4 stars

A well-written and entertaining book about the mysteries of how we make decisions.

While I found there to be rather TOO many case studies mentioned -- to the point it was hard to remember back to which case study Gladwell suddenly refers to again -- they were all relevant to the idea at hand.

Unlike many reviewers, I thought Gladwell had a very clear point.

If we have honed our understanding of a subject down to the tacit, then we need only the slightest bit of information to make an astoundingly accurate guess. Very true. But, what when we only THINK we have it tacit when what we've really got are biases that we've picked up through socialisation, class and background that seem right? That's when finding where those biases are and reducing or removing them becomes tantamount to personal and societal progression. Find the problem and fix it!

Hard to argue with that, although it seems neuroscientists do. They seem to be of the opinion that Gladwell has dumbed down the science to the point where it bears no resemblance to reality. Begs the question: is Gladwell oversimplifying, or are the scientists so caked up in data that they can't simplify down to the salient points. Which, interestingly, is one of the dangers Gladwell points out when experts give opinions based on analysis alone. Data worship vs reliance on personal, specific experience.

Whatever the reality of the situation, "Blink" is a highly accessible book on the subject for the lay reader. Recommended.

3.4 stars

My interest in this book varied by chapter--by far the best one for me was "Seven Seconds in the Bronx" in part because I have a child with a diagnosis on the "spectrum" and in part because it answered my question as to why I now see police officers cruising by themselves (this is for an excellent reason, it turns out, but no spoilers as to why!) While I enjoyed The Tipping Point more, I have to say that I am happy to have read this after that particular chapter. This is not to say it's the only one I found interesting, because at least one other one was quite fascinating for me.

I do plan to read more books by Gladwell in the future.

Most of us don't know how our decision making / thinking process works. Turns out we're on auto pilot more often than not. Imagine if you had to think routine tasks everyday: walking, manipulating basic objects, recognizing faces, language...etc that would be exhausting and would consume much needed energy.

“The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot. 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.”

We think we fully control every decision, but that's only what your mind is leading you to believe..

... what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

Well it turns out, it's not that straightforward or under our conscious control as much as we'd like it to be:
Reading Blink enables one to have a better idea of how it all works and become aware of the biases/influences that cloud our judgment. And there's plenty of examples & experiments in the book that highlights our "flawed judgment". And I think what all of this also means is that we're vulnerable to anyone wishing to manipulate us given that they know how our minds work better than we do.

One experiment mentioned in the book about facial expressions struck me as very interesting. The face is not just a projection of what we think and feel, it also works the other way around.

They gathered a group of volunteers and hooked them up to monitors measuring their heart rate and body temperature — the physiological signals of such emotions as anger, sadness, and fear. Half of the volunteers were told to try to remember and relive a particularly stressful experience. The other half were simply shown how to create, on their faces, the expressions that corresponded to stressful emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear. The second group, the people who were acting, showed the same physiological responses, the same heightened heart rate and body temperature, as the first group.

A few years later, a German team of psychologists conducted a similar study. They had a group of subjects look at cartoons, either while holding a pen between their lips — an action that made it impossible to contract either of the two major smiling muscles, the risorius and the zygomatic major — or while holding a pen clenched between their teeth, which had the opposite effect and forced them to smile. The people with the pen between their teeth found the cartoons much funnier. These findings may be hard to believe, because we take it as a given that first we experience an emotion, and then we may — or may not — express that emotion on our face. We think of the face as the residue of emotion. What this research showed, though, is that the process works in the opposite direction as well. 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.

Проблясък – силата на мигновените решения е любопитна и по своему интригуваща, но доста объркана и очевидно прибързано написана книга. Явно Майкъл Гладуел се е понесъл на вълната на известността от предишната си книга Повратна точка и се е взел много на сериозно…

Този път Гладуел решава да ни светне относно човешкото мислене и влиянието на подсъзнанието при вземането на решения и особено в условията на недостатъчно време и стресови ситуации. И общо взето, изводът му е, че когато нямаме време да мислим, връх вземат най-базисните ни инстинкти, предразсъдъци и нагласи – нещо, което психолозите от години знаят и което е очевидно за всеки.

Книгата всъщност представлява безкрайна поредица от някакви случки – „примери“ от икономиката, политиката и каквото друго се сетиш, които не са свързани по абсолютно никакъв начин, освен с по няколко реда от авторовите разсъждения. Безкрайните примери, които подробно описва Гладуел в защита на тезата си са доста скучни за четене, а и всъщност той не си прави труда да представи каквото и да е доказателство, че описаното в примерите се случва именно поради теорийките му.

This is going to be a very interesting review ..

I was introduced to this book through Thinking, Fast And Slow and was very excited to read it; the idea is brilliant, it dwells on one of my favorite topics in psychology, and who doesn't want to have a deeper understanding of their own thought processes?
It started with the Kouros story which was a great choice in my opinion to start the book with. In retrospect, it kind of summarized the whole book in a story format. One of my fav.

