Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

3.5 stars

n  This will be a fascinating book to talk about at book club tonight!n

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is in interesting look into the power of intuition and snap judgements. Malcolm Gladwell delves into the concept of thin-slicing, a concept on how our subconscious mind will make accurate decisions in the blink of an eye.

The book is filled with examples or case studies of this concept. I listened to this in audio format and liked how he's using those examples to show the concept of thin-slicing.

At the same time, there's unanswered questions in the book. I would have liked extra information on when to trust snap judgements on a situation or person vs not trusting first impressions due to lack of information that a person still hasn't seen or heard.
Gladwell really didn't get too much into how to do that.

Overall, I thought this was an interesting look into the psychology of decision-making and how our subconscious mind can shape our choices in either a positive or negative way.

The general topic was how powerful our initial impressions are because we can process stuff really quick at a subconscious level in some cases.

Blink was well written and pretty entertaining. I thought the author did a good job of coming up with interesting examples of good or bad information processing and I enjoyed reading those.

However, aside from writing style and some fun examples, I thought the content was quite neatly separable into two parts:
(a) stuff that was interesting and seemed true and which I knew already, and
(b) stuff that seemed untrue or at least incoherant and that I hadn't previously heard before. but maybe that was just my closed mind at work.

Examples of (a) were how you one's initial impression (lke in the first 5 seconds) of a teacher or an interviewee are pretty highly correlated with your opinion after an hour.

There were lots of examples of (b). Like it was weird that one of his first and favorite examples was this guy who had studied videos of couples interacting in intense detail for decades, and had created a list for how someone could score such videos to predict odds that the marriage would last. It was supposed to be an example of "blink" processing because the expert could recognize it quickly, but to me it seemed more like the opposite since (1) non-experts (including the author) all had inaccurate instinctive reactions to watching the videos, and (2) the best way to get the right answer was a mechanical scorecard -- kind of the opposite of blink.

And in general, there were examples of when you should trust your blink instinct and when that was wrong, but all the examples of when it was right or wrong seemed very post hoc (e.g. if your heart rate is over some threshold you shouldn't, but I don't think that would have come up unless he needed some explanation for why accidental police shootings occured), and he didn't really have a consistent framework for when it would be right or wrong, which made it kinda useless. and some seemed random, like the part about some musicians that musical experts liked but that did poorly in the musical equivalent of blind taste tests -- seemed likely that it was a friend of the author or some musician he liked (it was clear in the book that we should take as a given that it was a good musician and that the taste tests were wrong -- I was never quite clear why) and he was just trying to think of some way that might connect to his thesis.

I liked the description of how orchestras started doing blind auditions to avoid discrimination against women. wasn't sure that it supported his thesis, but it was interesting. that was more or less my reaction to the whole book.

4 Stars for Blink: Power of Thinking Without Thinking (audiobook) by Malcolm Gladwell read by the author.

This was a interesting look into making quick decisions. I think some of the author’s examples worked better than others.

A really great study on how important the first few seconds of anything can be, in any particular situation. Be it that you're an art expert who instantly knows an object is fake, or a police man who thinks that the victim is pulling a gun out of their pocket rather than a wallet, it's very clear that human beings do have this constant auto-pilot running, an unconscious "survival mode" that gives us most of the clues we might need in the "blink" of an eye, and sometimes those clues might be wrong.

امتیاز واقعی 3.5

پلیس مرد رو تعقیب می کنه. مرد دستش رو داخل جیبش می کنه. اسلحه همراهش داره یا نه؟ شلیک میکنه یا نه؟ پلیس باید چکار کنه؟ در اون یک لحظه چطور تصمیم میگیره؟

برای اولین بار زوجی رو با هم می بینید. هیچ دعوایی در کار نیست. با هم می خندند و حرف می زنند ولی حس میکنید مشکلی بینشون هست. چه مشکلی؟ مگه همه چیز ظاهرا خوب نیست؟

یک کارشناس هنری از یک گالری نقاشی بازدید میکنه. با دیدن یک اثر بلافاصله حس بدی بهش دست میده. این نقاشی کپی شده. از کجا می دونه؟ فقط میدونه، نمی تونه به راحتی توضیح بده

رزومه حرف نداره. مصاحبه کاری هم خوب پیش رفت و نکته خاصی نبود ولی دوست ندارید این آدم رو استخدام کنید. چرا؟ چه دلیل حرفه ای برای این تصمیمتون دارید؟

