Summary and Thoughts
I stumbled on Malcom Gladwell this year, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been binging his books. Blink was my third, after Talking to Strangers and The Tipping Point.
In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell investigates the power of snap judgments and the hidden workings of our unconscious mind. The book’s central idea is that the decisions we make in the “blink of an eye” are often just as good as—and sometimes even better than—the decisions we make after careful, deliberate analysis.
But he also explores the times when snap judgements are dangerous.
Like the other books by Gladwell I’ve read so far, there aren’t as many personal takeaways as I’d like. Should I rely more heavily on snap judgements, or less?
Snap judgements may be able to tell you more about a person than even their closest friends know. Or they could lead to killing an innocent person reaching for their wallet.
The book covers both scenarios, and many others.
One of the main takeaways from the book is an idea called “thin-slicing,” which is our unconscious ability to find patterns and meaning in very narrow or “thin” slices of experience. He argues that our brain is constantly processing information below the level of awareness, and this allows us to make sophisticated judgments very quickly. He supports this thesis with a wide array of interesting and engaging stories.
One of the most prolific examples, and one of the most interesting to me, is the work of psychologist John Gottman, who can observe a married couple for just a few minutes and, by “thin-slicing” their interaction, predict with over 90% accuracy if they will still be married in a decade.
Gladwell also explores the “dark side” of thin-slicing. He explains how our snap judgments can be easily corrupted by our environment, stress, and, most importantly, our hidden biases and stereotypes.
Ultimately, even though I wish it had more direct application, Blink is an exploration, not a “how-to” guide.
We should respect the power of our first impressions, but we must also be aware of their potential failures.
The book’s goal is to make us more self-aware, encouraging us to understand where our intuition comes from and to know when we should trust it, and just as importantly, when we should question it. At that, and being a thoroughly entertaining read full of fascinating and memorable stories, it succeeds wonderfully.
Stand-Out Stories
John Gottman and Marriage Thin-Slicing
As I mentioned earlier, Gottman is a psychologist and relationship scientist who has developed the skill of analyzing couples for a brief amount of time and determining the condition of their marriage in a decade, with a scary rate of accuracy.
The Getty Kouros
A marble statue was purchased by the Getty Museum in 1986. Experts were called to judge its authenticity, and when they first encountered it, most of them thought something was off about it. The more it was examined, however, the more the experts thought it was authentic.
This was until it was discovered that it really was a forgery.
The moral of the story is the experts’ first impression was right on, but many talked themselves out of believing it was truly a forgery.