Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

If you wanted to sum up Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", I would tell you to see the very first "Star Wars" movie. Remember in 1977 when Luke Skywalker while piloting his fighter hears Obi-Wan Kenobi tell him to turn off his radar while attacking the evil star ship? Obi-Wan wants Luke to rely on the FORCE. In other words, give up his conscious thought patterns and go with your gut. This is what BLINK is all about. Our ability to instantly know what is real from what is fiction. What is good from what is bad? Gladwell is telling us to go with our right (creative) brain, and for the moment to shut down our left (logical, analytical) brain, and oh he is so right. In example after example, the author goes through diverse instances where people in just the time it takes to BLINK, can make FABULOUS decisions that turn out to be the right ones. Others using the power of their analytical minds can take days, weeks, and even months, and come to the wrong decision. There's something going on here, and Gladwell is onto it. Human beings have five million years of evolutionary history behind us, and consciousness for only the last 15,000 or 20,000 years. Somehow, we have TURNED OFF the power of our unconscious instinctual patterns, and overridden them with our super analytical ways of logic. The result is inferior decisions to what we had before we became conscious. Hey, when a lion was chasing down our ancestors for a meal, you didn't have much time to think. By the way, every page of this relatively short book is fascinating. You will literally not be able to put it down. Let's look at a few of the topics that Gladwell covers in depth and convincingly. A) The J. Paul Getty Museum & the Kouros Statue The cash-flushed Getty Museum wanted to buy a 7-foot Greek statue for $10 million. With contract in hand they call in some of the greatest experts in the world who after running exhaustive scientific tests, agree that it's the real thing and you should jump to buy it. At the same time a handful of other experts just looking at the object instantly announce it's a fake, and you should walk away. Learn who was right and why. Hint: it took 2 seconds of looking to KNOW the answer. B) Who's a good Professor in less than 30 seconds Remember when we went to college we would attend a lecture or two to determine if we wanted to take the entire course with a certain professor. In BLINK you will see scientific studies that prove you can come to the same decision by watching a video of the professor for 30 seconds. Who's kidding whom? C) What if you could tell how long a potential marriage would last? This one is mind blowing. John Gottman of the University of Washington has shown in tests that he can do this with accuracy. Watching one hour of a couple talking, and Gottman can tell with 95% accuracy if 15 years later, they will still be married. Blink goes into it in detail. Too bad, I didn't learn about this study sooner. D) Why do some doctors get sued, and others not at all? You would think that the risk of being sued if you are a doctor is all about making mistakes, or improper medical care. BLINK shows that its really about words like "RUSHED, IGNORED, and TREATED POORLY." E) Can a President of the United States be elected on looks alone? Read BLINK and you will see how an entire nation got suckered into electing Warren Warding President just for that reason, unbelievable but true. Read how and why, and be mesmerized. F) Only 14.5% of men are six feet and over. Why are 58% of CEO's six feet, or taller? Pretty wild when you think about it, yet true. Could there be some kind of unwritten or unconscious criteria for being a Fortune 500 CEO that involves height? There aren't enough tall people to COMPLETELY staff any one company. Why is it that the tall ones seem to rise to the TOP? G) Blue Team versus Red Team This is my personal favorite. The American military runs war games all the time. The good guys who are us are always the BLUE Team. The enemy is always the RED team. In preparation for the first Iraq war in the early 1990's, the government ran the exercise, and put General Paul Van Riper in charge of the bad guys, the RED team. The bottom line is that the bad guys blew away the good guys, the Americans by using unconventional "BLINK" type thinking, while the BLUE Team relied on conventional, overwhelming force, and inside the Beltway type bureaucratic thinking. This illustrates why this book is so important. You will learn out of the box type thinking. You will also learn when to use it, and when to go with your logical left brain type thinking. By the way in the war exercise when the bad guys, the RED Team beat the good guys the BLUE Team with ease, what did the Pentagon do? They announced that the game would be done over again, and they outlawed the techniques that the bad guys the RED Team employed. The result, the good guys won. The problem is that nobody told the bad guys in Iraq during the second Iraq War that these techniques were outlawed, and thus our Generals as usual find themselves in some difficulty to say the least. Read BLINK, and find out how and why. This book is FASCINATING, and NOT TO BE PUT DOWN, ONCE YOU START READING IT. Richard Stoyeck

"Blink" is a book about our cognitive abilities. Malcolm Gadwell considers the ability of the human mind to make split second decisions and judgments, which are usually accurate. He delves into the idea that our instincts are usually correct, even though there are no fundamental reasons why then goes onto convince readers that snap judgement and first impressions can be controlled and educated. He writes about the term "thin slicing" to describe the ability to find patterns in events based only on narrow windows of experience. Overall "Blink" provides a new sort of perception that first impressions and judgments are actually true. From childhood, we are all taught that first impressions are key. Malcolm Gadwell provides evidence of split second Decisions and judgement ranging from a retired tennis player, to Medical Doctors. Gadwell does however, explain that prejudices can impair our thoughts. Gadwell even describes how the outcome of a relationship (Divorce or Married) in 10 years, can be quantitatively measured. The overall theme is "Thinking without Thinking," which describes that ones mind can subconsciously understand and analyze a situation before one's conscious takes place. The mind can conceive the details through a situation due to the associates made through society. Gadwell jumps between stories as a describes different topics such as priming, selective processing and expertise, but always relates back to the topic of thin slicing. His writing style leaves the reader curious as to why and how something happens, subconsciously urging them to read on till he abruptly explains the relationship. The overall book was a pleasure to read, yet I still remain skeptical about some of the ideas and presented. He present's ideas that have many different outcomes, such as how an artists who should have made it big didn't and how a commander beat his opponents in a war-game exercise. The book hits individuals with facts and then goes on to describe the relationships found within those statements and facts. I remain skeptical about some of the ideas because they simply seem implausible and rather controversial. Since the earliest days of our birth, we are taught never to make judgments or to judge a book by its cover. Blink teaches us something different, describing how it is alright to judge a book by its cover, and how those judgments actually save us a tremendous amount of time. Gadwell relies mainly on anecdotal evidence. Each section tells a story about someone who illustrates his theory of snap judgments. The first story presented was about a Greek statue the J. Paul Getty Museum had agreed to purchase. Just before the transaction was about to take place, two art experts immediately knew it was a fake. They had no idea why, or how they just "knew." Eventually it was found out that the statue was a fake and when a scientist tested a sample of the stuate, Gadwell explains that "In the first two seconds of looking--in a single glance--they [the critics] were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months." As the book progresses, much more of this intuitive knowledge is proven to be true. The main problem in the book is that some of the information is presented in a falsify way. The readers are not given completely background of all the other possibilities. In one example, Gadwell explains how artist by the name of Kenna, is loved by artists, managers, and talent scouts but fails to make it in the big run because radio stations dislike him because he didn't market himself properly to them. Individual people thin sliced Kenna and realized he was good, but radio stations waited some time to make a rational judgment which in turn led them denying him. Gadwell explains that Kenna could either have been promoted, or the radio stations are wrong, but never does he touch on the fact that Kenna might have been a bad artist. I would highly recommend this book to other readers, simply because of the way it makes you think about your judgments. I was able to finish this book within a day because of the intriguing logic Gadwell uses to prove his point. This book made me step back and think "Wow. Can that be true." It truly made me think of the decisions I make on a daily basis, and how some of those decisions are already determined. While I do remain skeptical about some of the idea's presented in the book, the overall book was a pleasure to read; keeping me entertained and curious enough to finish the entire book. I enjoyed the book enough to go and purchase Malcolm Gadwell's other book "The Tipping Point." Overall, read it and enjoy how much it makes you think. One should not however take everything said in the book to be the truth.

`Blink' is about the mysterious two seconds it takes to develop a first impression and how surprising the impression often is, given our known preferences and tendencies. Malcolm Gladwell got the idea for this book after he had let his hair grow long on a whim, and found he was getting speeding tickets for the first time in his life. He wondered why the cops all of a sudden had an impression of him that wasn't there before. He became curious: where do first impressions come from anyway? Gladwell does some interesting investigative work to try to get some answers to that intriguing question. He suggests that `rapid cognition' is behind a `closed door' in our minds and follows certain unwritten rules. It is a logical process that he feels is not instinctual, but, surprisingly, can be more accurate than deliberate, rational thought, and follows certain rules that we are not even aware of. (Even improvisational comedians follow certain rules, though what they do often seems so random.) One must be careful though, since stereotyping and the immediate environment at the moment can influence the impression. All of this mental background action is going on without our even knowing it! The `closed door', it turns out, can only be peaked into. There are lots of very good examples of `blink'. There is the case of the statue that didn't look right to experts at first glance. Fourteen months later, after much testing, it was discovered by other experts that the statue was a forgery. Then there was the case of the supervisory fireman who yelled to his men to leave the building immediately minutes before it collapsed; he sensed something was wrong when it was not at all obvious what it was. Another example has to do with internationally known and respected tennis instructor who can almost invariably tell when a pro will double-fault just before the serve is hit, and he doesn't know how he does it! Speed dating often shows people being attracted others that do not fit their criteria of what they are looking for, for reasons they are fuzzy about. All of this is very mysterious, to say the least. Information and understanding are not the same things and sometimes less information is better. He gives very good examples of this in the medical and military fields. He talks about the `power of the glance', the ability of a great general to look at a battle field, weed through all the information, and make a rapid decision; he gives a great example of this in Lee's improbable victory at Chancellorsville. "Sometimes, we have to edit" our information down to something manageable, and make a decision on that. This was very counter-intuitive to me, and I'm sure, something to approach with caution. But I can't argue against results and he gives good evidence that it works. Be aware that first impressions can be misleading. Spontaneous decision making is shown to be not infallible, and can even be dangerous at times; stereotyping can supplant logical decision-making in a time-crunch. He goes into some detail about this with an instructive example of a police action in the Bronx that went awry. Gladwell said in the interview at the end of the book that he tried very hard to make this point. Rapid cognition can be your enemy as well as your friend. Use it with caution. It is tricky knowing how to measure the value of a product or a performer. Packaging can count too much, a great example of which is what he calls the `Warren Harding Error', a fascinating section of the book. Also, when surveying the response to a product, an opinion can't always be comfortably expressed in words (except by the experts), and as a result, some people will tend to look for a plausible reason, and give an incorrect opinion. The mystery of why someone likes something can't always be codified. This was a fascinating book that does not pretend to give all the answers but does raise some really good questions about a mysterious and important subject. The so-called `locked door' is finally getting its due.

This is a very interesting book. With his characteristic easy-going style the author examines the first two seconds of human observation. He refers to them as intuition or snap- judgments first and later as intuition. The book is well articulated as he explores different parts of this phenomenon through different chapters. He states that there is a sophisticated unconscious process that takes place whenever we are facing a situation in which we are required to take action. This process is much faster than our conscious thought and rationalization process, he points out that this ability it is related with a particular area of the brain's frontal cortex located behind the nose. He points out experiments in which patients with brain damage were unable to choose between two sets of alternatives with their pros and cons detailed laid out by themselves. Gladwell also points out that there are many unconscious associations that are transmitted to us by our environment. Moreover, he asks the reader to engage on some exercises and test throughout the book in order to experience this and other assertions made by him. One direct implication of the previous is that our unconscious process can be educated or trained. Another implication is that these implicit associations may bias our intuition which reveals that our intuition can also lead us to make mistakes. Still this doesn't mean that we must only use our conscious rational thinking process as the only way to solve problems as data can also fools us. Worse, having extensive data won't necessarily protect us as too much data can prevent us from seeing the forest because of the trees. Information or knowledge means nothing if there is not any understanding of what these information means. Our "intuition" works with understanding, understanding requires a lot of preparation, education and experience, the alternative is just making random choices. Understanding translates into "good" judgment and "good" judgment into good decisions. In situation in which we are overwhelmed by information, variables and intricate consequences "intuition or judgment" is found by Gladwell to be better at making the call that our traditional conscious logic and verbal analysis, which ironically has proven far superior for making simple decisions. The book ends with a reflection and a call to action. Both methods of taking decisions have their strengths and weaknesses; there is no panacea but a need for balance between these two methods. Moreover the observations made on this book are here to stay, but now that we have this knowledge about the human decision process, how are we going to use this knowledge to overcome the current deficiencies that we as a society have when taking decisions. Along the book there is a Gladwell signature everywhere, the language is clear and direct, the message is relevant. Gladwell is not trying to construct a classical scientific theory, but to transmit his observations as directly and clearly as possible. In short , a fine reading.

Blink was a great read for me. The whole idea that our brains make quick, accurate judgments long before we consciously process what’s happening is something I never really thought about until this book broke it down. Gladwell has a way of taking psychology and turning it into stories that pull you in, and this book is full of those moments where you stop and think, “Wow… I’ve done that without even realizing it.” What I liked most is how he explains the power of intuition—not as some mysterious feeling, but as a skill our minds build through experience, patterns, and exposure. Whether it’s experts judging art in seconds or everyday people reacting to situations before they fully understand why, the examples really drive home how much is happening behind the scenes in our decision-making. The book also made me more aware of how snap judgments can be both incredibly accurate and surprisingly flawed. There’s a balance between trusting your instincts and understanding when they might be influenced by bias or bad information. That’s something I’ve carried with me after reading. If there’s one thing to note, it’s that some chapters feel more connected than others—it’s not always a straight-line narrative. But even with that, the ideas stick, and the concepts are easy to apply to real life. Overall, Blink is a thought-provoking, enjoyable read that helped me understand my own thinking on a deeper level. It’s worth picking up if you’re interested in why we make the choices we do—often in the blink of an eye.

Malcolm Gladwell, adored by the masses and mocked by the academy, has set out to explore human cognition and decision making in his book "Blink," despite the fact that he is a historian by training and a journalist by trade. The premise of this book is that we humans have two speeds when it comes to decision making: "really fast" and "regular." We are all familiar with regular- pause and think, employ logic, maybe even write stuff down on paper, and eventually come to a rational conclusion. Really fast, or as Gladwell calls it, blinking or 'thin-slicing', happens in much shorter times, ranging from milliseconds to know if a tennis serve will go awry, to mere minutes to know if a marriage will survive the next 20 years. The ability to accurately use the faster method is discussed by Gladwell, who provides several very entertaining and well-written stories detailing the split-second decisions that can be made, such as telling that a piece of art is a fake by just a quick glimpse, rather than expensive and lengthy laboratory tests. There is also a dark side to this method of decision-making, and in several very entertaining and well-written stories, Gladwell shows how white men turn into evil misogynistic racists when making split-second decisions. Take it or leave it, but Gladwell is an extremely talented and engaging storyteller. There is a lot of redundancy within and across chapters, and I estimate the book could be maybe 100 pages lighter. The individual stories lack scientific rigor, and the book lacks an overall conclusion (what is given is just another story). Yes yes, this book is classified as "popular science," but that does not excuse the fact that no attempt is made to construct a cogent and complete argument, including acknowledging competing ideas. The burden of proof is on he who makes the claim- while Gladwell may think he is being "deeply intellectual" and forcing the message of his book upon the readers by not having a solid conclusion, thus forcing us to blink for ourselves, instead he left the roof off of the house he just built, and I'm clearly not alone in this opinion. Another thing noticeably lacking is advice on how to do the fast thinking for yourself- Gladwell never explicitly says it, but the key it seems, is to study your field for years and years- and by then, you will have built in your brain the equivalent of muscle memory for thought processes, and you will be able to trust your gut a lot more....go figure. I'm ambivalent about recommending this one. This is possibly the worst place to start if you want to learn in depth the science of human thought and decision making, but it is a wonderful place to start if you know nothing on the topic and would like to get a feel for what it is all about. Either way, if you read "Blink" for entertainment value, you won't be too disappointed (though as I said, the stories do drag on a bit).

One of the primary criticisms of Gladwell's book, a criticism common to popular social science books, is that it covers the underlying research on an overly superficial level. I am not familiar with the scholarly work Gladwell relies upon, but if my experience in fields I am more familiar with holds, Blink certainly covers this corner of psychology on a superficial level. But that is ok. It would not be possible to write such a book otherwise. More important, in my mind, to this kind of book is that it clearly explain the consequences of the research to and spark some excitement for the subject in the lay reader. Blink achieves in spades on both counts. Blink is about snap judgments. Or, to put it another way, decisions made subconsciously, not consciously. Sometimes this is good (if you are an expert on the subject, for particularly complex decisions); sometimes this is bad (if the decision may be colored by subconscious, irrelevant biases). When Gladwell sticks to snap judgments (which he labels as "thin slicing"), Blink works. The stories are funny, relevant, and interesting. We discover that it is very difficult to really understand many, many things without years and years of experience and training, but we can still tell what is good and what we like. Gladwell uses jelly as an example, but take wine. I can tell you which wines I like and even tell you which wine I like better. But I cannot talk like a sommelier. And, as much of the research Gladwell discusses suggests, attempting to do so would interfere with my unconscious ability to differentiate good wine from bad. Gladwell also tries to show how we can use an understanding of thin slicing to make better decisions, but he tends to give answers that are less than fully satisfying. Gladwell relates how administrators at Cook County Hospital saved money and increased the accuracy of diagnoses by implementing a decision tree. It is an odd case study. Neither thin slicing nor conscious decision-making worked for the doctors; it was not an example of shifting from one to the other. It was an example of the power of narrowing focus to a few truly relevant metrics (a powerful and highly useful subject, but it is not the subject of Blink). In another case study, Gladwell never quite explains his point regarding the Kenna story, about a musician loved by record execs and ignored by the radio. Presumably he meant to imply that the thin slicing by the record execs was right (because they are experts), but the thin slicing by the radio focus groups was wrong (because they were not experts and could not identify music they would enjoy as quickly). Gladwell may be right, but that conclusion does not flow necessarily. Gladwell never really gives a solid basis for discerning when experts can be trusted. From Blink, it would be easy to over rely on experts. But a "sort of" expert can be worse than a layman. In the counterfeit statute case study Gladwell starts with, both those who got it right and those who got it wrong were experts. To give an example not in the books, literary "experts" have long denigrated the Lord of the Rings, while readers have had no trouble recognizing its brilliance (even if unable to explain why). The literary experts did not have the expertise to properly evaluate the expertise in philology and mythology that Tolkien used. Gladwell's final application of thin slicing shows a poor understanding of his own material. Gladwell observed that the percentage of female orchestra members shot up dramatically after a switch to screened auditions. Irrelevant visual signals were crowding out the relevant audio signals. Gladwell then extrapolates this to argue criminal defendants should be screened to mitigate subconscious racial bias. But a jury trial is not an orchestra audition. If a criminal defendant is on the stand in a jury trial, he visual cues are more important than the audio clues. As Gladwell discussed earlier in the book, facial expressions tell an indelible story about what a person is really thinking (he even uses an example from the OJ Simpson trial!). One of the primary duties of the jury is to assess the credibility of witnesses; how can they do this if they cannot see the person's face? That this recommendation achieved such quick support from an audience at Harvard Law School says more about the state of legal education than its merit.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell book review Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a book about the power of first impressions in your unconscious. Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian journalist, author, and speaker who has been writing for the New Yorker since 1996. The book takes you through many different stories all about what goes on behind the locked doors of your unconscious. Gladwell argues that we are thin slicing all the time – when we must judge an unfamiliar situation, meet a new person, interview a potential employee – that we take a small piece of a person or situation and can immediately make amazingly correct split second decisions. I believe that Gladwell very effectively makes this argument using data and examples. The book starts off by explaining the amazing and rather mind blowing studys of John Gottman. Gottman, a marriage counselor, turns the seemingly complicated issue of divorce into a simple equation. Looking at just 30 minutes of a couples conversation, Gottman can predict with 95% accuracy if the couple will still be together 15 years later (21). Amazing right? From there the book moves quickly through various examples of thin slicing. From marriages and dating, to judging a prospective employee in a snap decision, Gladwell covers it all. Firstly Gladwell uses data and studies to prove his argument that we are always thin slicing and doing so effectively. Back to Gottman’s study from earlier, Gladwell uses this data to prove to us that we don't need to spend hours days or weeks getting to know a couple before being able to effectively predict whether they will stay together or not. By taking a very thin slice of the couples conversation (30 min) Gottman can effectively predict if their marriage will last. Thus, proving to us that we do not need all the time or information in the world and that we can very effectively get the gist of something with only a small piece of information. Secondly Gladwell uses true stories/anecdotes to prove that we can, in fact, effectively make quick snap judgments. Take Gladwell’s story in the introduction for example. He tells the story of how the Getty Museum was going to buy an ancient Greek statue. They did all the normal checks to make sure that the peace with authentic and it checked out. At the last minute they had an art historian come to take a look and in an instant he decided that it was a fake. “It just didn't look right” (9). Sure enough he was right. This, Gladwell argues, is proof of your brains amazing ability to make split-second decisions without actually having all the information you might think you need. What Gladwell is saying in all of his stories is that we all have something in our brains that helps us to use the sum of all our experiences to make effective decisions without even knowing we are doing so. Your unconscious brain does it's best to give you information you might need about the situation. This lets your conscious brain focus on other things such as the actual task at hand, instead of the background information you didn't even know that you needed. Indeed, it's hard to grasp at first but by the fourth or fifth story he tells, you'll be able to fully understand what he means. Overall, Gladwell very effectively argues that we have the ability to make correct split second decisions without knowing all we may think we need to know. Blink has proven to be a very interesting book (as it should be – it's won many awards) and is definitely worth reading.

Bel libro, interessante. Aiuta a capire come funziona la prima impressione. Lo consiglio a chiunque sia interessato ai meccanismi del cervello!

Malcolm Gladwell explores how we make decisions, especially snap decisions and comes to some very interesting and profound conclusions. As an analytical sort of person I tend to rely on gathering as much information as possible before making a decision, and then still taking my time about it. The book shows that sometimes we can have too much information and that sometimes the snap judgements, aided by extensive experience, can be more accurate. Gladwell also looks at how instinctive judgements can be badly lead, the causes for these and the sort of unwanted results, even tragedies, this can lead to. His conclusion sets out ways we can overcome biases caused by these conditioned judgements. This all done in Gladwell’s incredibly engaging style of wonderfully spun true stories that illustrate something profound. Even if you learn nothing from the book, it’s worth reading it just the cases and stories and how he tells them. All in all, it’s wonderfully enthralling and thought-provoking reading.

Great book and it arrived in great conditions

Lo compré porque me salió anunciado en un libro de árboles, y me atrajeron las reseñas. Es fácil de leer, y te mantiene enganchado porque usa anécdotas del mundo real y te las va analizando "científicamente". También te da algunos consejos para "mejorar" tu intuición.

Being a great fan of „outliers“ by the same author I was really curious about „blink“ which means the incredible power of subconscious mind which is doing a lot for each and everyone of us everyday. The first part of the book exactly does this: presenting what a well trained subconscious mind can do, how it influences us everyday, how it leads our decisions and how often we do not know why we decide how we decide (and often do so correctly) – using tons of very illustrative examples and stories. The second part of the book goes into detail on how easy our very powerful subconscious can be (easily) fooled – and that we even fall into the same traps every time, again by presenting examples and stories out of real life. This awesome book is closed with a wonderful lessons learned chapter on what can be taken out of this book. Clear, well to understand language, great examples, available online material, detailed notes and index section make the book a great read which enables the interested read to dig deeper into this awesome topic. Recommend this book for readers who want to understand more about themselves as well as their environment, read this! It will turn some of your learnings upside down. 5 Stars.