Product Description

How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? Thats the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life. The result is a book that is surprising and transforming. Never again will you think about thinking the same way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3368 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
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

Intuition is No Simple Subject Matter to "Thin-Slice" - Gladwell does it Well!
Gladwell (intuition/"thin-slicing"), Coleman (emotional intelligence/"limbic high-jacking"), De Bono (lateral thinking/"water logic")... Brains within brains... Thinking without thinking... Thinking about thinking... The states of non-duality and no-mind of not thinking at all and just being...

The lotus of consciousness is still flowering, it seems... The pollen of popularization is still spreading across the printing presses... And we, the readers, violently sneeze out the allergies of oblivion as we thumb through the pages of these operating manuals for our consciousness...

Excuse the late-night reviewing poetics. Seriously: be glad Gladwell writes so well - intuiton is no simple subject matter to "thin-slice."


Pavel Somov, Ph.D., Author of "Eating the Moment: 141 Mindful Practices to Overcome Overeating One Meal at a Time" (New Harbinger, Nov. 2008)

Blink - A Must Read
"Blink" almost instantly made it to my shelf of favorite books of all time. I won't go into a detailed description of Gladwell's theory of thin-slicing, as other reviewers have already done this in all the detail you need to know before you decide to purchase this book (which I highly recommend you do) Instead, I'll tell you what I took away from "Blink", and why I think it's such an important read.

"Blink" is more than just a series of entertaining anecdotes that support his theory. It is a book of lessons that provide insight into our minds, and the minds of those around us. Armed with this knowledge, we are better prepared to not only understand our own decision-making process, but to see, for a blink of an eye, what others are seeing when they make decisions about us. Many of the experiments and studies he describes contain information that can be directly applied to one's life.

A good example of this is the study done in Germany that turns our idea of `feeling happy' on its head. While everyone knows that when you're happy, you smile, a team of German scientists found that it works in reverse as well. The simple act of smiling improves your mood. One could just take this interesting factoid and store it in the lumber room of your mind along with all the other trivia. I chose to make it relevant. I can't tell you how many times it's happened since reading this book that I felt angry, frustrated, impatient, or irritated in some way, and then turned my mood around just by forcing myself to smile for a little bit.

Another sub-chapter of the book ("Arguing with a Dog") describes what Gladwell calls "temporary autism", a kind of mind-blindness that occurs when one is excited or stressed to the point that the heart rate rises above 145. I found this chapter very helpful in understanding the physiological process, as my work often requires me to deal with very stressed out people. (It helped with some easily excitable friends too!)

The sub-chapter titled `The Storytelling Problem", which detailed the vast difference between what people say they want in a mate and what they are in fact attracted to, made me feel a lot better after reading it. After years of hearing women describe their "perfect man" to me, and then seeing them fall for a perfect jerk instead, I've gotten more than a little frustrated. But now I know there is a psychological reason for this insanity. I wish I could make every single woman in the country read this chapter (or at least the single women in my city!) On a similar note, I wish I could make everyone read the chapter called "The Warren G. Harding Error", which details the power of looks and our subconscious predilection for "tall, dark, and handsome" men. This chapter is especially relevant in an election year, when we are looking at our two candidates and judging them. Do we really know upon what basis we are judging? Are TRULY picking the best man for the job, or are we voting on who has made the more "presidential" first impression? As much as most people won't admit that race plays any part in their vote, mightn't it anyway, even among those people who truly DO deplore racism? Do we like a candidate because of what he or she truly stands for, or are we voting for them because they smile more often, or joke more often, or were wearing our favorite color the first time we saw them? One section of the book even describes how people can be "primed", subtly influenced to think and behave differently, at least in the short term. Are we, as voters, being "primed" by the various media? I think these are all very valid and relevant questions we need to ask ourselves.

This is what I took away from "Blink"- a deeper understanding of the decision-making process, and what factors assist or subvert it. "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory" is a portrait of a decision-making model that works. "Pepsi's Challenge" describes a situation where thin-slicing doesn't work out. "The Chair of Death" describes an interesting hiccup in the thin-slicing process, where peoples' initial reaction can be negative, not because something is genuinely bad, but simply because it is unfamiliar. And "Blink in Black and White", which not only relates the problem of automatic subconscious racial stereotyping (even of ones OWN race) but supplies a test you can do yourself, was nothing less than chilling.

OK, Gladwell is a writer, not a scientist. If you're looking for an airtight theory complete with control group testing and a detailed analysis of every possible permutation of the concept, go read a scientific journal. And, as another reviewer pointed out, he does tend to end his books with a thud rather than a conclusion. Nonetheless, I think this should be required reading in every American high school. The idea is that compelling, and the issues involved are that important.

Not a must read book
Let me start by saying that each chapter in the book is very interesting, easy to read and engaging. A real page turner from this point of view.

Now, having said that, as a whole I couldn't see what was the author getting at through the book. The book starts with the premise that some people can make a snap decision about something and be right, which is interesting. But then, the book goes into chapter after chapter of examples on exemptions to this. Which at the end feels like the original premise is completely false. The only conclusion I could get is that some expert in something might be able to make a quick decision and be right, which is mostly chance alone.

So in essence I found this book to be mostly unimportant.