Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

braggadocio

staginess.

Kenna is the sort of person who is constantly at odds with your expectations, and that is both one of the things that make him so interesting and one of the things that have made his career so problematic.

“In my life, everything seems to fall in place,”

dismal.

it seems as though the most accurate way to find out how consumers feel about something is to ask them directly.

What Masten and Rhea do is tell companies how to manipulate our first impressions, and it’s hard not to feel a certain uneasiness about their efforts.

“Well, they’re going behind our back.” But who is going behind our back? The ice cream company? Or our own unconscious?

protuberances

In the case of a blind sip test, first impressions don’t work because colas aren’t supposed to be sipped blind.

their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it. This isn’t true of everything we call ugly.

There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for ‘different.’”

ballyhooed

You know that scene in the deli from the movie When Harry Met Sally? That’s what I feel about food when it’s really good.”

esoteric

chroma,

Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look inside that room.

Whenever we have something that we are good at—something we care about—that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

peddler

Perhaps the most common—and the most important—forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people.

Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling.

You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions.

They would just come to you, blink.

Ordinarily, we have no difficulty at all distinguishing, in a blink, between someone who is suspicious and someone who is not, between someone brazen and someone curious, and, most easily of all, between someone terrified and someone dangerous; anyone who walks down a city street late at night makes those kinds of instantaneous calculations constantly.

anomalous

acquitted

courtesans

extraneous

taxonomy

What Ekman is saying is that the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion.

Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

We can all mind-read effortlessly and automatically because the clues we need to make sense of someone or some social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us.

The classic model for understanding what it means to lose the ability to mind-read is the condition of autism.

People with autism find it difficult, if not impossible, to do all of the things that I’ve been describing so far as natural and automatic human processes.

They have difficulty interpreting nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than the literal meaning of words.

condescension

In other words, on the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object.

Matisse.

Into the Kill Zone.

a dog in the hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its fleas.’

Mind-reading allows us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

the book The Gift of Fear,

“When you remove time,” de Becker says, “you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction.”

bravado.

virtuosos,

Ekman actually runs seminars for law-enforcement agencies in which he teaches people how to improve their mind-reading skills.

But look at how the officer’s experience and skill allowed him to stretch out that fraction of time, to slow the situation down, to keep gathering information until the last possible moment.

invariably

effusive.