I also really liked the idea of temporary autism and it's safe to say that it got me interested to the extent of wanting to know more about it and I honestly won't mind a book dedicated to it. The book also touched upon Priming in good details compared to other similar books.


A huge chunk of the book, and by that I mean >70% of it, were examples to the "Fast Thinking" process, or the Blink in this book's terms, and if you've been reading my reviews you should realize by this point that I really love stories as examples as long as I get my share (I go with big portions here) of facts, science, and evidence based info. I was forced to compare the "Blink" to "Fast Thinking" introduced in Thinking, Fast And Slow, where the author in the later provided a huge deal of facts along with the multiple examples. I didn't find this in blink, in fact, I felt it's a good support for "System 1" (a synonym for fast thinking in the book's terms) , read before or after it to provide deeper understanding of it, it that is wanted. It won't have satisfied me at all as a standalone (maybe cuz I read the other book before it?)

Another thing, the writer seemed a bit unsure, although he did lean more towards one of the opinions. Apart from repeating himself (and the incidents) a couple of times, he fluctuated between trusting our blink or going with deliberate thinking.

Overall, this was a good read and I'll recommend it to others ✨.

Read "Tipping Point" and didn't like it. Then, some CEO at work decided everyone in his division should read "Blink". Oh no, not again. If you've read one, you've read the other. Nonsense.

Elsewhere, in one of my other recent reviews, a GoodReads friend (Richard) told me that he had become less infatuated with this book after reading a review by a specialist in the field who gave it a drubbing. I was worried that knowing this might ruin this book for me – but it has not. I really enjoyed this one too. This is the third of Gladwell’s books I’ve read in quick succession and this contained lots of information about things that have made me think and sparked my interest to learn more. It may well be that Gladwell’s style does not appeal to an expert in the field – and that is quite likely to be true, but I’ve found that it is often the case that I’ve been introduced to themes by popularisers and later went on to read more deeply on a subject. I rarely condemn those who introduce me to fascinating topics – and this is a fascinating topic.

I’m not going to do a full review, but rather quickly talk about wine. While he was talking about coke and about taste tests I was thinking about wine.

He makes the point that when asked to judge jam people do nearly as well as the experts if they are just asked which jam they liked the most, but do much worse than experts if asked to explain why they graded them in the order that they did. That is, if they have to talk about texture and sweetness and citrus flavours – people change how they judge jam and end up picking the worst jam rather than the best. This is because we don’t really know what ‘texture’ is and so trying to slot jams into categories that we don’t really understand means we are most likely to stuff up and confuse ourselves.

Now, wine. I wonder if anyone has ever done a test at cellar doors to see what people end up buying and if they pick the nicest wine for the price, or do they buy vinegar instead? I wouldn’t mind betting that there would be something similar happening here – and if you are with someone who says things like, “Oh yes, fruity, but with a back-taste of coal tar” you might end up buying something that is quite disgusting. You know, unless you actually have some idea of what you are talking about, it might be best to shut up and drink the wine.

That is the point of this book – learning when to trust your “immediate reactions” and when to question them. I think there is much in this book that is worth knowing and much that is fascinatingly interesting. (The stuff about unconscious racism is so important that everyone should be forced to read this for that alone). But with Richard, I am a little concerned that an expert in the field didn't like this book. All the same, the expert does recommend Made to Stick so I guess that can be the next book I read.

There is – as is proven by Dylan Moran – only one way to pick wine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw2gGf...

I would put this book in the category of "Freakonomics" and "The Tipping Point." By the same author as the latter title, Malcolm Gladwell, the purpose of this book is to weigh the advantages as well as the disadvantages of the power of the mind's ability to unconsciously leap to conclusions based on what is seen in the proverbial blink of an eye.

While I have read some negative reviews of Gladwell's book, mostly citing that he fails to inform the reader how to know when to go with your gut and when not to, as well as arguments that he urges readers not to follow their gut when the gut instincts are politically incorrect, I have to disagree with many of them. I think that Gladwell's objective in "Blink" is to make the reader simply aware of their gut instincts and to urge them to consider trusting it more frequently than we do. People tend to make decisions that are supported by a litany of rationalizations and explanations, but do we always really have reasons for why we do or think what we do? Gladwell is arguing that we don’t, and that sometimes it takes the unconscious mind to make those decisions for us. On the flip side, he also argues that sometimes we unconsciously make negative decisions based on that same quick judgment and our predetermined stereotypes, such as with people of other sexes or other races than ourselves.

“Blink” was a very complicated book with many facets and it’s hard to explain all of them or review them all without writing an essay. In the end, I think the main goal isn’t perfect knowledge of the subject of thinking without thinking, but rather consideration of it and how it can benefit us or hinder us both individually and as a society.

Won't do my typical long review for this book.

I'm actually writing something more substantial that deals with these issues, so I'll save some of my energy for that. (And there is quite a bit more that needs reading).

The short-short version of my usual long review is that Gladwell has some very good exploratory writing that he has written through anecdotes. This shouldn't surprise Gladwell fans.

