Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

digitize

We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn’t possible,

people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions,

We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”

facetious.

The Warren Harding error is the dark side of rapid cognition. It is at the root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination.

implicit—associations

If you’d like to try a computerized IAT, you can go to www.implicit.harvard.edu.

we have our conscious attitudes.

The disturbing thing about the test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

which says that being short is probably as much of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African American.

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think. We see a tall person and we swoon.

virtuoso.

“You always put on your best face, even if you are having a bad day. You leave that behind,” he says. “Even if things are horrendous at home, you give the customer your best.”

“You cannot prejudge people in this business,”

“Prejudging is the kiss of death. You have to give everyone your best shot.

They were behaving just like the voters did in the 1920 presidential election when they took one look at Warren Harding, jumped to a conclusion, and stopped thinking.

unprepossessing

But unconscious discrimination is a little bit trickier.

They may bubble up from the unconscious—from behind a locked door inside of our brain—but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control.

whit

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions—we can alter the way we thin-slice—by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

hooch—but

JFCOM is where the Pentagon tests new ideas about military organization and experiments with new military strategies.

parlance,

Operation Desert Storm

Klein studied nurses, intensive care units, firefighters, and other people who make decisions under pressure, and one of his conclusions is that when experts make decisions, they don’t logically and systematically compare all available options.

How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action.

We would use the wisdom, the experience, and the good judgment of the people we had.”

You need to make a leap beyond the automatic assumption that doctors are always men.

With a logic problem, asking people to explain themselves doesn’t impair their ability to come up with the answers.

“When you start becoming reflective about the process, it undermines your ability.

We can hold a face in memory, and we can solve a puzzle in a flash. But what Schooler is saying is that all these abilities are incredibly fragile.

ESP,

Cook County Hospital. It was here that the world’s first blood bank opened,

apocryphal

Chicago has one of the worst asthma problems in the United States.

At the same time, the threat of malpractice has made doctors less and less willing to take a chance on a patient,

the more information decision makers have, the better off they are.

Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon.

even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern.

Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

When we thin-slice, when we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this proces...

And if you are given too many choices, if you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.

Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.

When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad.

jubilant.

virulently