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| Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | 
 enlarge | Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  948 reviews
Sales Rank: 173
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1
ISBN: 0316010669
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.44
EAN: 9780316010665
ASIN: 0316010669
Publication Date: April 3, 2007
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| Customer Reviews:
 Implicit Associations Test? September 16, 2007
40 out of 44 found this review helpful
The main idea behind "Blink," is how to make fast judgements by examining those who are very successful at doing so. I would suggest reading the conclusion first, then the whole book. The author's thesis has merit, we can learn to make better, & faster decisions when we filter out all the excess data.
Here are some of his examples. Does the new Police procedure benefit the community? Will the new medical procedure do more harm than good? Can we determine a persons character by observing their living space? The author gives various examples where the mind works based on biases that are not always in the realm of the conscience thought. That clearly is true. Mr. Gladwell is good at recognizing interesting things, whether it is rapid cognition, or a tipping point.
A fine example of this was President Warren Harding on pages 72-75, about appearances being favored over substance. But, after page 98 I felt that he posed more questions than he answered. His example about "Gulf war 2" being against a fundamentalist leader, showed historical ignorance. Saddam was always a "secular dictator." He also negates to analyze the politicizing of U.S. intelligence information about the Iraq war. It seemed simplistic not to question the premise for someones actions. His examples about the awful Police shooting in N.Y., & the music of Kenna are isolated to fit his thesis. He tries to hammer a square peg into a round hole. This illogical insistence on using matters of personal taste as proof that someone is an "expert," takes away from the positives of the book. In conclusion, I think forty Percent of the book is a worthy read. The remaining sixty percent was too anecdotal for my taste.
 Thin Slice this book November 20, 2005
34 out of 45 found this review helpful
After his bestselling book brought the phrase "tipping point" into popular usage, which is that moment when an idea, product or concept suddenly catches fire with the population at large, Malcolm Gladwell now gives us two more phrases that are likely to become equally well-known: "blink" and "thin-slicing."
We "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. What's interesting is that in our age of information overload, according to Gladwell, we often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.
The book opens with what reads like a heart-racing detective story about the discovery of a statue that initially fooled one group of art experts for being genuine and was later shown to be a fake by another group. The first group had exhaustively studied and analyzed the statue. Members of the second took one look --- "blinked" --- and declared it suspect and ultimately a forgery. And they were right. Why? How did they know? Why was the first group so wrong? Are there dangers in overanalyzing? Are we always right when we blink? Can we be wrong, even dead wrong? What is the science behind blinking? What can we learn from this phenomenon?
Gladwell addresses these questions and gives a wide range of examples of blinking from the worlds of gambling, speed-dating, tennis, war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce. Interspersed are accounts of scientific studies that partially, but never completely, explain the largely unconscious phenomenon that we have all experienced at one time or another in our lives. Nevertheless, the hypotheses, the scientific experiments, and the examples are very interesting.
A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn't. 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, which of course it wasn't. 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.
It took well over two hours of questioning for the fire lieutenant to piece together how he knew to get out. (First, the fire didn't respond as it was supposed to; second, the fire was abnormally hot; third, it was quiet when it should have been noisier given the heat.)
One take-away from the book is that how we blink is a function of our experiences, training, and knowledge. For example, prejudice is so unconsciously woven into our society that, despite our best intentions, at an unconscious level it can lead to really bad blinks. This is partly why tall people are frequently seen as natural leaders when there is no basis in reality for that belief. And, in the case of the Amadou Diallo killing in 1999, it is why four policemen incorrectly thin-sliced a situation and wound up killing an innocent man by mistake.
Gladwell is obviously fascinated by the phenomenon of blinking. Properly understood --- and properly prepared for --- it is a valid way to make decisions. Gladwell says, "A world where snap judgments and thin-slicing is taken seriously is a better place." I know some people who might object to that viewpoint, particularly when it comes to decision-making in foreign policy, but if you want an entertaining read, fast-paced, rich in entertaining anecdotes and some unusual scientific research, then BLINK is worth picking up.
Beautifully crafted nonsense February 2, 2005
33 out of 41 found this review helpful
There are a number of writers and reporters out there who never fail to impress me with their skill in gathering and presenting information and at the same time never fail to stun me with foolish conclusions. Malcom Gladwell, whose writing graces the pages of the New Yorker, is one such writer. He is such an excellent reporter and writes such beautiful prose that his readers seem to swallow even his most dubious and unjustified conclusions.
