Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
With Blink, Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly does for the psychology of the unconscious mind what he did for the sociology of trends in his first book, The Tipping Point. Like that bestselling earlier book, Blink is packed with fascinating studies and profiles. Here Gladwell starts with art historians' knack for sensing a sophisticated forgery (they couldn't initially verbalize the exact problem), and ends with a notorious failure of intuition, the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. Along the way we are by turns wowed and disquieted by scores of other examples that bolster his conclusion that good "thin-slicing," or ignoring all but a few salient facts in the face of potentially overwhelming amounts of data, is what makes for truly expert judgment.
— ChrisDescription
In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.
About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the host of the podcast Revisionist History and the author of The Tipping Point, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
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