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: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Description
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: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Description page:
Blink
is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an
instant. Gladwell campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for
translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes
from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course,
selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and
focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive
unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated
information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.
Gladwell
includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first
impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong
cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome
but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of
blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and
murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial
reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making.
In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of
Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
From
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Best-selling author Gladwell (The
Tipping Point) has a dazzling ability to find commonality in disparate fields
of study. As he displays again in this entertaining and illuminating look at how
we make snap judgments—about people's intentions, the authenticity of a work of
art, even military strategy—he can parse for general readers the intricacies of
fascinating but little-known fields like professional food tasting (why does
Coke taste different from Pepsi?). Gladwell's conclusion, after studying how
people make instant decisions in a wide range of fields from psychology to police
work, is that we can make better instant judgments by training our mind and senses
to focus on the most relevant facts—and that less input (as long as it's the right
input) is better than more. Perhaps the most stunning example he gives of this
counterintuitive truth is the most expensive war game ever conducted by the Pentagon,
in which a wily marine officer, playing "a rogue military commander" in the Persian
Gulf and unencumbered by hierarchy, bureaucracy and too much technology, humiliated
American forces whose chiefs were bogged down in matrixes, systems for decision
making and information overload. But if one sets aside Gladwell's dazzle, some
questions and apparent inconsistencies emerge. If doctors are given an algorithm,
or formula, in which only four facts are needed to determine if a patient is having
a heart attack, is that really educating the doctor's decision-making ability—or
is it taking the decision out of the doctor's hands altogether and handing it
over to the algorithm? Still, each case study is satisfying, and Gladwell imparts
his own evident pleasure in delving into a wide range of fields and seeking an
underlying truth.
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