Blink Quotes

“when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“most of us don’t make a distinction—on an unconscious level—between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“If you get too caught up in the production of information, you drown in the data.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The irony, though, is that that very desire for confidence is precisely what ends up undermining the accuracy of their decision.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“that a person’s bedroom gives three kinds of clues to his or her personality. There are, first of all, identity claims, which are deliberate expressions about how we would like to be seen by the world: a framed copy of a magna cum laude degree from Harvard, for example. Then there is behavioral residue, which is defined as the inadvertent clues we leave behind: dirty laundry on the floor, for instance, or an alphabetized CD collection. Finally, there are thoughts and feelings regulators, which are changes we make to our most personal spaces to affect the way we feel when we inhabit them: a scented candle in the corner, for example, or a pile of artfully placed decorative pillows on the bed.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The observers were looking at the students’ most personal belongings, and our personal belongings contain a wealth of very telling information.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the Big Five Inventory, a highly respected, multi-item questionnaire that measures people across five dimensions: 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?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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. It’s sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“there isn’t any gender difference when it comes to contempt.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The big gender difference with negative emotions is that women are more critical, and men are more likely to stonewall. We find that women start talking about a problem, the men get irritated and turn away, and the women get more critical, and it becomes a circle.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“With criticism I might say to my wife, ‘You never listen, you are really selfish and insensitive.’ Well, she’s going to respond defensively to that. That’s not very good for our problem solving and interaction. But if I speak from a superior plane, that’s far more damaging, and contempt is any statement made from a higher level. A lot of the time it’s an insult: ‘You are a bitch. You’re scum.’ It’s trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It’s hierarchical.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse Code operators, is pattern recognition.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“one of Gottman’s findings is that for a marriage to survive, the ratio of positive to negative emotion in a given encounter has to be at least five to one.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“He started out with ‘Yeah, I know.’ But it’s a yes-but. Even though he started to validate her, he went on to say that he didn’t like the dog.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“she rolled her eyes very quickly, which is a classic sign of contempt.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“yes-but” tactics—appearing to agree but then taking it back.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester. That’s the power of our adaptive unconscious.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, ‘conscious’ pilot.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“This new notion of the adaptive unconscious is thought of, instead, as 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured the game out:”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking