Malcolm Gladwell
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Genre: Nonfiction (Science)
Book Summary:
Using many different examples, Gladwell discusses the choices we seem to make in an instant. Sometimes these choices and hunches are correct, but sometimes our unconscious decision-making processes fail us. Gladwell argues that it takes a great deal of prior, well-thought out experience for people to develop the ability to unconsciously pick the right cues out of maybe only seconds worth of information (Gladwell calls this ability thin-slicing). Unfortunately, our culture has trouble trusting these "hunches", however accurate they may be, because we put more faith in quantitative data than in "gut feelings". It doesn't help that people who have developed these unconscious skills are generally not able to articulate why they know what they know. A bit of wariness about these unconscious decisions can also be good, however, because there are things that can interfere with their accuracy - unconscious biases, for instance. Finally, even these snap decisions require a little bit of processing time. If we don't have the ingrained experience necessary, and if we are too rushed, then we may focus too much on the wrong choice.
Geographical Setting: various places in the United States
Time Period: 1920s to modern day (2005)
Appeal Characteristics:
This book's biggest draw is its large number of interesting and engaging examples, covering many different topics. For instance, as an initial illustration of unconcious decisions, Gladwell writes about a statue the J. Paul Getty Museum in California purchased. All the scientific tests they did indicated that the statue was real, but the experts they brought in instinctively felt it was a fake - the experts turned out to be correct, but they couldn't articulate, at the time, why they thought it was a fake. Some of the other examples the author uses to illustrate various parts of his argument are the Pepsi Challenge, the Millennium Challenge (an expensive U.S. war game), and the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx in 1999. These are only a few of the examples the author uses - there are many more. Some of the examples generate the excitement of a thriller or a mystery. For instance, the example involving the shooting in the Bronx felt like a mystery, in which the officers' reasons for shooting Diallo were slowly unraveled using, among other things, observations about the perceptions of autistic people. The Millennium Challenge example was more thriller-like, as excitement built over which side would win the war game, and how. Another appeal of this book is that readers can view much of what is discussed in this book through the lens of their own lives. Gladwell can give readers ideas about why they might actually prefer Coke over Pepsi, despite the results of the Pepsi challenge, as well as the things their minds do when they are trying to make split-second decisions at work, on the road, or at home. The book's pacing is very stop-and-go: the individual examples are fast-paced, while the transitions between them can slow things down a little, and the book constantly jumps from one example to the next, interrupting ongoing examples. The book features some interesting people. For example, there is the successful car salesman, the man who studies the potential success/failure of marriages, and the military maverick who won the Millennium Challenge the first time it was done. Gladwell focuses less on the people themselves and more on what these people can do or have done, however.
Read-alikes: Daniel Goleman's Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships is suggested for readers who would like another nonfiction science book that includes a wide variety of examples involving interesting people, from a multitasking baker in New York to a U.S. commander in Iraq who diffused a tense situation by having his soldiers lower their weapons and smile. John Gottman's Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last is suggested for readers who want more detail on a specific example of thin-slicing; this upbeat and easy-to-follow book describes Gottman's studies of married couples, explains his analyses of the characteristics of healthy and unhealthy marriages, and gives advice (making it more explicitly practical than Blink). Gottman's relationship research was mentioned in a section of Blink. Readers who would like to read a refutation of the arguments in Blink might want to try Think!: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye by Michael R. LeGault. LeGault writes about the danger of not thinking critically, and like Blink, uses examples that deal with a wide variety of subjects and situations. Readers who do not necessarily want another book dealing primarily with human psychology, but who would like another fun and interesting nonfiction book that deals with a variety of examples through the lens of an overarching subject might try Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. In this book, the authors use the analytical tools of economics to address questions that may, at first, seem not to have too much in common with economics, like the organizational structure of crack gangs and the influence of parents on child development. Readers who would like to try fiction dealing with some of the same subjects discussed in Gladwell's book have many options. For instance, readers who found Gladwell's discussion of autism interesting might try Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery story from the point of view of an autistic boy who wants to figure out who killed his neighbor's dog. Another example, readers who enjoyed Gladwell's exciting, mystery-like section on the Getty Museum's forged statue may want to try The Raphael Affair (Jonathan Argyll and Flavia DiStefano Mystery, Book 1) by Iain Pears, a former art historian. The book centers on several members of Italy's Art Theft Detection Squad as they deal with a recently recovered Raphael painting, forgery, fraud, arson, and murder.
Red Flags: may be perceived as having too much of a left-wing bias (the Millennium Challenge example is pretty critical of the military, specifically those higher up on the chain of command, and one of the people the author interviewed about facial expressions was sympathetic towards Bill Clinton); in one of the examples, police officers shoot a man - the shooting is described, but there are no gruesome and bloody details; the huge number of really varied examples means that the argument as a whole often tends to lose focus; readers who go into this thinking that it is a book of advice about how to improve your decision-making abilities will be disappointed, since, although the book's information can help you evaluate how you are already making snap decisions, there isn't really any advice on how to improve your abilities
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