Perhaps it's simply a consequence of his narrow education, but Gladwell manages to present the grossly obvious as if it were a brilliant insight while at the same time making inferences that are just this side of nonsensical. In this he reminds me of William Greider, whose "Secrets of the Temple", although the best history and description of the US Federal Reserve system ever written, in full of nonsensical conclusions, i.e., that inflation helps fuel economic recoveries. Tell that to Jimmy Carter.
Gladwell's earlier book, "The Tipping Point", postulated that various phenomena take off once a critical point has been reached. Now put that way, it sounds profoundly obvious, and it is. Ice freezes at a critical temperature. Water boils at 100C. And so on. But Gladwell also accepts, at face value, a number of sociological theories that are without theoretical base, or even data, other than some casual observations. He doesn't, for example, touch on graph theory, which does have some bearing on the spread of phenomena.
In this book, his insight is that sometimes snap judgements are better than well-thought out ones. Again I'm reminded of Samuael Johnson's comment to a writer that "Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good." There is a good deal of recent research that looks at the processing between pereception and cognitive awareness, but when Gladwell touches on this he gets both his anatomy and his function wrong. Much of his discussion- like the fact that voters often choose attractive political candidates regardless of their qualifications- has more to do with factors other than the immediate perceptions he's trying to make a case for.
I still often enjoy reading Gladwell in the New Yorker- his recent piece on drug prices was a fine bit of reporting, even if his conclusions were not of the same caliber. But his books don't seem to be in the same category.
 Better as a magazine article October 22, 2006
28 out of 36 found this review helpful
This was a book club selection that I forced myself to finish. I was very frustrated with this book as it said the same thing over and over again. If I ever hear the term "thin-slicing" again, it will be too soon!
While some of the examples were good, there was just too much repetition. Basically, it reads like a textbook. I expected to learn how to use the information provided, rather than read the same examples over and over again. This information would have been better shared in a magazine article with a handful of examples. There is no way this book deserved the acclaim it has received. Do not waste your money.
 A very good ' blink ' indeed January 12, 2005
27 out of 31 found this review helpful
Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most brilliant non- fiction writers working today. He is a researcher and a thinker who looks into social phenomena and makes connections between diverse activities and areas of life in startling and interesting ways. While he is most known for the concept of ' the tipping point' I personally found his most remarkable essay to be on key figures in human social networks, and the way one individual may connect hundreds of even thousands different kinds of people together. In this present work which I have read the British edition of he writes about what he calls 'adaptive unconscious' about processes of mind and decision that determine much of our action in life. He opens with a consideration of the Getty Museum's considering the purchase of what seemed to be a great new discovery, a statue of a certain kind called a 'kourous. The Getty went to the greatest experts in scientifically evaluating the materials of the statue and they come up with it as genuine. However when the Getty showed the stature to people who live in the world of art history most of them instinctively recoiled from it. They made the kind of ' blink' split - second decision which bypassed their consciousness. They proved to be right. Gladwell goes on to consider ' thin- slicing' decision making in other areas, that is decision-making which is based on a very small set of experience. In his second chapter he looks at the work of a psychologist John Gottman who has developed a method of predicting whether a couple will eventually divorce through noting certain qualities revealed in a fifteen - minute conversation between them. Stonewalling, criticizing are two of the factors attended to but the key one is the degree of contempt one of the partners may have for another. But for Gladwell the focus is on understanding that it does not take a prolonged process of consciously investigating and collecting data but rather a quick- thin- slice evaluation to get to the truth of the situation. Gladwell investigates other kinds of situations in which in one case a firefighter, in another a Vietnam War veteran and Marine officer show a kind of instinctive ' right action' which would not be possible had they talked or thought too much at the wrong time and confused themselves in the process. Gladwell writes of very interesting characters , finds people of extraordinary abilities even when it comes to selling cars or tasting food. He centers on non- conventional figures who have in one way or another extraordinary gifts in ordinary life. In one chapter he looks at the diagnosis of heart- attacks in emergency room and shows how a method a researcher tried to push and had rejected for years has enabled quick, life- saving diagnosis. In this situation too he shows how too much information, too much conscious rehashing of data can interfere with a kind of quick- decision making a kind of ' in a blink' judgment. Here however it should be pointed out that Gladwell insists that in many areas of life it is only because there has been prior training, study, rehearsal that such wise- snap judgment is possible. All in all this is a richly informative and highly interesting work, a very pleasurable read.
It will take more than one blink to read, but it will be worth it.
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