Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

by Malcolm Gladwell

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled. I

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

in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.

“Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community.

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.

www.implicit.harvard.edu

“The next war is not just going to be military on military. The deciding factor is not going to be how many tanks you kill, how many ships you sink, and how many planes you shoot down. The decisive factor is how you take apart your adversary’s system. Instead of going after war-fighting capability, we have to go after war-making capability. The military is connected to the economic system, which is connected to their cultural system, to their personal relationships. We have to understand the links between all those systems.”

“By that, I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward. Almost every day, the commander of the Red air forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together, using these general techniques of trying to overwhelm Blue Team from different directions. But he never got specific guidance from me of how to do it. Just the intent.”

But it had one overwhelming advantage: allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly turns out to be like the rule of agreement in improv. It enables rapid cognition.

verbal overshadowing.

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

In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

The first impressions of experts are different.

our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. What

in which introspection destroyed people’s ability to solve insight problems.

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.

“The face is like the penis!” What he meant was that the face has, to a large extent, a mind of its own. This doesn’t mean we have no control over our faces. We can use our voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses.

I think that we become temporarily autistic also in situations when we run out of time. The

“When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes

and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.”

Our powers of thin-slicing and snap judgments are extraordinary. But even the giant computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work. The art experts who judged the Getty kouros needed to see the kouros before they could tell whether it was a fake.

Because when police officers are by themselves, they slow things down, and when they are with someone else, they speed things up.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.