Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explores the phenomenon he calls 'thin slicing'; the human ability to winnow out, in fractions of a second, salient facts from a mass of information and make a decision based on them. Something most of us do all the time without giving it much conscious thought – reading the facial expressions and body language of the people with whom we interact, walking down a busy street (or a quiet street late at night), our subconscious minds processing hundreds or even thousands of bits of information, deciding which few are important and making a judgement based on them.

Gladwell illustrates his thesis using several extended examples. The first is relatively straight forward. In 1983 California's Getty museum was show more offered a 2500 year old Greek statue, a kouros, for $10 million. All the tests said it was genuine but several art experts, at first glance and without being able to say precisely why, knew it was a fake. He also tells the stories of how an ugly chair conquered the offices of the world, how we are all effected by racial conditioning, how Chicago's Cook County hospital improved diagnosis of heart attacks by removing a physician's knowledge from the process, how a commander using WWII technology defeated the combined might of the the US armed forces in the largest ever war game, and more.

The author uses two main studies to demonstrate how this process of instant assessment works. John Gottman's 'love lab', where he gets couples to talk about a subject tangentially connected with their relationship and videos the exchange to bring out the non-verbal cues, and Paul Ekman, who is an expert of facial micro-expressions that last microseconds and over which we have no control (this latter also being the model for the excellent TV show Lie To Me with Tim Roth). Gladwell builds his argument convincingly and refers back to his examples frequently for both illustration and dramatic effect. Each example he uses shows a different facet of the Blink effect but also, and this is vital, how it can go wrong in certain circumstances.

While it is quick, this subconscious ability does require a moment to work, and can be short circuited by rushing or by an overload of adrenaline. Another case study chillingly shows what can happen when our subconscious is not given the opportunity to work properly. In 1999 an unarmed, innocent man, Amadou Diallo, was shot 41 times in the entryway of his own New York apartment building, by four policemen. He shows how a lack of experience, over-hasty action and perhaps even the over-confidence of numbers allowed these policemen to fall back on crude stereotypes and allow an initial poor assessment to lead them down a tragic course of events.

While Gladwell lauds the benefits of both listening to this subconscious supercomputer and developing the skills, in backing up the studies he constantly refers to the fact that this understanding has often been achieved by the exact opposite type of mentation – deliberate, analytical evaluation of evidence. This, along with the examples given, should show the reader that there are appropriate and inappropriate areas for this sort of thinking, although I can imagine some of the readership taking away only the face-value lesson of relying on first instincts and gut feelings. I would have liked to see a chapter on the abuse of these impressions, which is after all how con artists and frauds such as psychics operate. This could have been perhaps added into the chapter on Warren G. Harding, who was elected as US president because he was tall, handsome, masculine, dignified – and is considered by historians to be one of the worst presidents in US history. I want to take nothing away from this excellent book, however. It is superbly written, making excellent use of pacing and the storylines of the examples he uses to give the book structure. Malcolm Gladwell has a great style, authoritative and engaging, and he packs a great deal of both information and analysis into what is a quick, easy and enjoyable read. show less

38. Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Audio) by Malcolm Gladwell, read by the author (2005, 7:44, ~210 pages in paperback, listened June 8-17)
Rating: 4 stars

Another great book from Gladwell, much more science-y than Outliers or any others that I've listened to. It's the kind of book that makes you forget the author isn't actually the expert, but presenting other people's work. He just writes brilliantly. He also reads brilliantly.

The book covers the unconscious brain that does most of our "thinking" for us in a rapid speed, giving us our instincts for various impressions and feeling that we haven't had a chance to consciously work out. He looks at how powerful this is, particularly in well trained experts, and how it gets show more fooled and leads to mistakes, and on how this is manipulated in advertising and politics. And he makes it fun and fascinating, bringing in great stories. The most moving is his recount of the Amadou Diallo shooting by the NYC police, the story behind Bruce Springstein's 41 Shots.

There is just something wonderfully charming the Gladwell's exaggerated simplifications. He'll tell a story and then says, "Of course he did" and, really, it's not an of course, but damn that line sticks. I'm at the moment thoroughly charmed by Gladwell.

2015
https://www.librarything.com/topic/191940#5212765 show less

Jeepers this was an annoying book.

Its main problem is that it doesn't manage to hold to any central thesis. I think many people would pick it up thinking it's about how we make better decisions when we act instinctively, rather than over-analyze decisions.

Actually the main conclusion Gladwell draws is "it depends".

The back-up to that is that experts in a field, with years of experience, can instinctively make correct decisions, without necessarily being able to articulate precisely why. No, really.

There were some interesting bits of psychology, particularly about how articulating why we make a decison may actually be detrimental to our being able to do it (as the thing your memory stores is then your articulation of it, not the doing show more of it). However, he seems to then ignore the things he is telling us, in relying on 1st hand accounts of instinctual events, which he has told us are inherently unreliable. Gah!

As with The Tipping Point, there is quite a bit of this cherry-picking data, according to whichever way his argument is blowing at the time, and much flawed logic. For example:

* He claims that strangers judging a subject's character from their bedroom are more accurate than the subject's friends judgements. Actually he means that they more closely match the self-assessments of the subject, which may or may not be accurate.

* I'm paraphrasing, but he says that doctors that we think have a domineering tone have been "found wanting" by us, with the implication that we should ignore them. But actually he has previously said that they are simply more likely to be sued, and that that has no correlation with how many medical mistakes they make. So they have not been "found wanting" and a doctor with a nicer tone may well be a worse doctor.

