Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

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In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.

Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature—which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous.

they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.

It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive.

a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

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I think we are innately suspicious of this kind of rapid cognition.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

Haste makes waste.

We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.

decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

Our unconscious is a powerful force.

our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

When it comes to the task of understanding ourselves and our world, I think we pay too much attention to those grand themes and too little to the particulars of those fleeting moments.

the task of making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.

On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later.

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of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing. “Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.

“He started out with ‘Yeah, I know.’ But it’s a yes-but.

“In one study, we were watching newlyweds, and what often happened with the couples who ended up in divorce is that when one partner would ask for credit, the other spouse wouldn’t give it. And with the happier couples, the spouse would hear it and say, ‘You’re right.’ That stood out.

What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically.

He has figured out that he doesn’t need to pay attention to everything that happens.

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

I think that this is the way that our unconscious works. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is doing what John Gottman does.

1. Extraversion. Are you sociable or retiring? Fun-loving or reserved? 2. Agreeableness. Are you trusting or suspicious? Helpful or uncooperative? 3. Conscientiousness. Are you organized or disorganized? Self-disciplined or weak willed? 4. Emotional stability. Are you worried or calm? Insecure or secure? 5. Openness to new experiences. Are you imaginative or down-to-earth? Independent or conforming?

They have a thick slice of experience with us, and that translates to a real sense of who we are.

That’s why, when we measure personality, we don’t just ask people point-blank what they think they are like. We give them a questionnaire, like the Big Five Inventory, carefully designed to elicit telling responses.

They think they are more forthcoming than they actually are, or more negative than they actually are.

If couples aren’t aware of how they sound, how much value can there be in asking them direct questions?

Analyses of malpractice lawsuits show that there are highly skilled doctors who get sued a lot and doctors who make lots of mistakes and never get sued.

Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them.

What you need to understand is the relationship between that doctor and his patients.

The surgeons who had never been sued spent more than three minutes longer with each patient than those who had been sued did (18.3 minutes versus 15 minutes).

The difference was entirely in how they talked to their patients.

All they were using for their prediction was their analysis of the surgeon’s tone of voice.

Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human.

We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation.

You know, in order to make somebody laugh, you have to be interesting, and in order to be interesting, you have to do things that are mean.

Nonetheless, you’ve managed to extract something very meaningful about him from those thin slices of experience, and that impression has a powerful effect on how you experience Tom Hanks’s movies.

Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience.

they all describe the act of getting at the truth of a work of art as an extraordinarily imprecise process.

It’s one thing to acknowledge the enormous power of snap judgments and thin slices but quite another to place our trust in something so seemingly mysterious.

if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

They were simply in a “smart” frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier—in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked—to blurt out the right answer.

As a society, we place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test taker’s ability and knowledge. But are they really?

They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act—and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment—are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

“You know, girls are really smart,” Jon, a medical student in a blue suit, said at the end of the evening. “They know in the first minute, Do I like this guy, can I take him home to my parents, or is he just a wham-bam kind of jerk?”

“No, the real me is the me revealed by my actions.