Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (a journalist who also wrote The Tipping Point) examines the process of snap decision making. He suggests that we are wrong in thinking that we make decisions rationally by absorbing extensive information and experience. In the end we make decisions unconsciously and essentially instantly. This works great for most decisions because we learn to "thin-slice"-that is, to ignore extraneous input and concentrate on one or two cues. Sometimes, we don't even consciously know what these cues are, as in Gladwell's anecdote about a tennis coach who can predict when a player is going to make a rare sort of error but doesn't know how he knows. The book also explores how this process can go horribly wrong, as in the Amadou Diallo shooting. Gladwell gets the science facts right and has the journalistic skills to make them utterly engrossing.

I'm a rabid fan of these "how it all works" type of psychology books. Two others I fell in love with recently are The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book and The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All

An excellent book, just as good as Gladwell's previous landmark, "The Tipping Point," "Blink" is fascinating in the confirmation that "thin slice" first impressions are more than intuitive, they are the results of subconscious factual significant experience and realities, and in many cases subconscious bias. Interesting too, is the evidence that we can think "too much" and counter our "intuitive" knowledge judgments with obfuscating factual study - "introspection destroyed people's ability to solve insight problems" and, as is quoted, "what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason." I especially like the section on focus groups, how results on "first impressions" can be very wrong, "We like market research because it provides certainty...but the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty" says Gladwell. I particularly like the example of how the Aeron chair by Herman Miller failed every focus group rating it took on looks, and "likely to purchase" reviews, yet became the best selling chair in the company's history (and then focus groups reversed their scores), ditto audience reaction to the best selling situation comedies of their time, "All in the Family" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Applying the analysis to a polarizing product today in the automotive industry, as someone who is looking at the launch of the new reaction creating Ford Flex vehicle (September 23, 2008), I'm wondering whether or not what Gladwell said about the initial "looks" rating for the Aeron chair is true for the new Ford Crossover in the looks department - that is, as its very different looking, "Maybe the word `ugly' was just a proxy for `different." And when people get familiar with the `difference' time will change perception (as it did with the Ford Taurus over two decades ago). It will be interesting to see how this "real world" example of Gladwell's observations rolls out.

Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

This is probably one of the best books I have read. This book is an excellent compilation of captivating studies in very different fields, carefully selected by the author to make his point. How by artificially altering your facial expressions your mood can change (for example if you put up a sad face you get grieved), how a psychologist can tell if a marriage is going to last by studying how the couple reacts in a simulated argument, etc.

We all take decisions "in the blink of an eye", even if it is only a decision of trusting a person or not. This is how our brain works, if you like it or not. Maybe we should not call them decisions, since the word decision implies some sort of reasoning and a process of weighing pros and cons, I would also not call this process thinking without thinking. Maybe we should call them judgements or pre-judgements (prejudices).

A lot of information is stored, retrieved, compared and judged in seconds in our unconscious, a process of which we are completely unaware of. So it makes perfect sense that the more experienced and educated our unconscious is, the better these pre-judgements will be. I do not believe that a lay person would detect a false work of art by pure instinct (by a feeling of "something is wrong with this work of art"), like experts did in one of the stories. Their unconscious perceived some "anomalies" quickly, by comparison with the huge amounts of previously recorded information of this period's artistic style. The experts could not explain why they felt that way, since consciously they had not noticed the anomalies yet. On the other hand, I think that a person with deep knowledge of people might have unconsciously detected that the art dealer selling the work of art was uneasy in some way, so he might have got a "hunch" that something was wrong.

This book tells you that you should trust your gut-feelings, but that you should "nurture" them with observation and expertise to make them more precise. Since these pre-judgements are influenced by our cultural environment and far quicker than ourselves and our conscious rational minds, they are also the basis of unfair prejudices that can make you act upon them and that are difficult to override (the author even claims that in situations in which time is of the essence, they are impossible to overcome, since we react upon them before thinking). Test your "racism" and "sexism" in a brief exercise in a chapter of the book, you will be surprised...

The best is probably to let our unconscious pre-judge and then we can still decide by a thinking process. Nature gave us both abilities, let's use them both.