Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
A review by Anna Godbersen
Snap judgments aren't always bad, says Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, his new
book about the kind of thinking that is done in the blink of an eye. They can
in fact be very useful, while the kind of thinking that takes time and research
and teams of experts can be misleading, or worse. Gladwell, author of the much
talked about The
Tipping Point, illustrates with a few carefully rendered examples: art historians
intuitively spot a Greek statue, authenticated by a long, scientific investigation,
as a fake; a marriage counselor determines, from a few moments of their conversations,
whether couples are headed for divorce; college students characterize strangers,
better even than the strangers' friends, from a few minutes in their dorm rooms.
(That last one was a campus psychology experiment, naturally.) He then goes about
complicating and narrowing his endorsement of "Thin Slicing," "the ability of
our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow
slices of experience." Prejudice, of course, can throw our first responses. Warren
Harding is generally thought of as one of the worst U.S. presidents, for instance,
and it seems he got himself that dubious honor by being tall and always giving
a dignified first impression; the Amadou Diallo shooting (in which four white
policemen killed a five-foot-six, 150-pound black man, when they mistook his wallet
for a gun) provides a more harrowing example of how prejudice can cause instincts
to go terribly wrong. Still, with training and experience, Gladwell believes our
rapid decision making abilities can do far more good than harm.
Nearly every argument in Gladwell's book is made by example, and these are invariably topical and interesting, and often lead you to picture some societal niche that you hadn't thought of before. (Speed dating, say, or the much more financed world of Pentagon war games.) The anecdotal method can be less than satisfying, however, and by the end of Blink I found myself longing for a book more drawn out and philosophical, the kind of thing you couldn't digest in a single flight.
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