The pretense of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, is that we are able to make quick decisions based on relatively little information and discusses the downside of stereotyping, with the upside of the other adaptive mental processes we use to do this.

In a more general context, this is a concept called heuristics, which is when we find simple rules to make good decisions in a complex situation.  In most cases, too much information can be detrimental to your decision making; it just ends up confusing you.

The term for that — where your excessive analysis of the situation leads to a) a lack of a decision and b) emotional distress — is called analysis paralysis.

In sports, its called a “choke”, in board games, its called “running out of time and losing your turn”, and in life, its called “cognitive distortion”.

Tips on avoiding this very annoying situation:

1) Mental tallying:  when deciding whether he wanted to marry his wife, after only knowing her for a week, Charles Darwin decided he had to tally up the pros and cons of marrying her.  Turns out one of the “pros” he wrote on his list was, “for companionship, better than a dog, anyhow.”  But this mental tallying of a person for the purpose of a life-long relationship only took a week — and the man had a point: generally speaking, it doesn’t take that long to mentally tally.

2) Blink’s point was that the decisions we make spontaneously, with little information, are often just as good/correct as ones given more information and more time to think, thanks to our ability to do something called “thin-slicing”.  You’ll have to read the book for the exact numbers.

3) Maya Angelou said, very succinctly, “when people show you who they are, believe them.” Often times, getting more information about something, someone, a situation, will serve to reinforce what you already believe, which may or may not be right in the first place.  When it comes to people, just remember that most of the time, what you see is what you get.

My advice to you — if you’ve got a spontaneous, super-strong feeling about something, follow it.  It will often take a while for our conscious cognitive processes to catch up and explain what our subconscious already knew.