Long story short, intuition helps if you have the knowledge. If you have the knowledge, it becomes like muscle memory and is almost reflexive. If not, intuition can go terribly terribly wrong.

همیشه اسم گلدول رو توی پادکست‌های مختلف میشنیدم و همیشه کنجکاو بودم کتاباش چجوریه که این همه درباره اشون حرف زده میشه. فک کنم این اولین کتابیه که ازش میخونم. خلاصه اکثر کتاباش رو خوندم یا شنیدم. ولی اینکه یه کتابش رو کامل بخونم هیچوقت فرصت نشده بود

کتاب خیلی راحت خونه و پر از مطالعات موردیه...
حرف اصلی کتاب این هست که خیلی وقتها عمیق شدن و بررسی دقیق داده باعث میشه شما اصلا نتیجه گیری اشتباه بکنید. چون ناخودآگاه انسان چیزایی رو میبینه که دلیل و مدرک نمیتونه ببینه و مدارک بعضی وقتها باعث چشم پوشی از اون چیزا میشه. و کلی مثال و نمونه میاره که چقدر تصمیات سریع میتونست از چندسال مطالعه بهتر عمل کنه.
این حرف بسیار جالبیه. من تصورم این بود که کتاب اینو میگه و بعد میگه ببینید اینکارا رو بکنید تا تصمیم گیری‌هاتون سریع‌تر و دقیق‌تر بشه و خوش اومدید... برید حالشو ببرید.

ولی واقعیت این کتاب کلی چیز از قدرت این مدل تصمیم گیری میگه بعد میاد میگه البــــــــته همیشه هم درست نیست. پلیسی که با تصمیم گیری سریع میگه مضنون تفنگ داره بهش تیر میزنه. ممکنه اشتباه بکنه و یکی کشته میشه. به هزار دلیل. پس خیلی روشم حساب نکنید.
از مدل های مختلف هم این چیزا رو بررسی میکنه و تقریبا برای همه موارد دلیل نقض میگه. خوب دوست عزیز اذیت میخواستی بکنی؟

فارغ از اینکه چقدر همه حرفاش از نظر علمی درست بوده. واقعیتش کل حرف کتاب همون یه قسمت پادکست بود. بیشتر کشش داده بود و در نهایت هم نتیجه گیری درستی به نظرم نکرده بود. یعنی یه سری نکته جالب گفت. ولی قانون یا روشی که همراه خودتون ببرید من ندیدم.

من از خوندن کتاب ناراحت نیستم. بیشتر حسم این بود که یه قسمت بلند هیدن برین رو گوش دادم... ولی انتظاراتم فراتر از این بود

پانوشت. اگه این هیدن برین رو گوش ندادید. حتما امتحان کنید. یه پادکست درباره ذهنه

https://hiddenbrain.org/

I've been listening to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman while reading this book and the two are very closely related. I liked Blink more, so far. (Haven't completely finished the Kahneman one yet.) Gladwell is an excellent storyteller and, though he includes many scientific studies, Blink feels more approachable than Thinking Fast and Slow.

The end result of reading back-to-back books on psychology that deal with our decision making processes and the problems/biases that we may have with them is that it has me doubting everything I've thought about or had to make a decision about for the past couple of days. I guess that's the sign of good literature, it makes you think and changes your worldview. While being slightly disturbed by all of this new input, I've also been wondering about how I can apply this new knowledge to its up-most potential.

For example, I know within milliseconds of someone coming up to the reference desk, if the interaction I'm about to have with them is going to proceed smoothly or not. It's in their face, their pacing, if they're carrying something in their hands or not- I don't know how I know, I just know. From reading Gladwell's book, I think I do a combination of body language reading and then prime myself for whatever I think I've read in that glance about the person I'm about to deal with. Maybe I could prime myself to expect the best interaction for every experience? Maybe I could slow down the process of the gut check reaction? Anyway, this book taught me that I can do better and that perhaps I shouldn't rely on that immediate first impression to drive the rest of the action. Maybe I could set up a screen in front of my desk and then respond only to people's questions instead of how they're approaching me like how the interviewers removed the initial bias in the blind orchestral auditions... now there's an idea.

If you enjoyed Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking then you may like Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (more of a scientific approach to the same topic) or The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More by David DeSteno (mind blowing book, at least it was for me, on trust, and how we make our decisions to trust or not).

“ The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious- from behind a locked door inside our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it is outside of control.”

