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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
Buy New: $4.80
You Save: $11.19 (70%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  957 reviews
Sales Rank: 279
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 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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Amazon.com Review
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
Product Description
In his #1 bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. In BLINK, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in BLINK. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, examining case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the New Coke, Gladwell shows how the difference between good decision making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but rather with the few particular details on which we focus. BLINK displays all of the brilliance that has made Malcolm Gladwell's journalism so popular and his books such perennial bestsellers as it reveals how all of us can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 952 more reviews...
 Not an idea - a series of curious New Yorker articles January 29, 2005
489 out of 551 found this review helpful
The mistake was too try and get all of these wild animals onto the same boat. The book a series of semi-socio-scientific articles on insight and intuition. It is not a cohesive theory.
The writing is enjoyable - I read the most of it in a single plane flight. Some of the insights provide building blocks for understanding how certain professionals (people who practice a subject or skill for many years) are able to develop an additional sense about things -- gamblers, art curators, policemen. They are essentially seeing something that doesn't register at the conscious-level but provides them a gut-feel about the thing. Actually, I should say that these articles are how this MIGHT be happening - it's more speculation based on the diverse theories of a number of different researchers. Individually the stories and ideas are believable. Unfortuately, Gladwell fumbles in trying take them into some unified theory that is comprehensible let alone cohesive -- at times you wonder "where is he going with this?". Without that thread the indivudal beads get lost and fade into memory as clever ideas...and not much more. Without confidence in the grand idea, the individual pieces begin to feel simply exploratory. It's a shame because there are some remarkable ideas. He's a good documenter of curiousities of research (sort of like a Ken Burns is to historical things) so the storytelling is good enough for entertainment. Another reviewer likened it the addage about Chinese food, tasty but hungry an hour later. I agree. Flawed but still some interesting ideas to puzzle over.
 Absolutely enthralling and fascinating throughout. March 21, 2005
256 out of 315 found this review helpful
This is one of the most fascinating books I have read in some time. The book centers on the concept of how fast we really do make judgments, called "thin slicing", and how deeper analysis can sometimes provide less information than more. It is all about cognitive speed.
The concept of "thin slicing" is dissected and explained. What I found fascinating, and also common sense, is that we process information on a subconscious level, "behind the door", and process so holistically that to over analyze can actually hinder our ability to make decisions.
Several key points are applicable in business. One of the in depth studies looked at a military leader who was particularly successful. One of his more poignant observations was that a great leader needs to let the people do their work. When deciding how often to follow up "you are diverting them, now they are looking upward instead of downward. You are preventing them from resolving the situation". (Page 118) Further "allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly ... enables rapid cognition" (Page 119). It seems that most micro-management actually prevents people from successful decision making.
Another strange phenomenon occurs when we try and explain how we come to some conclusions. It seems that the more we try to analyze how we come to some conclusions the less reliable they become.
The ability to absorb and detect minute changes in facial expressions allows us to essentially "read minds" if we pay attention. There are several chapters on how reliable we can be in predicting behavior with very little information.
Overall, this book is so well written that I had a hard time putting it down. My only compliant, and it is a minor one, is that the book just ends. No summary or wrap up, just "boom", it's over. However, that is more a testament to how engaging the book is I suppose. Highly recommended!
Disambiguating the Beginningless Time Starts with a Blink of No Mind December 14, 2006
93 out of 117 found this review helpful
This book starts off with an interesting notion: There is a level of circuitry in our brain beyond our consciousness (or rather beneath it), that is capable of making sophisticated statistical judgments far quicker than our conscious minds know. This makes sense if you think about it, pattern recognition being a necessity to survival throughout the generations of any of our mammalian ancestors. If you are skeptical, Gladwell provides some nice experiments that seem to support the premise, lab experiments demonstrating physiologic reactions to patterns before the subjects can consciously verbalize the pattern or even alter their own strategy to these patterns. Somewhere deep in our minds is a great calculator, unshakably logical by design. But the conscious mind complicates things, because we desire certain outcomes and thus, also demonstrable, we are more likely to believe things we want to believe.
Gladwell's suggestion is that we can benefit from training our minds to hear the little calculator, that the best decisions are the ones made in a blink. What we call gut feelings and intuitions are actually the more dispassionate mechanism lying within.