* he says that that if we want to have more positive instinctive associations about black people, we should get to know some, hang out with them, become friends etc., etc. That's a nice piece of social engineering, which I am very happy to support in principle, but what he has shown earlier in the chapter is that if you want to have more positive instinctive associations actually what you want to do is think about positive black role models (MLK, Nelson Mandela) and watch international track and field events.

* Gladwell cites a statistic that displays of contempt in a relationship are correlated with number of colds suffered by the recipient of the contempt, from which he draws the conclusion the effect is so stressful that it suppresses the immune systen. What?! where does that conclusion come from? It could be the person is throwing sickies, or that they're taking long walks in the cold, or they're smoking more, etc., etc. But Gladwell seems to blithely draws these confident conclusions without pause or consideration.

Gladwell still writes engagingly (I read this in a day) and many of the anecdotes and sciencey snippets are fascinating. I feel his books would have more integrity if they were just collections of essays (or his articles). As it is he seems hidebound to find some grand overarching theme, leading him to undermine the good and interesting writing that is here. show less

Finally got around to reading this. It's interesting to me that there were sections that I found dense. Not sure what I was expecting, but the book dragged a little for me towards the end. All told, it was still really good, but I definitely think there was room to tighten. The arguments were at their best when he was marrying examples to research. No surprise there, as that is what drives his great podcast series.

This book was such a fascinating read. Although the title is a bit misleading as it sounds like some pseudo-scientific 6th sense crap, this book is nothing of that sort. In fact, this book is exactly the opposite of that; the content of the book is extensively researched with the aid of psychological case studies and isolated experiences that scientific evidence backs up. This book feels more like a meta-analysis of multiple reports written in a story-like narrative to make it more digestible to the readers.

The science behind how our brain is able to crunch unimaginable amounts of data and stimuli to accurately (and sometimes falsely) come up with a decision in a split second, is extremely interesting.

The author also tackles sensitive show more issues such as racial stereotyping and sexism through real-life examples which successfully provides an alternative perspective to scenarios which we will otherwise perceive as being black and white.

I would highly recommend this book to people who are interested in psychology or anyone who is looking forward to learn something new about themselves. Cause that is what this book exactly does; it takes a concept that you feel as if you are extremely familiar with, and provides a fresh angle that forces you to reconsider your preconceived notions. Extremely intriguing and captivating. show less

Blink is well-written, hard to put down, makes one feel he is learning yet another great secret of the universe thanks to the NY Times Bestseller List. And Amazon, of course. We live in an age of information overload. Thus, we need to have an indigestible surfeit of technical gobbledegook predigested for us like a cow predigests it curds.

Cut to the quick: basically, some of us have more blink than others. Many of us can train to improve our blink. Blink is useful, sometimes vital - remember those old 'New England Life' insurance commercials about two men talking near a tall apartment building, you know, the one who has blink looks up to see a grand piano falling right towards his companion (who doesn't have blink) and pointedly asks, show more "What's your insurance company?" Reply, "New England Life, of course! Why?"

Paradoxically, some blink is bad. For example, those implicit assumptions about people who are handsome or beautiful: Wrong! That's the Warren Harding error - the handsome, skirt-chasing nincompoop united states voters elected to the presidency in the 1920's. Bad blink. Remember U.N. ambassador Shirley Temple? Bad blink. First impressions can be dead wrong. Get it?

Information overload can stifle your blink. Regard the U. S. military or the C.I.A. as hog-tied by too much data, too much systems babble. A little Via*gra might help them get some blink. An enemy hand delivers messages, gives local commanders autonomy, strikes at will, refuses to fight pitched battles, employs lethal low-technology weapons (think: Molitov cocktail). Sound familiar? It's worked from the American revolution to Iraq. Large organizations always get their blink bent.

Thinking about something is bad. When one goes on an introspection trip, the blink takes a U-turn. Fill out a questionaire on WHY one likes something and the answer is different from the original blink impulse of liking it. Hmmmmm. Very interesting. Only experts can retain their blink whilst they report their findings to major corporations: you remember 'The Pepsi Challenge?" We flunked it. Coke is better. The experts knew it all along. They had trained their blink to stay up longer.

Lastly - I'm sure you were waiting for this review to end - there's that darned abnormal ventral temporal cortical activity shutdown. Huh! What? It turns out that when your heartbeat goes much over 170 per minute, you have about the same ability to discriminate nuances as your cocker spaniel does. Remember cops doing the Rodney Ki*ng thing? Or Amadou Dia*llo? Over forty 9mm slugs into a hapless guy who was just trying to pull out his wallet to identify himself to them. Time. Give yourself time to recover to under 150 heartbeats per minute so the deepest recesses of your frontal lobes (those are the ones you use impress your date with how bright you are) will resume functioning normally. Eh! voila. You're a reasonably normal, sensitive human being again.

This generation of readers, you my friends, doesn't read Dicken's novels to get it about how to act in society. No, you read books like this one. What you want is a techno-novel like Blink. Everything you already knew, explained to you in pleasant, condescending detail. You'll feel as you did after you finally learned how to factor quadratic equations in Intro to Mathematics 101. A little smugger. Water cooler chatter. For $25.95. Such a deal. show less

Blink is a fascinating survey of how the human mind perceives the world, especially in the first two seconds of an encounter. The author balances examples of the mind's incredible power to almost instantly and unconsciously thin slice a situation and reach amazingly accurate conclusions on the slimmest of evidence against it's own tendency to fool itself by semi-consciously over analyzing and yielding to irrelevant input.

Gladwell is a journalist, not a scientist. But that allows him the freedom to wonder far afield to bring together amazingly varied and seemingly unrelated research to build his case. When viewed together, the studies and anecdotes create a tantalizing glimpse of what seems to be happening inside our heads.

Oh, and this show more is one of the few times when having the author read the audio book works. show less