By now if you’re human and happen to be connected to the Internet, you’ve heard of Susan Boyle, that awkward, strange, overweight woman from Britain’s Got Talent who dazzled the world when she gave a stunning performance of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables. Beyond the utterly astonished reaction of the judges and the audience during the performance, what was more interesting obviously was the online response. With nearly 100 million views and counting, Susan Boyle must be one of the fastest rises to popularity the Internet has ever produced.

But that’s all old news. The real question is: why? Sure, she’s a great singer, but she’s not that great. I mean, there are countless other unknown singers who sing amazingly well, I really don’t think that’s the issue here. The issue is that the audience and judges in the show so clearly misjudge her due to her appearance, and that while watching the YouTube videos, every single viewer of that video had the exact same reaction while watching it. In a way, this video should be titled “Watch How Your First Impressions Don’t Work”. I think the real fun part about that video is to watch the stunned faces — stunned by their own misjudgment.

I recently read Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, and I find Susan Boyle’s case to be living proof of his theories. In case you’re not familiar with that book, it talks about how people should (and can) make quick judgment of situations, and how these judgements tend to be more accurate or just as accurate as long term studies conducted afterwards. Gladwell contends that our instincts might be far more powerful (and certainly faster) than our conscious intelligence. Of course, Gladwell explains that our ability to perform these kinds of snap judgements is limited by our prejudice and predispositions, which is exactly what happens in Susan Boyle’s case. Our deeply ingrained stereotypes tell us one thing about her, yet our eyes and ears tell us something completely different. It’s just a powerful demo of stereotypes working on an almost universal scale.

Additionally, we are amazed by seeing how it happens to everybody else (audience, judges) at the same time. Bottom line, this is a fascinating little social experiment that reveals, yet again, just how stereotypes can be misleading.