Blink (book)

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Author	Malcolm Gladwell
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Psychology
Publisher	Back Bay Books, Little, Brown
Publication date	January 11, 2005
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	320 p. (paperback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-316-17232-4 & ISBN 0-316-01066-9 (paperback edition)
Preceded by	The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference, 2000

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a 2005 book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he explores the power of the trained mind to make split second decisions, the ability to think without thinking, or in other words using instinct. Some of the material in the book appeared previously in Gladwell's articles for The New Yorker.

1 Summary
2 Film
3 Criticism & Reception
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Summary

After his best-selling 2000 book The Tipping Point brought the phrase "tipping point" (the moment when an idea, product or concept suddenly catches fire with the population at large) into popular usage, Gladwell, in Blink, introduces two more phrases: "blink" and "thin-slicing."

The author describes his subject as "thin-slicing": our ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones. Gladwell draws on examples from science, advertising, sales, medicine, and popular music to reinforce his ideas.

Gladwell explains how an expert's ability to "thin slice" can be corrupted by their likes, dislikes, prejudices and stereotypes, and how they can be overloaded by too much information. That is why police might be suspicious of a dark-skinned man out at night, as in the case of Amadou Diallo, when other signs would indicate that he poses no threat. Gladwell also tells us about our instinctive ability to mind read, how we can get to know what emotions a person is feeling just by looking at his or her face. He informs us that with experience, we can become masters at the game of thin slicing. Blink is not a book on mind-reading or quick decision-making.

Gladwell maintains that we "blink" when we think without thinking. We do that by "thin-slicing," using limited information to come to our conclusion. In what Gladwell contends is an age of information overload, he finds that experts often make better decisions with snap judgments than we do with volumes of analysis.

Gladwell addresses the questions about thin-slicing and gives a wide range of examples of blinking from the worlds of experts in gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce. Interspersed are accounts of scientific studies that partially, but never completely, explain the largely unconscious phenomenon that we have all experienced at one time or another in our lives.

A researcher tells the story of a firefighter in Cleveland who answered a routine call with his men. It was in the back of a one-and-a-half story house in a residential neighborhood in the kitchen. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. It should have abated, but it didn't. 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 box" 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.

Gladwell also mentions that sometimes having too much information can interfere with the accuracy of a judgment, or a doctor's diagnosis. The challenge is to identify and focus on only the most significant information. The other information could be just noise and can confuse the decision maker. Collecting more and more information, in most cases, just reinforces our judgment but does not help to make it more accurate. He explains that better judgements can be executed from simplicity and frugality of information, rather than the more common belief that greater information about a patient is proportional to an improved diagnosis.

One take-away from the book is that how we blink is a function of our experiences, training, and knowledge. For example, Gladwell claims that prejudice is so unconsciously woven into our society that, despite intentions, it can affect our blinks. Gladwell suggests this is why tall people are frequently seen as natural leaders. And, in the case of the Amadou Diallo killing in 1999, Gladwell claims it is why four policemen incorrectly thin-sliced a situation and wound up killing an innocent man by mistake.

[edit] Film

Writer and director Stephen Gaghan is to adapt the book into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.^[1]

[edit] Criticism & Reception

A table of Blink books at a Barnes & Noble in Naperville, Illinois

Richard Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago, and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit argues that Gladwell in Blink fails to follow his own recommendations regarding thin-slicing, and makes a variety of unsupported assumptions and mistakes in his characterizations of the evidence for his thesis. ^[2].

Conservative pundit Steve Sailer was also strongly critical of Blink, adding in his review that:^[3]

But as far as I can tell, his book reduces to two messages:

Go with your gut reactions, but only when they are right.
And even when your gut reactions are factually correct, ignore them when they are politically incorrect.

However, Gladwell notes particularly that in situations of high stress -- with heart rates above about 145 beats per second -- the situation is not "thin slicing" but "tunnel vision". He uses Gavin de Becker's bodyguard training as an example where responses are deliberately slowed in a violent confrontation by using training exercises. "In the beginning, their heart rate is 175. They can't see straight. Then the second or third time, it's 120, and then it's 110, and they can function," says de Becker in Blink.

The metaphor "a blink of the eye" for intuition is not original to Malcolm Gladwell. Lois Isenman divided intuition into two parts, rapid thought-like unconscious cognition (what Gladwell calls "thinking without thinking") and intuition proper, in an 1997 article. She characterized them both with the metaphor "a blink of the eye," which came to her in an unusual experience (page 4). The publisher refused Isenman's request to cite her article in the paperback version of Blink.^{[citation needed]}