmes knows better than anyone else how important engagement is for proper observation and thought. Your mind needs to be active, to be involved in what it’s doing. Otherwise, it will get sloppy—and let pass a crucial detail that almost gets the object of your observation killed. Motivation matters. Stop being motivated, and performance will drop off, no matter how well you’ve been doing up until the end—even if you’ve successfully done everything you should have been doing up to now, the moment motivation and involvement flag, you slip up.

When we are engaged in what we are doing, all sorts of things happen. We persist longer at difficult problems—and become more likely to solve them. We experience something that psychologist Tory Higgins refers to as flow, a presence of mind that not only allows us to extract more from whatever it is we are doing but also makes us
feel
better and happier:
we derive actual, measurable hedonic value from the strength of our active involvement in and attention to an activity, even if the activity is as boring as sorting through stacks of mail. If we have a reason to do it, a reason that engages us and makes us involved, we will both do it better and feel happier as a result. The principle holds true even if we have to expand significant mental effort—say, in solving difficult puzzles. Despite the exertion, we will still feel happier, more satisfied, and more in the zone, so to speak.

What’s more, engagement and flow tend to prompt a virtuous cycle of sorts: we become more motivated and aroused overall, and, consequently, more likely to be productive and create something of value. We even become less likely to commit some of the most fundamental errors of observation (such as mistaking a person’s outward appearance for factual detail of his personality) that can threaten to throw off even the best-laid plans of the aspiring Holmesian observer. In other words, engagement stimulates System Holmes. It makes it more likely that System Holmes will step up, look over System Watson’s shoulder, place a reassuring hand on it, and say, just as it’s about to leap into action,
Hold off a minute. I think we should look at this more closely before we act.

To see what I mean, let’s go back for a moment to Holmes—specifically, to his reaction to Watson’s overly superficial (and unengaged) judgment of their client in “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder.” In the story, Dr. Watson demonstrates a typical System Watson approach to observation: judging too quickly from initial impressions and failing to correct for the specific circumstances involved. Though in this particular case the judgment happens to be about a person—and as it applies to people, it has a specific name: the correspondence bias, a concept we’ve already encountered—the process it illustrates goes far beyond person perception.

After Holmes enumerates the difficulties of the case and stresses the importance of moving quickly, Watson remarks, “Surely the man’s appearance would go far with any jury?” Not so fast, says Holmes. “That is a dangerous argument, my dear Watson. You remember that terrible murderer, Bert Stevens, who wanted us to get him off in ’87? Was there ever a more mild-mannered, Sunday school young man?” Watson has to
agree that it is, in fact, so. Many times, people are not what they may initially be judged to be.

Person perception happens to be an easy illustration of the engagement process in action. As we go through the following steps, realize that they apply to anything, not just to people, and that we are using people merely to help us visualize a much more general phenomenon.

The process of person perception is a deceptively straightforward one. First, we categorize. What is the individual doing? How is he acting? How does he
appear
? In Watson’s case, this means thinking back to John Hector McFarlane’s initial entrance to 221B. He knows at once (by Holmes’s prompting) that their visitor is a solicitor and a Freemason—two respectable occupations if ever there were any in nineteenth-century London. He then notes some further details.

He was flaxen-haired and handsome, in a washed-out negative fashion, with frightened blue eyes, and a clean-shaven face, with a weak, sensitive mouth. His age may have been about twenty-seven, his dress and bearing that of a gentleman. From the pocket of his light summer overcoat protruded the bundle of endorsed papers which proclaimed his profession.

(Now imagine this process happening in the exact same way for an object or location or whatever else. Take something as basic as an apple. Describe it: how does it look? Where is it? Is it doing anything? Even sitting in a bowl is an action.)

After we categorize, we characterize. Now that we know what he’s doing or how he seems, what does that imply? Are there some underlying traits or characteristics that are likely to have given rise to my initial impression or observation? This is precisely what Watson does when he tells Holmes, “Surely the man’s appearance would go far with any jury.” He has taken the earlier observations, loaded as they might be—handsome, sensitive, gentlemanly bearing, papers proclaiming his profession as a solicitor—and decided that taken together, they imply trustworthiness. A solid, straightforward nature that no jury could doubt. (Think you can’t characterize an apple? How about inferring healthiness as an intrinsic
characteristic because the apple happens to be a fruit, and one that appears to have great nutritional value given your earlier observations?)