Blink Quotes

“What I heard is that the Blue Team had all these long discussions,’ Van Riper says. ‘They we’re trying to decide what the political situation was like. They had charts with up arrows and down arrows. I remember thinking, Wait a minute. You were doing that while you were _fighting?_ They had all these acronyms. The elements of national power were diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. That gives you DIME. They would always talk about the Blue DIME. Then there were the political, military, economic, social, infrastructure, and information instruments, PMESI. So they’d have these terrible conversations where it would be our DIME versus their PMESI. I wanted to gag. What are you talking about? You know, you get caught up in forms, in matrixes, in computer programs, and it just draws you in. They were so focused on mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“this wasn’t about something really obvious, such as skin color or age or height or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“But in other aspects of our lives, I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“This is the price we pay for the many benefits of the locked door. When we ask people to explain their thinking -- particularly thinking that comes from the unconscious -- we need to be careful in how we interpret their answers.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Cheskin’s offices are just outside San Francisco, and after we talked, Masten and Rhea took me to a Nob Hill Farms supermarket down the street, one of those shiny, cavernous food emporia that populate the American suburbs. “We’ve done work in just about every aisle,” Masten said as we walked in. In front of us was the beverage section. Rhea leaned over and picked up a can of 7-Up. “We tested Seven-Up. We had several versions, and what we found is that if you add fifteen percent more yellow to the green on the package—if you take this green and add more yellow—what people report is that the taste experience has a lot more lime or lemon flavor. And people were upset. ‘You are changing my Seven-Up! Don’t do a ‘New Coke’ on me.’ It’s exactly the same product, but a different set of sensations have been transferred from the bottle, which in this case isn’t necessarily a good thing.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The Cheskin company demonstrated a particularly elegant example of sensation transference a few years ago, when they studied two competing brands of inexpensive brandy, Christian Brothers and E & J (the latter of which, to give some idea of the market segment to which the two belong, is known to its clientele as Easy Jesus). Their client, Christian Brothers, wanted to know why, after years of being the dominant brand in the category, it was losing market share to E & J. Their brandy wasn’t more expensive. It wasn’t harder to find in the store. And they weren’t being out-advertised (since there is very little advertising at this end of the brandy segment). So, why were they losing ground? Cheskin set up a blind taste test with two hundred brandy drinkers. The two brandies came out roughly the same. Cheskin then decided to go a few steps further. “We went out and did another test with two hundred different people,” explains Darrel Rhea, another principal in the firm. “This time we told people which glass was Christian Brothers and which glass was E & J. Now you are having sensation transference from the name, and this time Christian Brothers’ numbers are up.” Clearly people had more positive associations with the name Christian Brothers than with E & J. That only deepened the mystery, because if Christian Brothers had a stronger brand, why were they losing market share? “So, now we do another two hundred people. This time the actual bottles of each brand are in the background. We don’t ask about the packages, but they are there. And what happens? Now we get a statistical preference for E & J. So we’ve been able to isolate what Christian Brothers’ problem is. The problem is not the product and it’s not the branding. It’s the package.” Rhea pulled out a picture of the two brandy bottles as they appeared in those days. Christian Brothers looked like a bottle of wine: it had a long, slender spout and a simple off-white label. E & J, by contrast, had a far more ornate bottle: more squat, like a decanter, with smoked glass, foil wrapping around the spout, and a dark, richly textured label. To prove their point, Rhea and his colleagues did one more test. They served two hundred people Christian Brothers Brandy out of an E & J bottle, and E & J Brandy out of a Christian Brothers bottle. Which brandy won? Christian Brothers, hands-down, by the biggest margin of all. Now they had the right taste, the right brand, and the right bottle. The company redesigned their bottle to be a lot more like E & J’s, and, sure enough, their problem was solved.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The irony, thought, 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

“Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgment And what Blink is — what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to — is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“Every moment — every blink — is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preferences to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“But testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases, the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves make very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That's what makes it so compelling and — to be frank — terrifying.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“What Gottman is saying is that a relationship between two people has a fist as well: a distinctive signature that arises naturally and automatically. That is why a marriage can be read and decoded so easily, because some key part of human activity — whether it is something as simple as pounding out a Morse code message or as complex as being married to someone — has an identifiable and stable pattern. Predicting divorce, like tracking Morse code operators, is pattern recognition.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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

“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

“n good decision making, frugality matters; take a complex problem and reduce it to its simplest elements.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Every moment—every blink—is composed of a series of discrete moving parts, and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform, and for correction.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“second lesson of Blink. Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition. We can prevent the people fighting wars or staffing emergency rooms or policing the streets from making mistakes.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. In fact, he makes an even bolder claim—one central to understanding how mind reading works—and that is that the information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our mind. In a certain sense, it is what is going on inside our mind.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“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

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

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“four different operators in that unit, working on a shift system, each with his own characteristics,” says Nigel West, a British military historian. “And invariably, quite apart from the text, there would be the preambles, and the illicit exchanges. How are you today? How’s the girlfriend? What’s the weather”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking