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.

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.

Fascinating! I have to admit, in the first chapter I had a little knee-jerk reaction when I thought he was saying that our intuitive reactions are invariably correct. As I continued to read I appreciated his skill in outlining the complexity of his theory, and the fact that only one who is trained in a particular field can really articulate what is happening in his or her unconscious decision-making process. He also explained how that unconscious reaction can be skewed by unrelated factors, thus completely disproving my knee-jerk disagreement.

Audiobook read by the author. I'm going to keep this review short but I'm going to say it is an easy read and definitely worth reading. Basically, it is about the information our brains and subconscious process in the 'blink' of an eye. It's surprising how our subconscious knows what is happening in a scenario before we do. Gladwell provided many different scenarios and anecdotal stories throughout the book that were fascinating and eye-opening. It's sad to learn that we all are quick to judge and have many different stereotypes imbedded in our subconscious and conscious. The author's own anecdotal story of when he grew his hair out and the things that happened to him as a result is crazy. And he just had longer hair. So imagine all the other factors that play into someone's appearance and the quick judgements our subconscious starts to make.

But this book isn't just about stereotypes. I also found the section on analyzing married couples fascinating. An expert (I forget his name) is able to 'thin slice' a couple's interaction with each other and can tell with 90% accuracy if they will stay married or not. Maybe this would be a good tool for counselors and therapists to learn before couples get married? Definitely recommend. 4 stars.

Probably the best among Gladwell's books. He still stands true to his success mantra - "Gladwell - The Power of Inductive Reasoning." But, it was still a well researched and informative book. Blink.

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.

I seem to be destined to be disappointed by every book that I pick up these days. Perhaps I am just in a reading funk, but this book, too, left me a bit unsatisfied. I'm not quite sure what I expected, but the book was essentially a series of anecdotes about instinct. Gladwell may call it "thin-slicing" but the book is really about making snap judgments, stereotyping, if you will. It's the judgment that we make in the first few seconds of an interaction, a judgment made in the "blink" of an eye. Often, if not always, these judgments are more true than the ones made with greater reflection and we ignore these "thin-slices" at our peril. That, in a nutshell (or a thin-slice), is the thesis of this book. It is an interesting theory and one that I find amicable. My personal experience seems to confirm it. Still, I would have liked to see the whole thing fleshed out just a bit more. It just seemed a bit lightweight overall, but interesting as pop science.

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.

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).

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.

This book was really interesting. It discusses the way in which people can "thin-slice" a situation in a matter of seconds and make a judgement. This is where pre-conceived notions such as stereotypes can affect the way we react to something under a time constraint. It's about how our unconscious mind figures things out and affects how we feel or affects our actions before we even realize what is happening. Even if you aren't a racist, you can be programmed to act as a racist by the things you are exposed to in society. Even if you don't think you are sexist, you are more sexist than you think, due to programming. We associate things like home with mother and work with father. Examined in the book are police brutality, predictions of whether a couple will stay together (just by examining 15 min. of conversation), reading facial expressions, how one firefighter was able to thin slice a situation so quickly that he was able to save his men.

The study I found most interesting was the analysis of an autistic man. We have a part of our brain we use for facial recognition and another part we use for object recognition. The autistic man used the object part of his brain for both facial recognition and for things like recognizing that an object was a chair. The autistic man would watch a movie and not "get" the emotional things happening because he barely paid attention to faces and didn't distinguish meaning from them. A new police officer, for example, in a time of distress where his heart is racing, he just finished chasing a man in his car for an hour, will become "autistic" so to speak because he ignores all cues and shoots a man to death. All he perceives is a threat and he forgets the person. A police officer with more experience will be able to "thin slice" the situation better in a matter of seconds and avoid an unecessary shooting.

In order to be a good "thin-slicer", you probably have a lot of experience with what you are examining and it just becomes second nature. Some people are just naturally good at reading faces, predicting outcomes, and making those snap decisions that happen in the blink of an eye. Others, well, not as good! I feel that the book could use more focus, but overall, a good read.

I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the mysterious ways our minds work.

Fascinating book! I would describe Blink as promoting self-awareness more than self-help. It's a captivating exploration of the ability of our unconscious minds to accurately(much of the time)read the world around us. The psychological studies featured offered refreshing evidence that it isn't always in our best interest to slow down and think rationally. I wouldn't base an investment strategy on Gladwell's "thin-slicing" methods, but when it comes to matters of life and death, love, trust and marriage, oh, and battle tactics, Blink makes a convincing argument to "go with our gut."