Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a book about snap judgements, split second decisions and what we call the gut feeling and how sometimes we must listen to thoughts that come to us in a BLINK. This unconscious decision making that the author calls ‘thin slicing’ is something we all partake in day to day.

These snap decisions, the author warns can be harmful because of the biases and prejudice we carry with us, citing the shooting of Amadou Diallo, the election of Warren Harding, the New Coke and research that I have come to associate with Gladwell. .
Blink isn’t perfect, kinda difficult to review but I love how it made me see certain things differently, how we should trust our gut even though we cannot explain it but should use this power judiciously as there are a lot of factors to consider when to give that good old gut feeling a miss.

Pick this book for something quintessentially Malcolm Gladwell and I loved every bit of it! I’d recommend it for anyone who loves interesting facts and thorough analysis as I do.

O, to have the writing career of Malcolm Gladwell. The man pulls interesting case studies from academic research and news headlines, spins it into a book under a general theme, and blammo! He has a bestseller. This formula worked for him with The Tipping Point and then Blink.

Blink is a compelling read, despite its weak overall theme, which is that sometimes split-second decisions are good and sometimes they're bad, and we need to learn when to trust our first impressions and when to discount them (except there's no real way to make that distinction).

The book is a pleasure to read simply because of its case studies. Gladwell throws in so many topics — art, politics, marriage, consumer testing, athletes, war, police shootings, music — that there is bound to be something engaging for everyone. (After reading another one of Gladwell's peppy articles in The New Yorker, my husband joked, "Gladwell thinks he can make ANYTHING seem interesting.")

After finishing Blink, I feel like I've learned something important, but I'm not sure exactly what, other than that Gladwell has a very charmed career.

My rating: 3.5 stars rounded up to 4

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

n  n   

“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.”

n  n

I think this was the first time I experienced a Gladwell book as an audiobook and ever since, it has been my favorite form to consume his books. The quality of production is great and Gladwell narration makes the books even better.

I know Gladwell's books are controversial from a scientific point of view as some readers think they're full of contradictions. Personally, I get the feeling that they are well researched, and I never noticed glaring contradictions or mistakes while reading them. Once again, that is only a subjective feeling and they may be not perfect, but I think the way they are written makes them so damn addicting and easy to read.

In this book, Gladwell discusses decisions made in the blink of an eye and my favorite kind of non-fiction books are those that affect me somehow and this one did. It kind of gave me more confident to take those quick decisions specially in my job as a doctor!

Interesting and immensely readable. Full RTC

Exciting cutting edge neuroscience and psychology pitched at a level designed to drop a layman’s jaw!

BLINK is about first impressions, unconscious thought, data accumulation at a glance, snap judgments and spontaneous, instantaneous high-speed decision making!

In the first chapter, Gladwell summarizes his threefold purpose of writing the book. His first purpose was to convince readers that high speed decisions can be “every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” His second purpose was to demonstrate that when those snap judgments and first impressions go off the rails, they do so for a very specific set of quite understandable reasons that are obvious enough on their face to allow decision makers to be on their guard when necessary. Gladwell’s final objective, obviously I dare say, was to convince readers that learning the difference and developing the skill of harking to those snap judgments when it’s appropriate to do so is a learnable skill.

From first page to last, Gladwell’s descriptions of the science, the psychological tests that were used to bolster the scientific conclusions and the anecdotal examples of instances where snap judgments took the day or, ultimately, failed miserably were, in a word, gripping.

For instance, Gladwell’s description of the degree to which facial movements are inextricably linked to emotions is mind-blowing. I dare you to NOT stop and shake your head in dumbfounded amazement when you read, “The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.” Think about that for just a second. Facial expressions not only reflect emotions that already exist. They can create emotions and enhance or depress already existing feelings. You certainly won’t be hearing me expressing any disbelief when I read about a canny detective’s ability to pick up on kinesic “tells” about lying or information withholding during an interrogation any more.

BLINK has lots and lots of succulent meat to chew on – recognition of forged artwork; wartime leadership and decision-making in the heat of battle; the differences between normal perception and autistic perception; judging on appearance; why Coca-Cola made the spectacularly flawed decision to create New Coke; a policeman’s near instantaneous decision to shoot a suspect; and much, much more.

Highly recommended (and THAT, by the way, was NOT a snap decision!)

