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.

So, when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be wary of them? Answering that question is the second task of Blink.

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.

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.

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.

We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

Justice is supposed to be blind. It isn’t.

This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works—and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment—it is our responsibility to act.