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About Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is a writer for the New Yorker magazine. He is the author of three books, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” (2000) , “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (2005), and “Outliers: The Story of Success” all of which are bestsellers.
About the book
Blink is a book regarding how we think without thinking, when it comes to selections that seem to be made in an instant – in the blink of an eye – that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why do a good deal of people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? Why are a good deal of humans brilliant decision makers, while others are systematically wrong? How do our brains actually work in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best conclusions often those that are inconceivable to explain to others? Blink changes the way you comprehend each decision you make.
Using Blink
Blink reveals that great decision manufacturers aren’t those who procedure the most info or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of thin-slicing – filtering the very few constituents that matter from an overpowering number of variables. I genuinely liked the book. I believe in statistics, but I also believe that once in a while the right answer just cannot be confirmed with numbers. If you only rely on numbers you now and then miss out on doing the right thing. You may use the technique of thin slicing that is explained in Blink in your own business and personal live. Trusting on your intuition when you make decisions. Think without thinking and make the right decision and be successful.
Blink The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking
In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we comprehend the world within.
Blink is a book in regards to how we think without thinking, with regards to selections that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that genuinely aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are a lot of people brilliant decision makers, while others are systematically inept? Why do galore people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains in truth work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best conclusions often times those that are totally unlikely to explain to others?
In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a bogus at a glance. Here, too, are outstanding failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.
Blink reveals that outstanding decision makers aren’t those who procedure the most selective information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of “thin-slicing”-filtering the very few components that matter from an overpowering number of variables.
ReviewBlink is in regards to the original two seconds of looking–the decisive glimpse 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 exploration into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, merchandising cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think little 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 info to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell includes caveats when it comes to leaping to conclusions: marketers may manipulate our original impressions, high arousal moments make us “mind blind,” focusing on the defective cue leaves us vulnerable to “the Warren Harding Effect” (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that discloses the “dark side of blink,” he illuminates the failure of rapid psychological result of perception learning and reasoning in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies regarding autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one may only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell’s ideas regarding what Blink Camp might look like. –Barbara Mackoff
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling capacity to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this agreeably diverting and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people’s intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he may parse for popular readers the intricacies of arousing and attention holding but little-known fields like professional feed tasting (why does Coke taste dissimilar from Pepsi?). Gladwell’s conclusion, after studying how persons make instant conclusions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we may make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most applicable facts—and that less input (as long as it’s the right input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this counterintuitive truth is the most pricey war game ever conducted by the Pentagon, in which a wily marine officer, playing “a rogue military commander” in the Persian Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision making and data overload. But if one sets isolated Gladwell’s dazzle, a heap of questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are necessitated to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that in truth educating the doctor’s decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor’s hands exclusively and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own apparent pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an underlying truth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks MagazineGladwell, the author of 2000’s The Tipping Point, reaches to develop another frequent intellectual phenomenon by overturning received wisdom with regards to how we make decisions. As in his articles for The New Yorker, where he works as a staff writer, the anecdotes allround Blink are lively and entertaining. But the sheer amount of stories when it comes to everything from sip tasters for Coca-Cola and the Pepsi challenge to gut reactions to “fake” art overwhelms the main theme of the book; a heap of critics feel Gladwell isn’t exclusively sure what his theme is. David Brooks of The New York Times Book Review sums up the critical consensus nicely: “If you want to trust my snap judgment, buy this book: you’ll be delighted. If you want to trust my more reflective second judgment, buy it: you’ll be delighted but frustrated, bothered and left wanting more.” Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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Most helpful client reviews
419 of 449 humans found the following review helpful.
 Don’t make a snap judgement buying this book
By E. Freeman
Well, as a huge fan of Gladwell’s last book, The Tipping Point, I was excessively affected emotionally last week to ultimately get my hands on his new effort: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This time around Gladwell’s basic thesis is that often snap judgements (what he calls “thin slicing”) may be more exact than well researched, careful analysis. Gladwell uses a heap of examples (most are interesting) to demonstrate this conduct such as determining when art is faked, sizing up car buyers, picking presidential nominees and determining the characteristics of a person by watching their living space. This has always been Gladwell’s talent: taking just-under-the-radar topics and bringing them into the public’s view through outstanding journalism and storytelling.
Gladwell is likewise careful to thoroughly examine the flipside of this phenomenon: the times when “thin slicing” misleads us or gives us the defective results. For instance, he presents examples where the mind works based on biases that don’t inevitably enter the realm of conscious thought, but are nonetheless there (age, race, height, and so on).