Paul Weiss

3.5 stars.
Review to come.
It wasn;t upto the mark as I had expected.

I find this book to say very little in the end, at least, little that is useful or that I can apply. We make split-second judgements. Some people more accurately than others. This does not always mean what we think it means.

Okay....

I guess when the subtitle of a book has the words "power" and "thinking" in it ("The Power of Thinking Without Thinking"), I expect to gain something from it. Instead I feel like the author explains all the reasons why we should not be relying on snap judgements, despite the fact that some of the time, they are right. I don't find "some" to be very useful. If a person can't rely on first impressions, or what the author refers to as "thin slice" representations of performance or taste, what good is there in talking about it at all?

Then I started thinking about why I read this book in the first place. When the new president of the university where I work started, he talked extensively about Malcolm Gladwell. He referenced this book as well as Outliers. I felt like if I read them, I would understand where he was coming from, and some of the changes he has been making. I have to admit that knowing how much of a decision people make in that first moment could have an impact on how a place is marketed. Even if first impressions don't necessarily become our opinions later on, they still have the power to make a decision in a person's mind, for better or for worse.

Still, I'm not sure how you can make that work for you. Is it better to be super-sweet Pepsi that people prefer at the first sip, or more popular Coca-Cola which people are more likely to drink an entire bottle/can of, and make a repeat purchase of? I'd rather be Coke. Can you manufacture enough of a Pepsi experience and then also be Coke? That sounds dangerous to me, because I'm not sure you can be both.

"People are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often."

"How good people's decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal."

Gladwell does seem to be saying that if you understand the limitations of snap-judgments, you can train yourself to try to lessen bias, prejudice, and incorrect assumptions. It seems to me that the bigger trick is understanding when and how you are doing this to begin with. Write me a book about how to do that, Mr. Gladwell.

I generally distrust anyone who says that they ‘go-with-their-gut’. But when the company I work for announced a major decision a few years back, I instantly said, “This is going to be a huge mistake.” Smart people had examined the deal backwards and forwards for months and thought it was a great idea. I had a bad feeling about it that I could only later explain, and I was far from the only one. And we were right. The entire thing turned out to be a huge disaster.

I kept thinking about that incident when I read Blink. The book has a pretty obvious point. People make snap decisions that they can’t consciously explain. Sometimes these decisions are correct and amazing based on the limited amount of information available. Art experts who instantly know a statue is fake despite scientific tests indicating otherwise. A fireman who appears to be fighting a routine small fire suddenly orders his men out without really knowing why and the floor collapses a second later. And sometimes these decisions can be wrong and have tragic consequences. Four cops think a guy has a gun when he’s pulling his wallet out and shoot him multiple times.

We’ve all made quick decisions and later been amazed at how good or bad they turned out, but what makes Blink interesting is that Gladwell does some examination of the science behind how we arrive at these conclusions, and his thoughts on how the data we’re processing can either give us incredible insight or lead us horribly wrong.

Thankfully, Gladwell is not making an argument against logical thinking or analyzing a problem. What he is doing is pointing out that instinct or intuition can be a powerful tool IF the people involved have trained themselves to make good decisions, and if we know when to trust it. He’s got a lot of great examples of doctors, military officers and police officers who often have to make life-or-death decisions in a matter of seconds with limited information. They have to trust their instincts, and Gladwell makes some common sense points that the right kind of training and education can make a huge difference. He contrasts the story of the four New York cops who killed the guy with a wallet versus a patrolman who did not fire on someone who actually had a gun but was attempting to surrender it.

What made this book fun to read was the variety of examples that Gladwell uses and the scientific research done with them. Art dealers, doctors, marriage counselors, cops, military officers, car salesmen, a tennis coach, and classical musicians are all used as examples of the strengths and weaknesses of snap decisions. There’s also some simple experiments included that let you play along at home. This is a book that will make you think about the way you think.

As an empirical psychologist by training, I get very annoyed at journalists who simplify things to the point that its no longer even remotely accurate. Such is the case for Blink. This is especially annoying to me, because the book describes my area of research specialization. If you're interested in a fun read, Gladwell is certainly an engaging author. If you're looking for something that accurately describes the research, I'd recommend looking elsewhere.

For example, Scott Plous's "the psychology of judgment and decision making" (which, despite the title, is not textbook like), or the Heath brothers' "Made to stick".

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.

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.