Blink

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

In 1986, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California put on display a marble statue it believed to date from the 6th century BC. Prior to exhibition, the museum had run 14 months of checks on the statue’s authenticity, including electron microscopy and other high-tech tests. But when a series of art historians laid eyes on the statue, they had an instinctive sense that something was amiss. Their hunches proved correct: the statue was later revealed as a forgery. “In the first two seconds of looking—in a single glance—they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team of the Getty was able to understand after 14 months,” writes Malcolm Gladwell. “Blink is about those first two seconds.”      In this follow-up to his bestseller The Tipping Point, Gladwell leads us on a whirlwind tour of examples of snap judgments, which, when successful, depend on what he calls “thin-slicing”—the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. Gladwell didn’t invent the term; he borrowed it from John Gottman, a psychologist who’s found that watching just a few minutes of a married couple’s videotaped conversation is enough to let him predict—with remarkable accuracy—how likely the couple is to stay together or break up. In his breezy, conversational style, Gladwell introduces us to a tennis coach who claims to know when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; explores why doctors who talk more directly to their patients are less prone to lawsuits; and interviews veterans of “speed-dating,” in which potential partners are sized up in a few seconds. Of course, spur-of-the-moment thinking can lead to bad decisions as well; as examples, Gladwell includes the election of Warren Harding (whose “presidential” appearance may have trumped his other qualifications for office) and the ill-fated introduction of New Coke into the marketplace.