It’s a outstanding topic and Gladwell sets it up with a good deal of terrifi examples, but then the book begins to have problems. First, the book is a little too anecdotal. Anyone who has ever had a 200-level psych class knows that what looks like cause and effect may be accounted for by an independent variable that wasn’t considered (e.g., concluding cancer rates are higher in a good deal of area of the country because of pollution, when in fact the area has higher smoking rates as well). Given this, I found that too ofttimes conclusions are made on basic handwaving, or that primary distinct features of studies are not mentioned. For instance, Gladwell describes a study were observers are asked to determine sure characteristics (such as truthfulness, consciensciousness, etc.) of students by observing their dorm rooms; but, never does he mention how incisively one would determine these characteristics of persons in a scientific manner for comparison. Such omissions leave the reader a little less than convinced.
Nevertheless, even with this flaw the introductory third of the book supports the thesis and makes for the general agreeably diverting reading; but things derail from there. The examples get started to seem more peripheral: a rogue commander beating the traditionalisti forces in a war game exercise, an artisan known as Kenna who apparently will have to have made it huge but didn’t (why this example is interesting I’ve yet to figure out), and numerous rehash in regards to coke vs pepsi from one of his older articles.
By the end of the book the whole thing derails into examples that just don’t seem suitable for the topic. Sure a study of why Pepsi always does better than Coke in blind tastes tests is interesting (and you may read his article on this without buying the book on Gladwell’s web site), but does a study of “sips” vs “whole-can drinking” – persons prefer sweet for sips (Pepsi) – actually say something with regards to unconscious rapid cognition?
One of Gladwell’s greatest amount of energy is in recognizing interesting things, and then bringing them into conscious consciousness so we in truth realize these things are happening (whether it be tipping points or rapid cognition). I think he’s partly achieved that in this book, but it doesn’t come together the way the Tipping Point does. One gets the idea that this topic may have been better handled in an article rather than a full blown book.
652 of 733 persons found the following review helpful.
 Not an idea – a series of curious New Yorker articles
By Eric Antonow
The fault was too try and get all of these wild animals onto the same boat. The book a series of semi-socio-scientific articles on clear or deep perception and intuition. It is not a united theory.
The writing is gratifying – I read the most of it in a single plane flight. Some of the perceptivities provide building blocks for understanding how sure pros (people who exercise a subject or skill for galore years) are capable to invent an further and added sense when it comes to things — gamblers, art curators, policemen. They are basically seeing something that doesn’t register at the conscious-level but provides them a gut-feel when it comes to the thing. Actually, I must say that these articles are how this MIGHT be happening – it’s more speculation based on the diverse theories of a number of dissimilar researchers. Individually the stories and ideas are believable. Unfortuately, Gladwell fumbles in attempting take them into a good deal of unified theory that is comprehensive let alone merged — 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 selfconfidence in the grand idea, the person pieces get started to feel merely exploratory. It’s a shame because there are a good deal of remarkable ideas. He’s a good documenter of curiousities of exploration (sort of like a Ken Burns is to historical things) so the storytelling is good sufficient for entertainment. Another reviewer likened it the addage when it comes to Chinese food, tasty but hungry an hour later. I agree. Flawed but still a good deal of interesting ideas to puzzle over.
159 of 186 persons found the following review helpful.
 A disappointment
By Louis Gudema
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 oftentimes have intuitive introductory impressions that are more valid and valuable than conservatively considered, well-thought-out, researched conclusions. Except when they aren’t, because primary impressions of individuals, for example, may be beclouded 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 genuinely everything you thought s/he was…?
This entire book flies in the face of an splendid article Gladwell wrote in 2000 called “The New-Boy Network” [...] in regards to how unworthy the typical occupation consultation is (because it relies too much on gut impressions) and how “structured interviews” are the only suitable ones (an excerption 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 reasonably rigid. Each applicant is treated in precisely the same manner. The questions are scripted. The interviewers are conservatively 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 significant 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 conclusions when it comes to communications, etc., genuinely were at the heart of the victory, not intuitive conclusions made in the blink of an eye.
On the other internetsite of the intuition vs. analysis coin, a very good read is Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball.” Central to that book, with apps well beyond it is baseball setting, is the realization that the gut reactions of seasoned baseball scouts are many times unreliable, being beclouded 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 ordinary manager Theo Epstein’s player moves that helped the Red Sox win the World Series.
Gladwell surely loves the social sciences, and runs all over the landscape talking about respective experiments, theories, etc., but it doesn’t actually come together here like it did in “The Tipping Point,” or in numerous of his articles. My “thin slice” (as Gladwell would say): a disappointment.
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