Blink

Following on his success of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell released Blink in January of 2005. The book is about snap decisions and some of the psychology around them. Malcolm writes in his accessible, conversational style. It makes for quick reading. Stripped down, the book makes the following points. (Note that the order of these points does not match the order they are made in the book.)

1. People subconsciously pick up on small details in people, things, and environments around them. People subconsciously aggregate these details when making snap decisions.
2. People are especially good at reading details in other people and ascertaining their mental state, what he calls mind-reading. He notes that autism is a kind of mind-blindness, an inability to understand the intentions and mental states of others.
3. Snap judgments are handled by the subconscious, and often justified by the conscious mind with fabricated—but wholly believed—stories in retrospect.
4. Having to voice an explanation of our snap decisions forces the logical right brain to handle it rather than the emotional left brain, often to our long term dissatisfaction.
5. Our snap judgments can be confounded by several things.
   1. Misleading appearances
   2. Our preconceptions and prejudices
   3. Irrelevant factors
6. People can overcome the effect of appearances and prejudice by exposing themselves to positive examples before the moment of decision. (These examples are called primers, kind of like deliberate subliminal messages.)
7. People can further mitigate the negative effects of the bad snap decision in one of two ways.
   1. Developing a principle and adhering to it regardless of feelings.
   2. Scientifically identifying salient information and hiding everything else from the decision maker.
8. We can improve our snap decisions by slowing complex situations down and studying them bit by bit in a process he terms thin-slicing. Eventually, we can return to real-time observations and snap judge them accurately.

Gladwell is fun reading for the anecdotes, but fails to answer the crucial question that directly results from addressing the topic: When should we trust our snap decisions and when shouldn't we? He seems to imply that experts make better judgments, but never states it directly and never provides any analytical tools or framework for the reader. (He provided one in The Tipping Point, so its absence is quite conspicuous here.)

Perhaps the greatest value of the book is its references to other topics, such as John Gottman's treatise titled The Mathematics of Divorce, Harvard's Implicit Association Test, and the unsung artist Kenna, among others. But ultimately, as a book with some good stories, a few interesting references, and a muddy point, it is unsatisfying.