To me it seems that there are certain kinds of analyses that benefit from being made in that logical processor and others that are hindered. After nearly a decade in school or training, my tendency is to think in medical analogies. Any radiologist that has been reading chest X-rays consistently for over ten years is welcome to interpret my films in a blink. And cardiologist who has been interpreting EKG's consistently for over ten years is welcome to eyeball my EKG and diagnose me in seconds. In my field, the answer is more complicated, which is one of the reasons it never gets dull. In Psychiatry, a pharmacologist who goes from symptoms to diagnosis to treatment in a linear fashion can probable do so in the twenty minute visits that are now the insurance industry's dictated standard. Likewise, a well trained psychoanalyst, a specialty equally prone to simplistic reduction, can come up with one of their fairy tales in a matter of seconds. But a broad-minded psychiatrist who employs a combination of psychotherapeutic modalities in the context of prescribing medications, a doctor who integrates thoughts on the mind, the brain, and the body that houses it, should not be coming to conclusions in a blink. Less is more only when less is more. However, Gladwell's book does a universal service in alerting us that this is in fact what we are prone to do whether we know it or not. Good mindfulness is being tuned in to our pattern recognizing processors, but also knowing when to feed it and when to starve it, realistically confronting it when called for and then immediately resetting it so it stands as a linchpin. It stands as the stake that tethers the generous leash of our doggie Buddha Brains, giving us some slack but then snapping us back, always reminding us it's there, the Now that cradles the past and imagines the future.
This is a worthy read. Good food for thought. It's good to once in a while stop and think about how you stop and think about how you stop and think. So thumbs up. Stuff it in the novelty oversized sock of a loved one this holiday season. Along with a couple of those little nip bottles of Tanqueray, a handful of lottery scratch tickets, and some Sudoku pages from last June of your forgotten Sudoku-a-day 2006 calendar. Okay. What else can I tell you?
 A disappointment January 14, 2005
70 out of 81 found this review helpful
I am a great admirer of Malcolm Gladwell's writing, having read him for years in "The New Yorker" and loving "The Tipping Point," his earlier book. But "Blink" is no "Tipping Point."
The idea here is that people often have intuitive first impressions that are more valid and valuable than carefully considered, well-thought-out, researched conclusions. Except when they aren't, because first impressions of individuals, for example, can be clouded by (and Gladwell even discusses this) such matters as attractiveness, gender, race -- and even height (what Gladwell calls the "Warren Harding" error). And how are we to know when our quick-as-a-blink reaction is valid and when it isn't? Well, that's the problem with the book. Ever experienced love-at-first-sight and then realized the person wasn't really everything you thought s/he was...?
This entire book flies in the face of an excellent article Gladwell wrote in 2000 called "The New-Boy Network" [...] about how worthless the typical job interview is (because it relies too much on gut impressions) and how "structured interviews" are the only worthwhile ones (an excerpt from the article: "This interviewing technique is known as "structured interviewing," and in studies by industrial psychologists it has been shown to be the only kind of interviewing that has any success at all in predicting performance in the workplace. In the structured interviews, the format is fairly rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are carefully trained, and each applicant is rated on a series of predetermined scales.")
Even examples he uses in this book are not very on-target, such as the Red/Blue military exercise he spends a considerable amount of time discussing. He implies repeatedly that the victory of the Reds was due to thin-slicing and their quick judgments, but by his own description a lot of well-thought-out strategic decisions about communications, etc., really were at the heart of the victory, not intuitive decisions made in the blink of an eye.
On the other site of the intuition vs. analysis coin, a very good read is Michael Lewis's "Moneyball." Central to that book, with applications well beyond its baseball setting, is the realization that the gut reactions of seasoned baseball scouts are often unreliable, being clouded by how a player looks rather than his actual on-field accomplishments. A more analytical approach has helped Oakland make the playoffs repeatedly with a salary a third (now a quarter) that of the Yankees -- and also was at the heart of general manager Theo Epstein's player moves that helped the Red Sox win the World Series.
Gladwell certainly loves the social sciences, and runs all over the landscape discussing various experiments, theories, etc., but it doesn't really come together here like it did in "The Tipping Point," or in many of his articles. My "thin slice" (as Gladwell would say): a disappointment.
 Don't bother -- a gadfly jumping for headlines. April 13, 2005
40 out of 48 found this review helpful
Malcom Gladwell is really eating his own dog food. In Tipping Point he discussed how you create buzz and get your ideas into the mass market and market acceptance. He has executed this plan with Blink -- a book that basically reviews psych studies conducted by others in the 80's and 90's into an interested but uninspiring tale.
Gladwell is pushing the book in every avenue possible -- inclduing a segement on CNN entitled "are you a racist?" A piece of jaundiced journalism if I have ever seen one. Generating buzz by this means is low and beneath any credible author. I stopped reading the book and decided to write this reveiw after seeing the piece on 4/12/05
The material in Blink is mildly interesting, but its not Gladwell's work. He is at best an editor putting interesting ideas and stories together to tell a story, not provide soemthing to help you improve your business.
The Tipping point brought you ideas from the 1970's and this book does much the same. I am not smarter nor more aware after reading this book. It is shameless commerce and promotion for Gladwell's brand that I would rather not participate in.
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