BOOK REVIEW

About the Book

Name of the Book : Blink - The Power of Thinking Without Thinking’
Author : Malcolm Gladwell
Pages : 288 pages (Hardcover)
Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (January 11, 2005)
About the Author
1. Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since
1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he
was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
2. He is the author of "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big
Difference," (2000) and "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005), both of
which were number one New York Times bestsellers.
Summary of the Book
3. This book talks about the decisions that we are able to plan in the blink of an eye.
The decisions that most people would think would take months to conclude can just as
accurately take three minutes, with the right data and experience, to conclude. This
rapid formulation of an opinion is called thin slicing, where someone uses their past
experiences and expertise to form an opinion. A person can thin slice without even
knowing that they are thin slicing. The book talks about how our adaptive unconscious
is able to not only start to make these decisions for us without us being consciously
aware but also our adaptive conscious is able to send messages throughout our body
that allow us to begin to react without being consciously aware of why we are reacting in
a certain way.
4. There is also a down side to thin slicing. Because most of thin slicing is based on
personal experiences, sometimes these experiences can lead us to make the wrong
decisions or conclusions. For instance, the book gives an example of a car dealer who
judges someone who walks through the door based upon their race, age, or by what
they are wearing. This, often, has led to the wrong decision and consequently, the car
dealer has lost out on the commission. In cases such as these, it is usually impossible
to thin slice based upon what someone looks like when they walk through the door,
therefore it is best to get to know the person before making any judgments. In cases
where someone has a negative view about certain races and therefore make incorrect
judgments about people of that race, the author offers advice on training your adaptive
unconscious to be unbiased so that you may be able to make better and more accurate
snap decisions.
Review on Contents
5. 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 experts 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". However, controversy still surrounds the
Kouros as there is no consensus on whether it is genuine or a forgery.
6. Gladwell 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 door" 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.
7. 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 for an hour, Gottman can predict whether that couple will be married in 15
years with 95% accuracy. If he analyzes them for 2 hours, his accuracy diminishes to
90%. This is one example of when "thin slicing" works.
8. The studies of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who created the Facial Action Coding
System (FACS), indicates that a lot of “thin slicing” can be done within seconds by
unconsciously analyzing a person’s fleeting look called a micro expression. Ekman
claims that the face is a rich source of what is going on inside our mind and although
many facial expressions can be made voluntarily, our faces are also governed by an
involuntary system that automatically expresses our emotions.
Comments about the Book
9. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently
inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up
stumbling into error? How do our brains really work – in the office, in the classroom, in
the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are
impossible to explain to others? For the answers to these you will have to read
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink – The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
10. In Blink, Gladwell revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink
is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in
an instant – in the blink of an eye – that actually aren’t as simple as they seem.
There are lots of books that tackle broad themes that analyze the world from great
remove. This is not one of them. Blink is concerned with the very smallest
components of our everyday lives – the content and origin of those instantaneous
impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new
person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions
of stress.
11. Gladwell says that we live in a world that assumes the quality of a decision is
directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. When doctors are faced
with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests, and when we’re uncertain about what
we hear, we ask for a second opinion. And what do we tell our children? Haste makes
waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We
believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and
spending as much time in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision
making. But Gladwell says there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when
haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer
a much better means of making sense of the world.
12. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very
quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately. So,
when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? Answering
that question is the second task of Blink. When our powers of rapid cognition go awry,
they go awry for a very specific and consistent set of reasons, and those reasons can
be identified and understood. Gladwell believes it’s possible to learn when to listen to
that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it. The third and most
important task of Blink is to convince you that our snap judgments and first
impressions can be educated and controlled. Just as we can teach ourselves to think
logically and deliberately, Gladwell says we can also teach ourselves to make better
snap judgments.
13. In Blink you’ll read about doctors and generals and coaches and furniture
designers and musicians and countless others, all of whom are very good at what they
do and all of whom owe their success, at least in part, to the steps they have taken to
shape and manage and educate their unconscious reactions. The power of knowing, in
that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. Gladwell says it
is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
14. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology Blink changes the way
you’ll understand every decision you make. Gladwell believes and hopes that by the
end of his book you’ll believe it as well – that the task of making sense of ourselves
and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the
blink of an eye as there is in months of rational analysis. After reading his book, never
again will you think about thinking the same way!
Conclusion
15. There is in all of our brains, Gladwell argues, a mighty backstage process, which
works its will subconsciously. Through this process we have the capacity to sift huge
amounts of information, blend data, isolate telling details and come to astonishingly
rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something. 'Blink' is a book
about those first two seconds.