This is an engaging read because
1. it leads the argument of Snap Judgements - perfect snap judgements and why there is a need to perfect snap judgements
2. The author pulls examples from all over the place - From Art, Music, Military, Policing, Business, Research work to bolster his point making it very holistic
3. Very good trivia and addition of vocabulary- be it Thin Slicing, Warren Harding error, Mind Blind, Sensation Transference, Duchenne Smile

What it misses is the question on how to improve snap judgements and if there is some toolbox for the same, and it gets repetitive in proving the point at certain places.

But I still give it a 5/5 because I enjoyed the examples, case studies, research and I feel like I’ve learnt something reading this book! Happy reading

From any psychologist's point of view, this book is full of contradicting psychological facts. Even as a general reader, I find this book says a lot of things but does not actually tell you what it actually wants to address.
But I love this book for totally different reasons. Firstly, I love case studies with interesting results written by someone who can write in a way you will find the whole experience exhilarating. Secondly, this guy deserves a five star because he is making less known but thought-provoking scientific studies to a much wider audience. Thirdly, nowhere it is mentioned in the title it is a book which teaches you how to think without thinking so it is completely understandable why it shows us both the advantages and disadvantages of snap decision making and it completely leaves to the reader to decide when to do what. Finally, I love non-fiction which uses a lot of anecdotes to state a fact rather just directly stating the fact it wants to address.
I recommend it to anyone who loves to read about interesting psychological studies.

Equally as fascinating as Gladwell's other book The Tipping Point. Really makes you think, consider your decisions differently.

Quotes:
But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice.

Of the tens of millions of American men below five foot six, a grand total of ten in my sample have reached the level of CEO, which says that being short is probably as much of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African American.

Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of, automatically associate leadership ability with imposing physical stature.

...when corrected for such variables as age and gender and weight, an inch of height is worth $789 a year in salary. That means that a person who is six feet tall but otherwise identical to someone who is five foot five will make on average $5,525 more per year.

Prejudging is the kiss of death...because sometimes the most unlikely person is flush.

The truth is that improv isn't random and chaotic at all...it's an art form governed by a series of rules, and they want to make sure that when they're up on stage, everyone abides by those rules. One of the most important of the rules that make improv possible, for examples is the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story—or humor—is to have characters accept everything that happens to them. Good improvisors seem telepathic; everything looks pre-arranged. This is because they accept all offers made—which is something no normal person would do.

Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations, and it is foolish of company to service one dimension and ignore the other.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process. Silvan Tomkins one began a lecture by bellowing, "The face is like a penis!" What he meant was that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own.

Imagine if there were a switch that all of us had, to turn off the expressions on our face at will. If babies had that switch, we wouldn't know what they were feeling. They'd be in trouble. You could make an argument, if you wanted to, that the system evolved so that parents would be able to take care of kids.

People with autism...have difficulty interpreting non-verbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions...in anything less than a perfectly literal environment, the autistic person is lost.

In the interviews with police officers who have been involved with shootings, these same details appear again and again: extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. This is how the human body reacts to extreme stress, and it makes sense. Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.

Notes:

The adaptive unconscious:

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions is called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision making is one of the most important new fields in psychology. It is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud, which was a dark and murky place filled with desires and memories and fantasies that were too disturbing for us to think about consciously. This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

When you walk out into the street and suddenly realise that a truck is bearing down on you, do you have time to think through all your options? Of course not. The only way that human beings could ever have survived as a species for as long as we have is that we've developed another kind of decision-making apparatus that's capable of making very quick judgements based on very little information........ As the psychologist Timothy D. Wilson writes in his book Strangers to Ourselves The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner.

Wilson says that we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation. A decision to invite a co-worker over for dinner is conscious.... The spontaneous decision to argue with that same co-worker is made unconsciously - by a different part of the brain and motivated by a different part of your personalit

The problem with Coke versus Pepsi taste tests:

The difficulty with interpreting the Pepsi Challenge findings begins with the fact that they were based on what the industry calls a sip test. Tasters don't drink the entire can. They take a sip from a cup of each of the brands being tested and then make their choice. ........ Dollard says that one of the biases in a sip test is toward sweetness: "If you only test in a sip test consumers will like the sweeter product. But when they have to drink a whole bottle or can, that sweetness can get really overpowering or cloying." Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so right away it had a big advantage in a sip test. Pepsi is also characterized by a citrusy flavour burst, unlike the more raisiny-vanilla taste of Coke. But that burst tends to dissipate over the course of an entire can, and that is another reason Coke suffered by comparison. Pepsi, in short, is a drink built to shine in a sip test. (159)

We are hugely influenced by the way things look:

Researchers did blind tastings with the two brandies Christian Brothers and E & J. Their tests showed that people's preferences were totally based on the packaging of the brandies. Other tests with ice cream blocks, have shown that people are willing to pay 5-10 cents more, depending upon whether ice creams were packaged in rectangular or cylindrical packaging. (162 & 164)

The experts: Gladwell goes to lunch with two professional food tasters:

Gail Vance Civille and Judy Heylmun ...are experts. Would they get fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not. Nor would they be led astray by the packaging for Christian Brothers, or be as easily confused by the difference between something they truly don't like and something they simply find unusual. The gift of their expertise is that it allows them to have a much better understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious..... It is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions..... Expert food tasters are taught a very specific vocabulary, which allows them to describe precisely their reactions to specific foods. Mayonnaise, for example, is supposed to be evaluated along six dimensions of appearance (colour, colour intensity, chroma, shine, lumpiness and bubbles), ten dimensions of texture (adhesiveness to lips, firmness, denseness, and so on), and fourteen dimensions of flavour, split among three subgroups - aromatics (eggy, mustardy, and so forth); basic tastes (salty, sour, and sweet); and chemical-feeling factors (burn, pungent, astringent) Each of those factors, in turn, is evaluated on a 15-point scale..... Every product in the supermarket can be analysed along these lines, and after a taster has worked with these scales for years, they become embedded in the taster's unconscious.

Those of us who are not experts:

This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren't grounded in real understanding. (184)

Hiring people to play in orchestras:

When hiring a new musician, in the last 30 years it has become common to use screens to hide the auditioning musicians from the selection committee. This way prejudice against women can be avoided. It has made a big difference. The number of women in the top US orchestras has increased fivefold in the last 30 years. (250)

When to trust the subconscious, and when to think things through:

When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well here is a partial answer. On straightforward choice, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated - when we have to juggle many different variables - then our unconscious thought processes may be superior. This is exactly contrary to conventional wisdom. We typically regard our snap judgement as best on immediate trivial questions. Is that person attractive? Do I want that candy bar? But Dijksterhuis is suggesting the opposite: that maybe that big computer in our brain that handles our unconscious is at its best when it has to juggle many competing variables. ..... As Sigmund Freud said "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, i think, by the deep inner needs of our nature." (268)

A must read - really interesting stories about how people process things unconsciously.
- for instance, you can't hide your feeling about race from your unconscious - take the Race Test (http://www.understandingprejudice.org...). It said I (and 13% of test-takers) have a 'moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American'. It also said 48% of test-takers have a "Strong automatic preference for White people" - crazy!
- I loved the bit about President Warren Harding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_H...), who - according to the author, basically got elected because he "looked presidential". I firmly believe looks matter - hey after all I do live in CA where we have the Governator...

The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
…
We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

Blink is an interesting book, full of examples of situations when you would be better off trusting your snap judgment over a long, well-reasoned approach. It’s counterintuitive, and it seems like research may continue to flesh out which items are the ones that should be processed by snap decision (such as the book’s heart attack diagnosis example). But the anecdotes were consistently fascinating, and it even explained why Pepsi always wins the Pepsi Challenge yet Coca Cola always sells more soda. Worth reading! Recommended.

An awesome choice of title first of all as it aptly highlights the direction in which the present day decision making process is going towards. With increasing complexity and requirement of multi tasking, decision making is that one quality that every one yearns for. But the travesty of the truth is that very few are there amongst us who really know the process of decision making. Well I used to think that you sit, process and decide. That's one method ofcourse. The other one that comes to my mind is you run, slip, dash and just pick one from the options available to you with just hope, and logic being the last thing, on your side. ;p

Adding to the joy, various experimental findings have been highlighted in the book forming the crux of the fun which I won't disclose here as it'll rob you off the fun in it. IN the book, author explicitly says that decision making process actually has two approaches. The first one that i mentioned above involves comprehension, cognition and lot of data crunching leading to the conclusion. But the underlying assumption in this process is that you have an unlimited supply of time (which is hardly ever the case). The second one that i mentioned above is called rapid cognition and in a cursory glance it would seem to you as a random act. We pick an option under such circumstance only when we know that picking is compulsory and we would be better off with a wrong choice rather than with no choice at all. If someone picks the right one, losers instantaneously brand it as luck by chance. What if i told you that even behind your rapid cognition, there is a basis. There's reason that you chose a particular option and only that option amongst all the options. It has a direct relation with the memories and experiences that have created your subconscious since you have stepped foot on this planet.

The best example of this can be seen in our own society. If some guy is seen with a tattoo, long hair, ostentatious clothes, our mind immediately forms an image of him as someone who's born with a silverspoon or has no regards for the life he is living, he must be arrogant, impertinent etc etc. Where do all these ideas come from? They are nothing more than what we have been fed into our minds repeatedly and on a daily basis. In India, the organisational hierarchy of the family leaves little room for individual thought process and as an aftermath, the habit of questioning and curiosity goes down the drain. Cultural practices as such, leads to the creation of these kind of biases and prejudices which in turn has brewed a great deal of hypocrisy in our generation as the same characteristics that I mentioned above becomes desirable to an individual and even after he/she attains it, he/she remains contemptuous of the practice as a whole because that's what he/she has been fed with. How often have we seen that a guy in public transport even if mistakenly outrages the modesty of a female passenger, the crowd goes berserk and thrash the guy presuming that he must have had bad intentions. His pleas and requests fall upon deaf ears as people have already taken a snap judgement and no amount of explanation can convince them otherwise.

Talking about all this brings us to a very important question. Are we slaves to our snap judgments? Can't we break free the shackles of biases and prejudices? To answer this, it is important to know that there is one big similarity between our conscious and subconscious thinking process. Both of them can be trained and taught through repetitive exercises only. It might be possible for some of you to think that since subconscious decision making is a quick process, training it will also be likewise but it isn't. Author substantiates this claim by quoting instances in the book in which body guards, police officers are provided training of this sort in which they control their adrenaline rush by repeatedly practicing in high-stress situations in which they learn to control their heart-rates, resisting their brains to keep the amount of input from dropping which ultimately helps them to take judicious action in such situations.

Thomas Hoving, a curator, says that:

" I try my best to create best first impressions of the people, activity or an object during my first interaction as I believe that our subconscious is an untapped source of abilities and possibilities and it can be educated and trained in a manner such that we harness it for the greater good and for all this to happen, I need to have a positive frame of mind for every new experience of life."

Do you agree? I most certainly do;);).

Blink is a typical Malcolm Gladwell book. It is a book filled with anecdotes that are meant to support the main topic. In this case the topic is the power of thinking in the moment. The anecdotes are very interesting by themselves and they are well worth the read. However, they don't really form a cohesive unit, they seem to be forced together by the author in order to try to show the true power of instinctive thinking.

The book talks about our ability to make instantaneous decisions and how sometimes these end up being actually better than long thought-out decisions. However, we can actually train ourselves and learn how to make better instant decisions.

The anecdotes include:

- the Getty art museum spent millions on buying a fake kouros (Greek statue) and no one noticed it was fake until an art expert looked it for a few seconds and instantly picked up on the queues indicating this
- in the Millenium Challenge the US military staged a large exercise between two forces: blue team which had a larger and better equipped force and red team which was led by Van Riper and had a smaller and poorer equipped force. Contrary to expectations, Van Riper managed to completely defeat blue team. This is because he was an experienced officer who was very good at making quick decisions as a result of being in numerous conflict zones
- a doctor who can look at a couple interacting for a few minutes and instantly figure out if they will end up divorcing or not
- President Warren Harding was well liked by everyone that met him, at first sight he seemed to be the best candidate for the Presidency but ended up being one of the worst Presidents in the history of the US
- the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999 by police officers who misinterpreted his body language and opened fire on him thinking that he was about to shoot them
- the psychologist Paul Ekman developed a system to read the micro-expressions on people faces in order to actually figure out what a person is thinking
- autistic people see faces as just another object and as such are not able to read emotions from people's faces
- due to heightened stress and bodily excitement levels humans lose a lot of their senses when they are involved in a gun fight. That is why many poor decisions are made during fire fights and policemen require training in order to improve this.

This was the first Gladwell book I read.

I read and finished it during my backpacking trip across Cambodia. I read it amongst the ruins of ancient temples, on bumpy dusty tuk-tuk rides, I held on to it while on the boat waiting for the freshwater dolphins to crest the surface of the mighty Mekong, I read it while sitting cross legged on the floor of the aisle of a public bus on the 2-hour ride back to Siem Reap.

But even without all that hazy semi-sense-of-adventure-backpacking state of mind... I would still recommend this book to anyone. Or any of Mssr Gladwell's books honestly speaking (up to the date of this review I have read them all except for 'Tipping Point' and 'David & Goliath', ironically -or maybe rather quite properly Gladwellian- the first & latest of his books).

In a nutshell, this book is about how intrinsically we know things. But how all that is usually drowned out or pushed to the corner of ones mind by a lot of good old crusty 'preconception', 'social upbringing' and 'societal brainwashing'. But maybe it's not something that comes when we think about it.

Anyhow the main concept/theory in this book is not bedrock to be sure, but somewhat elastic. Something to be taken with a grain of salt. Just as relying too much on facts and proof takes the fun out of life, not caring at all about facts and proof takes out the foundations of sound character.

Trust your gut, people. Trust your gut. But don't try too hard.