Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-03
• Released on: 2007-04-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.com
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

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses to focus on the most relevant 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 expensive 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 information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm, or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts his own evident 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 Magazine
Gladwell, the author of 2000's The Tipping Point, reaches to create another popular intellectual phenomenon by overturning received wisdom about how we make decisions. As in his articles for The New Yorker, where he works as a staff writer, the anecdotes throughout Blink are lively and entertaining. But the sheer quantity of stories about everything from sip tasters for Coca-Cola and the Pepsi challenge to gut reactions to "fake" art overwhelms the main theme of the book; many critics feel Gladwell isn't entirely 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, troubled and left wanting more."

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Perverse obsession
A fascinating book, but as others have pointed out too many of the ideas here rely on anecdotal information. I got the feeling after a while that the author cherry-picked the stories he wanted to tell in order to bolster his thesis, and that another researcher could just as easily have formed a different thesis about decision making by selecting different stories.

Another thing about this book that struck me, as odd, was the author's obsession with a person's appearance, particularly whether the person was short or tall. Some of the descriptions are as follows.
P22, 'he is short and very charming'
P49, `he is a small and irrepressible man'
P61, `a tall, striking woman'
P73, `his bigness of frame'
P87, `who is both on the short side - five foot nine - and black'
P99, `is tall and lean with a gleaming bald dome'
P132, `is a tall man with a runner's slender build'
P148, `is very tall and strikingly handsome'
P190, `He was short and unassuming'
P197, `He was short and thick'
P202, `although he is of medium build, he seems much larger'
P251, `is tiny'

Seldom does the person's size matter to the thesis about decision making that the author presents. Even in the last example where a woman musician is described as `tiny', Gladwell admits that her size ought not to determine whether she is hired to play the French horn. Yet throughout the book he includes a person size as though it has some importance to his argument. This just struck me as perverse, and I wondered at his 'decision' for including this mostly useless information.

No conclusion
Like someone allready said, it's a bunch of stories with no conclusion to it (and yes there even is a conclusion chapter.. but guess what.. it's another story)

Hyped book that ends up about nothing.
This book is full of promise and full of interesting stories. But ultimately, it doesn't even end up proving or disproving any of the ideas on its jacket.

Some people are good at trusting their instincts, and they end up right. Others are bad at trusting them. Other people's instincts themselves are untrustworthy. Other people don't trust their instincts. Some are right, some are wrong.

It's the equivalent of snob candy--it feels like an intellectual book, but it really doesn't say much of anything. It just makes you feel smart for a few minutes, if that.

I'd put money that no one will be talking about this book in two years. It's just the flavor of (last) month.