The problem with this book is that we never know whether he is intervening in the art vs. science debate, the intuitive vs. structured methods debate, or the rationalist vs. heuristic learning debate. If we were to read the book through any of these perspectives, unsurprisingly, the answer would be -- it all depends.

Intuition can be the answer -- unless it's the problem.

Intuition can be made better, through science. Unless our science is actually the problem, in that case, trust expert judgement (not necessarily the same thing as intuition, right?). The concepts get fuzzy. And actually, it seems like Gladwell is taking liberties with his subject matter to explore a range of things that might only be slightly related.

One might take away from this book that we need to be aware of our own cognition, or that we need something called an epistemological frame. How do we know what we know? When is information too much information? When do we need rigor? When do we need to make a decision quickly?

In any case, we're not sure what we're supposed to take away because the book hasn't quite settled into a fuller version of itself. That is my intuition as a writer. Gladwell has a second or third draft, but not quite a final draft. And that final draft might be a little beyond his capabilities. He might need a co-author, more time, or expertise to help his cause.

There is a deep literature that deals with all of these subjects of epistemology, analytical failure, art vs. science (and so on). But since the book scrapes the surface of applied psychology, we're left with a few good stories and some things to think about.

One has to remember that the author is a journalist and kind of intellectual voyeur -- thin-slicing is not only one of the topics of his book, it is also his profession.

Not bad for a book written for a popular audience, but not great.

جالب بود که چطور از علم برای توضیح این مساله استفاده کرده بود. البته مقداری که از علم استفاده کرده بود کمی کم بود و برای رفرانس علمی نیاز بود که کمی تحقیقات بیشتر صورت بگیره. و اینکه زیاد هم نمیشه روی این موضوع تاکید کرد که افرادی که قضاوت های لحظه ای انجام میدن افرادی هستن که دانش عمیق زیادی دارن یا تجربه یا مهرت خاصی در یک زمینه خاص دارن. خواندنش سریع بود و کمی نگاه علمی به چیزی که بهش تصمیم گیری بر اساس حس ششم میگیم، انداخت.


We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.

I didn't learn much from this book that I did not already know. I am beginning to suspect that Malcolm Gladwell is not writing books that uncover valuable facts that we should know, but rather is writing books that restate facts we already know but in an interesting way.

I like his anecdotal stories very much which is why I finished the book - hoping for more stories. When he lays out the facts, though, his writing is no more interesting than any other scientific author.

So, in summary, what we have is a talented writer making certain scientific findings available to a much wider audience than usual. Bravo! However if you want to learn something new, this book or his previous effort, The Tipping Point, is not where to go to find it. I imagine, if I read it, I will find The Outliers, his latest effort, to be similarly constructed.

Blink's content is easily summarized. First impressions are often more accurate than conclusions arrived at after much study and analysis. Be careful, though, because first impressions can be troublesome because of people's prejudices. Got it in 254 pages. He does come up with an interesting term, "thin slicing", to describe the process of taking in a first impression. Maybe learning that term made reading the whole book worthwhile. Maybe.

Malcolm Gladwell has written a book about the power of first impressions (aka intuition/ your gut feeling). He provides a series of anecdotes about the process of first reactions including a tale about a forged ancient Greek statue at the Getty that some experts deemed as authentic and others classified as a fake upon sight. In another anecdote, he scrutinizes a "couples lab" where psychologist John Gottman determines if a matched pair will last the test of time by studying their conversation for 15 minutes - -he accurately predicts their fate about 90% of the time.

Gladwell coins the term "thin-slicing" to capture these small snippets in time when a human judges a situation in an instant like a first date, hiring an employee, or meeting a new colleague. Human beings tend to take a first glance and "thin-slice" what they perceive through sight or interactions with the situation or individual. Rapid fire cognition is scary to many individuals and Gladwell believes that if "we paid more attention to those fleeting moments...it would change the way wars are fought, the kinds of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled...If you combine all those little changes together, you end up with a different and happier world." How profound! He is attempting to bring psychology to the masses and does so artfully, choosing his words and sharping his ideas with high-interest examples to engage the reader. Gladwell further discusses "priming," a term used to refer to subtle triggers that influence human behavior without any awareness of such changes (ex. Spain played classical music on subways and littering and vandalism decreased).

The book incited much discussion with my book club membership- - thought provoking questions and topics selected from the Blink Reading Group Guide, but membership barely scratched the surface in their debate. This book caused the group to make many connections to their own lives and world. Conversation often digressed into self-reflective wondering or observations.

Gladwell wants all readers to believe that intuition is often more reliable that reasoning and a series of data. But is that really the case? One criticism - he never addresses the brain in a scientific manner. In my own experience, I have learned (and am still learning) that I need to pay more attention to my intuition, my first gut instinct. I do not always think that "thin-slicing" is as reliable as collecting data and observations in many instances, but there is something to say about my first impressions of situations or people. I need to have more confidence about my "gut impressions" and have more faith in ME. Gladwell's book Blink substantiated that there is a certain degree of accuracy in my intuition.