Blink Quotes

“We just can’t get past the stereotype of the dumb jock. But if all we saw of that person was his bookshelf or the art on his walls, we wouldn’t have that same problem.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“«Algunos de estos nuevos pensadores afirman que si tuviésemos un mejor servicio de información, si pudiésemos verlo todo, no podríamos perder», dice el coronel Van Riper. «Lo que mi hermano dice siempre es: “Imagínate que estás mirando un tablero de ajedrez. ¿Hay algo que no veas? No. ¿Y eso te garantiza la victoria? Ni mucho menos, porque nunca podrás ver lo que está pensando el otro”.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Inteligencia intuitiva. ¿Por qué sabemos la verdad en dos segundos?

“Hooker knew everything he could possibly know about his enemy. But it didn’t help him. The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Believe it or not, the risk of being sued for malpractice has very little to do with how many mistakes a doctor makes. Analyses of malpractice lawsuits show that there are highly skilled doctors who get sued a lot and doctors who make lots of mistakes and never get sued. At the same time, the overwhelming number of people who suffer an injury due to the negligence of a doctor never file a malpractice suit at all. In other words, patients don’t file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care. Patients file lawsuits because they’ve been harmed by shoddy medical care and something else happens to them. What is that something else? It’s how they were treated, on a personal level, by their doctor. What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly. “People just don’t sue doctors they like,” is how Alice Burkin, a leading medical malpractice lawyer, puts it. “In all the years I’ve been in this business, I’ve never had a potential client walk in and say, ‘I really like this doctor, and I feel terrible about doing it, but I want to sue him.’ We’ve had people come in saying they want to sue some specialist, and we’ll say, ‘We don’t think that doctor was negligent. We think it’s your primary care doctor who was at fault.’ And the client will say, ‘I don’t care what she did. I love her, and I’m not suing her.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Estaban tan concentrados en la mecánica y en los procesos, que eran incapaces de ver el problema desde una perspectiva holística. Cuando se descompone una cosa, se pierde su significado».”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Inteligencia intuitiva. ¿Por qué sabemos la verdad en dos segundos?

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

“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it. When doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests, and when we are uncertain about what we hear, we ask for a second opinion. And what do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. 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

“You may have noticed that I called the Dijksterguis study a "partial answer" to the question of when to draw on our instincts and when to rely on conscious analysis. The truth it that this is not a question that I - or anyone else, for that matter - can answer definitively. It's just too complicated. The best we can do, I think, is try to puzzle out the right mix of conscious and unconscious analysis on a case-by-base basis.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“One of the questions that I've been asked over and over again since Blink came out is, When should we trust our instincts, and when should be consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. One straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated - when we have to juggle many different variables - then our unconscious thought processes may be superior. Now, I realize that this is exactly contrary to conventional wisdom. We typically regard our snap judgement as best on immediate trivial questions. is that person attractive? Do I want that candy bar? But Dijksterhuis is suggesting the opposite: that maybe that big computer in our brain that handles our unconscious is at its best when it has to juggle many competing variables.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“It seems the father of the unconscious agreed: "When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Nuestro inconsciente es una fuerza poderosa, pero falible. Nuestro ordenador interno no siempre se abre paso en las tinieblas ni descubre al instante la «verdad» de una situación. Puede ser derrotado, distraído y neutralizado.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Inteligencia intuitiva. ¿Por qué sabemos la verdad en dos segundos?

“We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. This is why it was so hard for the Getty, at least in the beginning, to accept the opinion of people like Hoving and Harrison and Zeri: it was a lot easier to listen to the scientists and the lawyers, because the scientists and the lawyers could provide pages and pages of documentation supporting their conclusions. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“But what does the Goldman algorithm say? 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“adolescencia del arte occidental».”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Inteligencia intuitiva. ¿Por qué sabemos la verdad en dos segundos?

“When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think things through? Well, here is a partial answer. On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of analysis and personal choice start to get complicated—when we have to juggle many different variables—then our unconscious thought processes may be superior.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“no argument in the book has resonated more with readers than this one. 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.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“By making people think about jam, Wilson and Schooler turned them into jam idiots.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that 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

“The IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes. It’s also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations. If you have a strongly pro-white pattern of associations, for example, there is evidence that that will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you’re behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward a little less, turn away slightly from him or her, close your body a bit, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less, hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more, laugh at jokes a bit less. Does that matter? Of course it does. Suppose the conversation is a job interview. And suppose the applicant is a black man. He’s going to pick up on that uncertainty and distance, and that may well make him a little less certain of himself, a little less confident, and a little less friendly. And what will you think then? You may well get a gut feeling that the applicant doesn’t really have what it takes, or maybe that he is a bit standoffish, or maybe that he doesn’t really want the job.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t let us edit.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to understand that we actually like them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“If you want to get a good idea of whether I’d make a good employee, drop by my house one day and take a look around.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking