Blink

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Author	Malcolm Gladwell
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Psychology, Popular Psychology
Publisher	Back Bay Books, Little, Brown
Publication date	January 11, 2005
Media type	print (hardback & paperback) & audiobook
Pages	320 p. (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-316-17232-4 & ISBN 0-316-01066-9 (paperback edition)
Preceded by	The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, 2000
Followed by	Outliers: The Story of Success, 2008

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell. It popularizes research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious; mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information. It considers both the strengths of the adaptive unconscious, for example in expert judgment, and its pitfalls such as stereotypes.

Summary

The author describes the main subject of his book as "thin-slicing": our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones. Gladwell draws on examples from science, advertising, sales, medicine, and popular music to reinforce his ideas. Gladwell also uses many examples of regular people's experiences with "thin-slicing."

Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes and dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes (even unconscious ones), and how they can be overloaded by too much information. Gladwell also tells us about our instinctive ability to mind read, which is how we can get to know what emotions a person is feeling just by looking at his or her face.

We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than they do with volumes of analysis.

Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce.

Gladwell also mentions that sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgment, or a doctor's diagnosis. The challenge is to identify and focus on only the most significant information. The other information could be just noise and can confuse the decision maker. Collecting more and more information, in most cases, just reinforces our judgment but does not help to make it more accurate. He explains that better judgments can be executed from simplicity and frugality of information, rather than the more common belief that greater information about a patient is proportional to an improved diagnosis.

The book argues that intuitive judgment is developed by experience, training, and knowledge. For example, Gladwell claims that prejudice can operate at an intuitive unconscious level, even in individuals whose conscious attitudes are not prejudiced. An example is in the halo effect, where a person having a salient positive quality is thought to be superior in other, unrelated respects. Gladwell uses the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, where four New York policemen shot an innocent man on his doorstep 41 times, as another example of how rapid, intuitive judgment can have disastrous effects.^[1]

Research and Examples

• A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in a kitchen in the back of a one-story house in a residential neighborhood. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it did not. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here," and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP. What is interesting to Gladwell is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From what Gladwell calls "the locked box" in our brains, our fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision. In fact, if the fireman had deliberated on the facts he was seeing, he would have likely lost his life and the lives of his men.

• The book begins with the story of the Getty kouros, which was a statue brought to the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. It was proved by many experts to be legitimate, but when people first looked at it, their initial responses said something was not right. For example, George Despinis, head of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, said "Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground could tell that that thing has never been in the ground". Later it was proven that these experts "blink moment" was correct. The statue was a fake.

• John Gottman is a researcher well known for his work on marital relationships. His work is explored in Blink. After analyzing a normal conversation between a husband and wife, Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15 years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 15 minutes, his accuracy reduces to 90%. This is one example of when "thin slicing" works.^[2]

Criticism and reception

Richard Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, argues that Gladwell in Blink fails to follow his own recommendations regarding thin-slicing, and makes a variety of unsupported assumptions and mistakes in his characterizations of the evidence for his thesis.^[3]

Joshua Correll, a University of Chicago professor renowned for his research on racial bias, stereotyping, and prejudice,^[4] taught a class on Blink (Course Number: PSYC 24500). The course description read as follows:

"This small seminar is a reading and discussion of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which addresses a variety of psychological topics (e.g., impression formation, close relationships, racial bias). Each week we compare sections of this book to the experimental literature on which they draw, critically considering Psychology (sscd) 475 these diverse areas of academic research and issues involved in communicating such work to the general public." ^[5]

"You can't judge a book by its cover. But Gladwell had me at hello — and kept me hooked to the final page." Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly

"The book features the fascinating case studies, skilled interweavings of psychological experiments and explanations and unexpected connections among disparate phenomenon that are Gladwell's impressive trademark." Howard Gardner, The Washington Post

"If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you'll be delighted. If you want to trust my more reflective second judgment, buy it: you'll be delighted but frustrated, troubled and left wanting more." David Brooks, New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Mr. Gladwell is a gifted storyteller, able to find memorable characters and delightful anecdotes wherever he goes. But for much of the book, he struggles to figure out what he really wants to say." George Anders, Wall Street Journal

"Smart, provocative but slippery... Too much of "Blink" reads like a longish string of features from the New Yorker." David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

"As a researcher, Gladwell doesn't break much new ground. But he's talented at popularizing others' research. He's a clever storyteller who synthesizes and translates the work of psychologists, market researchers and criminologists." Bob Minzesheime, USA Today

Film

Writer and director Stephen Gaghan is to adapt the book into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which is set to come out in 2011. The main character (DiCaprio) has a special gift to read people's faces and body language. He uses this ability in the corporate world but ends up helping his rich father win a lawsuit by observing potential judges in the case.^[6]

Topics mentioned in Blink

• Millennium Challenge 2002 and Paul K. Van Riper
• Kenna
• Pepsi Challenge and New Coke
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show
• Getty kouros
• Cook County Hospital
• Amadou Diallo

See also

• Gavin de Becker
• Paul Ekman
• John Gottman
• Think—a book by Michael R. LeGault that claims to refute Blink
• Interpersonal perception

References

External links

• Official website
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - WikiSummaries: Free Book Summaries
• Blink (2009) at the Internet Movie Database