Blink by Malcolm Gladwell Buy This Book Now

Suzanne
Rating:


Review
Blink is a curious dissection of how our mind makes decisions based on split-second, unconscious impressions.  Thus the phenomenon of why it’s so hard to explain our decisions sometimes. It’s not always a good thing, depending on what our instant impressions are based on, e.g. societal prejudices we’ve unknowingly absorbed. Basically we are always profiling people.  This phenomenon could be of great use in marketing products, but it can also backfire as the author explains happened with the New Coke debacle. The most interesting part of it is how you can train yourself to read people’s faces in order to tell what they’re really thinking or feeling. It’s difficult, but you can learn to see the split-second “micro-expressions” that flash across people’s faces before they try to hide them. A brilliant skill to bring to a poker game for sure, but it also could be invaluable to the police in preventing the escalation of situations to violence.  Sometimes this book was interesting, and sometimes it dragged.

Best Line: “The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.” (pg. 174)

---

Kim
Rating:


Review
The power of thinking without thinking is an accurate way to describe this book. By the author of The Tipping Point and Outliers, Blink not only offers a refresher course in trusting our gut instincts, but also delves into how we can sum up people, situations and such in the blink of an eye. And we can be accurate in our judgments most of the time if we pay attention! Mr. Gladwell talked with some fascinating people such as Paul van Riper, the former Marine commander who, in early 2000, gave some high ranking officials at the Pentagon a completely sanctioned butt-kicking, and Ami Klin, who teaches at Yale University and is an expert on autism. I also found the author’s theory of our country’s “Warren Hardy error” thought-provoking as well. I agree with Suzanne that the book does drag at times, but mostly I appreciated what the author had to say, and have tried to be aware of “thin slicing” when at all possible.

Best Line:“We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility.”