know whether Tom Hanks was an astronaut. But I saw this as a
movie about a spacecraft in jeopardy. And who does the world
want to get back the most? Who does America want to save?
Tom Hanks. We don’t want to see him die. We like him too
much.”
If we couldn’t thin-slice — if you really had to know
someone for months and months to get at their true selves —
then Apollo 13 would be robbed of its drama and Splash would
not be funny. And if we could not make sense of complicated
situations in a flash, basketball would be chaotic, and bird-
watchers would be helpless. Not long ago, a group of
psychologists reworked the divorce prediction test that I found
so overwhelming. They took a number of Gottman’s couples
videos and showed them to nonexperts — only this time, they
provided the raters with a little help. They gave them a list of
emotions to look for. They broke the tapes into thirty-second
segments and allowed everyone to look at each segment twice,
once to focus on the man and once to focus on the woman. And
what happened? This time around, the observers’ ratings
predicted with better than 80 percent accuracy which marriages
were going to make it. That’s not quite as good as Gottman. But
it’s pretty impressive — and that shouldn’t come as a surprise.