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 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking :: 0316010669
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| 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 Editorial Descriptions are usually submitted by the manufacturers, publishers and authors. Contact us if you are one of them, and wish to change the above description. |
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Author: Guest
The book is part of a new genre - the short "sum of articles" around a concept. (Think Freakonomics for the most successful of the genre) In these essays, Malcom Gladwell covers why we make decisions so quickly, why they're frequently right, and how to work around the poor decisions we can find ourselves in.
It's definitely not high science or a textbook, but it's good pop science. It'll only take a night or two to learn about our mind's ability to short-circuit our supposedly rational decisions.
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Author: Guest
Malcolm Gladwell has pulled together a series of nicely-told anecdotes about .... something. He doesn't put much effort into trying to explain what is going on, whether in fact anything interesting actually is going on, nor does he make a convincing case that the various examples he uses actually have anything in common. I couldn't see much connection among museum curators being able to recognize fake sculptures, psychologists predicting the strength of a couple's relationship based on watching a conversation, and a former Special Forces soldier using unconventional guerilla tactics to outwit the military establishment. Gladwell's journalistic background comes through in his easy writing style and lack of intellectual rigor. It's easy to read and easy to forget.
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Author: Guest
For a book essentially about good intuition and snap decisions, "Blink" is a little full of itself. The self-importance starts right on the cover: "Blink" bills itself as an illustration of the "power of thinking without thinking." Although it provides some insights for understanding how, in only a glance, certain professionals (art curators, military strategists, gourmet food tasters, etc.) develop a "gut feeling" before weighing every conceivable strand of evidence, "Blink" offers nothing to improve your own intuition and decision making skills.
One of the concepts Gladwell explores is "thin-slicing," the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. You might not conceive that a 15-minute videotape of a mundane conversation with your spouse has anything particularly relevant to say about your love life. According to Gladwell and his narration about psychologist John Gottman, however, you'd be wrong. Gottman videotaped hundreds of volunteer couples discussing a point of contention in their marriage: money, sex, pets, etc. Then he broke down behavioral responses to these discussions into groups and represented them in a mathematical form, leading to...boom!...a prediction as to whether that marriage would last.
Sounds like a stretch? Gottman followed up to see whether his calculations had made the right prediction. They sure had--with an astonishing 90 percent success rate. As a result of his experiments, Gottman reputedly could predict the future of a couple only by overhearing snippets of their conversation at a restaurant. The take-away lesson from this story may sound pedestrian, but practice makes perfect. The author is to be credited for at least drumming up some off-the-beaten-track examples to buttress his message.
Additionally, Gottman's story highlights another idea in "Blink": that less is more and overloading decision-makers with information may often hamper their reasoning. If the scientist had asked his subjects about the state of their marriage, they might lie or feel awkward or--more importantly--they may be unaware of the truth. Instead, the author claims that by thin-slicing, Gottman found a much quicker path to the truth.
Similarly, the example of Chicago's Cook County ER reinforces this idea in another context: the importance of a snap diagnosis of heart attacks to save lives. There, a doctor identified three major risk factors based on which a recommended treatment was to be followed. His algorithm, although more simplified than experts in the medical community felt comfortable with, guessed right more than 95 percent of the time compared to 75-89 percent when more laborious testing was conducted. This time out, Gladwell concludes that truly successful decision making lies in the balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking: while deliberate thinking and extensive experiments work well when we have the luxury of time, rapid cognition and the ability to thin-slice are called for when frugality matters.
Next, there is the story of a man gifted at reading facial expressions who made a fortune at horse races just by getting a good look at horses' faces before races. The ability to absorb and detect minute changes in facial expressions, Gladwell suggests, allows us to essentially "read minds." There are several chapters on how reliable we can be in predicting behavior with very little information.
Then there is the tale of Amado Diallo, an immigrant, who was shot 41 times by policemen wrongfully suspecting him of criminal behavior on the doorsteps of his own house in the Bronx. Given that the police failed to read Diallo's facial expressions and body language, the case study appears to confirm the theory that people are guided by stereotypes and prejudices when making split-second decisions. Moreover, Gladwell goes further to suggest that stressful situations lead to a temporary condition of autism that hinders our ability to interpret others' actions and intentions.
Such tales are entertaining--and certainly make for a fast read--but they come across as mere anecdotes, cherry-picked to bring a little liveliness to what might otherwise be humdrum common sense. The book teems with references to scientific studies, as if we need science to understand the importance of reading faces to understand people's true motivations and feelings.
The numerous--and seemingly incoherent--illustrations discussed by Gladwell all relate to snap decision-making skills - the kind that help managers react swiftly in high-pressure situations and anticipate people's actions by carefully observing their faces. At the end of the book, the author devotes a chapter to the problem of stereotypes, which, he implies, may deprive us from controlling what surfaces from our unconscious. But do they? Gladwell maintains that we do have control over the environment in which rapid cognition takes place and thus we can steer our decisions away from preconceived notions. Thus, the power of thin-slicing works only in combination with a cognitive realization of all the stereotypes we have grown up with - which contradicts his thesis in the very subtitle of "Blink".
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Author: Guest
How can a few experts tell in a blink of a second that a sculpture is a fake when all of the scientific tests say it is authentic?
What is examined in this book is the minds ability to make snap decisions with the barest amount of information and often doing much better than people with unlimited time and information.
I have to say that this book is very interesting and actually reflects my personality. The longer I have to think about something the more liekly I will get it wrong. I was trained as an infantry sergeant which requires snap decisions but I have been this way my whole life.
On the whole this book was a good read and I recommend it to others but I remember thinking the whole time I was reading it that all of the examples were anecdotal. I can find enough anecdotal evidence to support just about anything no matter how ridiculous. The books major failing is its ability to show any hard data to support its suppositions.
Read it but don't take it too seriously
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Author: Guest
This book reinforced some views that seem to be common sense, but it's nice to see some science behind it. The people in the world who are the best at what they do, often can't tell you why they do things they way they do...it just comes naturally.
I've been able to use some of the concepts here at my workplace to be mroe efficient. Good stuff.
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