این کتاب در مورد همین تصمیم های لحظه ای هست. تصمیم هایی که در مغز ما اما در نقطه ای به دور از رادار آگاهی گرفته می شن و خیلی از رفتارهای ما رو شکل میدن. این تصمیمات می تونن به شدت درست باشند. تجربه ها، اطلاعات و مهارت هایی که در طول زندگی کسب کردیم ممکنه به بهترین نحو در این تصمیم گیری های لحظه ای استفاده بشن و با کمترین داده به بهترین نتیجه برسند
یک پلیس با تجربه با استفاده از بررسی لحظه ای تمام مواجهه های قبلی و مقایسه اون ها تصمیم میگیره که مرد نمی خواد شلیک کنه
یک کارشناس با آنالیز لحظه ای تمام آثاری که در زندگیش دیده تصمیم میگیره که این اثر کپی شده

اما این تصمیم های لحظه ای می تونن همونقدر غلط و گمراه کننده باشند. کافیه از داده های اشتباه استفاده کنند، از تعصبات ریشه دار مغز نسبت به جنسیت ها، رنگ پوست و تمایلات پنهان ما به خصوصیت هایی که در مغز تکاملی ما نشان دهنده ی "برتری" هستند. مثل قد بلند مردان
برای همینه که اون مرد قد کوتاه یا زن غیر جذاب با رزومه ی عالی برای اون شغل مناسب به نظر نمیاد
یا پلیس به مرد سیاه پوستی که داره کیفش رو از جیبش در میاره شلیک می کنه

باور نمی کنید ذهنتون پر از این داده های غلطه؟
نژادپرست نیستید؟
زن و مرد رو برابر می دونید؟
با دگرباش ها مشکلی ندارید؟
این تست ها رو بدید و متوجه چاله های مخفی ذهنتون بشید
Harvard Implicit Association Test

پس نتیجه چیه؟ استفاده از این تصمیم های لحظه ای خوبه یا بده؟
گلدول در این قسمت جواب خاصی نداره. وقتی درسته خیلی خوبه و وقتی غلطه خیلی بده! متخصص و کارشناس بودن احتمال درست بودن این تصمیم ها رو بالا می بره و تعصبات ذهنی باعث ضعفشون میشه
و این دقیقا نقطه ضعف کتابه. ایده ی عالی و ساختار نامشخص. نویسنده حدوداً می دونه می خواد از چی بنویسه و تعداد زیادی مثال برای توضیحش ذکر می کنه ولی کتاب جمع بندی مناسب یا پایه های علمی مستدل تری برای دفاع از خودش نداره


کتاب رو با صدای نویسنده گوش کردم و با وجود ضعف هاش گوش دادن به مثال ها و تحقیقات مختلف واقعا جالب بود. نکته دیگه این بود که دید جدیدی بهم داد و برای بیشتر خوندن در مورد تصمیم گیری کنجکاو شدم

کتاب و صوتیش رو هم مثل همیشه اینجا گذاشتم
Audiobooks are awesome

I was really expecting more from this book. I've heard mostly good things about Gladwell, and he had a pretty interesting TED talk, and I enjoy almost anything to do with the brain, so...why not?

The book certainly brought up a lot of interesting ideas and did a good job of discussing the different elements that go into the snap decisions that we make every day. And it's probably worth a read for many of the stories and experiments related. But for the most part this book really failed to impress. More than that though, it failed at being a coherent analysis of what goes on in the human brain when we make snap judgments.

Gladwell alternates between telling us to trust and accept this "mysterious phenomena" that allows us to make these unconscious snap judgments and warning us against the use of these snap judgments. One moment he advises against the idea that we need to slowly collect data and weigh options to make the most informed opinion and provides examples where too much thinking and information leads us astray, and in the next moment gives us examples of how snap judgments sometimes go horribly wrong. And he leaves us with no clear sense of how to use this new found information to make better decisions and judgments in our own lives. Do I trust my insights because my rational brain will fool me, or do I mistrust my instincts because of the inherent bias contained within them? If Gladwell knows he sure didn't tell me.

One example of somewhere where I think he didn't analyze the situation enough was when he talked about the Wisconsin Card Sorting task (pick cards from one of two decks, one deck tends towards bad and the other towards good outcomes). He focused solely on how the unconscious mind was aware of the pattern (which deck was bad and which was good) long before the conscious mind was aware of it when making decisions. And this was shown by the fact that sweating occurred when choosing from the "bad" deck before the subject knew why (or was even aware of it). What he fails to mention about all this is that the reason for this is because we are designed to be "risk averse". It is not because we are making brilliant snap judgments, or that our brains have "learned" the rules before we are aware of it. From an evolutionary perspective it pays off more to learn from our mistakes than learn from our victories. Mistakes are costly. This is why bad memories are more salient than happy ones. The sweating that occurs is a physiological indicator of and means of prompting the organism to stay away. It's not even that this explanation is in contradiction to Gladwell's; it is that it IS an explanation for the phenomena Gladwell describes, one easily at Gladwells' disposal.

Two other aspects of this book stuck out as major frustrations for me:

1) Gladwell spends a lot of time early on talking about the mysterious nature of our ability to thin slice (make accurate snap judgments based on very little information) and urges us to accept this. To his credit, he does attempt to demystify this somewhat later on, but not enough in my opinion. His first example is of a museum that purchased an expensive sculpture which all the data and scientists evaluated as legitimate, but which experts in the field immediately saw as a fake without being able to put into words why. It's purposefully misleading to label this as some sort of mysterious phenomena. For instance, it's important to remember that these people were experts. An amateur would not and could not make this same snap judgment because they don't have the training to. This ability didn't magically appear, it came from learning and training and synaptic change. These experts learned over time. They studied types of stone, and different styles, and everything else that goes into understanding their field. And this process created memories...synaptic change within their brains. And there exists a system (or systems) in the brain that can make decisions based on that neuronal structure without conscious awareness. Shortcuts so to speak. But these shortcuts are a product of that neuronal structure, which is a product of that synaptic change, which is a product of the learning the individual did over time. It's misleading to call this mysterious. What's important, and more interesting in my opinion, is figuring out the underlying processes that allow this to happen.

2) Towards the end of the book Gladwell discusses how our stress response leads us to make all sorts of bad decisions. He talks about autism and how autistic people can't mind read (don't have theories of other minds) and how this affects their interpretation of events around them and of the world in general. He compares what happens to people in stressful situations to this, that during these situations, because the fight or flight response has taken over, people have tunnel vision and can no longer "read minds" and thus make all sorts of mistakes and bad decisions because they are focusing on the wrong things. My issue is that he, incomprehensibly, makes a literal, as opposed to metaphorical, connection with autism. He argues that during these times we become "temporarily autistic". While it's true that one aspect of our behavior becomes similar to an aspect of an autistic individuals behavior during these times, it seems like a pretty ridiculous statement to make as a broad generalization. He spends quite a bit of time talking about this and I don't think it does anyone any good.

In the end I think I was most disappointed by the fact that all the elements to create a good book WERE present here, and the failure is due in large part to how he puts it all together and his ability to analyze all the disparate ideas properly (insert irony here). Evolution has built into us shortcuts to react quickly to stimuli in our environment. Our experience, whether broadly cultural or personal, prunes, enhances, changes those built in shortcuts as we go through life. Some develop as unfair biases towards people of different races. Some develop as we become experts in a subject. Thus some can be trusted and some can't. Our brains can't tell the difference between fact and fiction, only between experience and non experience, and so it's important to be aware of what kind of decision making goes on under the surface and what factors are involved in those decisions so we can be more aware of whether to trust them or not. Other factors can affect decision making, such as our emotional state due to the physiological changes that take place during those times, and this too is important to understand because it radically alters our perception during those times. The most important thing to remember is that experience translates into instinct through synaptic change, and through work and training we can increase the effectiveness of our gut reactions and snap decisions, but due to biases and our altered states during emotional situations those instincts should not always be trusted outright. There you go Malcolm Gladwell, please feel free to use this in the next printing. No citation necessary.

This book started out great. With case examples and interesting facts. I was listening to the audiobook narrated by the author himself and I was enjoying it a lot. I was sure it was going to unravel the power of our subconscious mind or what we call intuition. But as it went on I lost track of the actual subject of the book. At first, I thought it's because of the audiobook maybe I could not concentrate properly. So I switched to softcopy. But the situation was not better. Eventually, when I finished it, I could not relate everything that is presented in this book with its title. 3* for the first few sections when I enjoyed.

This was a big best-seller for Gladwell. He posits that much of the time we make decisions, reach conclusions in a sort of pre-conscious manner that he calls “thin-slicing.” That means taking a very small sample, a thin slice, and making a decision immediately based on that information. However, it is the case that the ability to evaluate that slice is fed by a lifetime of experience. It is not simply, as some, including President Bush the second, might believe, that using one’s gut, in the absence of years and years of preparation, is as valid a way of reaching decisions as taking the longer route of careful analysis of available data. No, no, no.