But that same tape has been given to almost two hundred
marital therapists, marital researchers, pastoral counselors, and
graduate students in clinical psychology, as well as newlyweds,
people who were recently divorced, and people who have been
happily married for a long time — in other words, almost two
hundred people who know a good deal more about marriage
than I do — and none of them was any better than I was. The
group as a whole guessed right 53.8 percent of the time, which
is just above chance. The fact that there was a pattern didn’t
much matter. There were so many other things going on so
quickly in those three minutes that we couldn’t find the pattern.
Gottman, however, doesn’t have this problem. 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. How
does he do it? He has figured out that he doesn’t need to pay
attention to everything that happens. I was overwhelmed by the
task of counting negativity, because everywhere I looked, I saw
negative emotions. 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,