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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Paperback – April 3, 2007
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Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others?
In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police.
Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.
- Print length296 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBack Bay Books
- Publication dateApril 3, 2007
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.88 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100316010669
- ISBN-13978-0316010665
- Lexile measure1100L
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- “Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience.Highlighted by 8,187 Kindle readers
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Blink
The Power of Thinking Without ThinkingBy Malcolm GladwellBack Bay Books
Copyright © 2005 Malcolm GladwellAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-01066-5
Chapter One
The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long WaySome years ago, a young couple came to the University of Washington to visit the laboratory of a psychologist named John Gottman. They were in their twenties, blond and blue-eyed with stylishly tousled haircuts and funky glasses. Later, some of the people who worked in the lab would say they were the kind of couple that is easy to like-intelligent and attractive and funny in a droll, ironic kind of way-and that much is immediately obvious from the videotape Gottman made of their visit. The husband, whom I'll call Bill, had an endearingly playful manner. His wife, Susan, had a sharp, deadpan wit.
They were led into a small room on the second floor of the nondescript two-story building that housed Gottman's operations, and they sat down about five feet apart on two office chairs mounted on raised platforms. They both had electrodes and sensors clipped to their fingers and ears, which measured things like their heart rate, how much they were sweating, and the temperature of their skin. Under their chairs, a "jiggle-o-meter" on the platform measured how much each of them moved around. Two video cameras, one aimed at each person, recorded everything they said and did. For fifteen minutes, they were left alone with the cameras rolling, with instructions to discuss any topic from their marriage that had become a point of contention. For Bill and Sue it was their dog. They lived in a small apartment and had just gotten a very large puppy. Bill didn't like the dog; Sue did. For fifteen minutes, they discussed what they ought to do about it.
The videotape of Bill and Sue's discussion seems, at least at first, to be a random sample of a very ordinary kind of conversation that couples have all the time. No one gets angry. There are no scenes, no breakdowns, no epiphanies. "I'm just not a dog person" is how Bill starts things off, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. He complains a little bit-but about the dog, not about Susan. She complains, too, but there are also moments when they simply forget that they are supposed to be arguing. When the subject of whether the dog smells comes up, for example, Bill and Sue banter back and forth happily, both with a half smile on their lips.
Sue: Sweetie! She's not smelly ...
Bill: Did you smell her today?
Sue: I smelled her. She smelled good. I petted her, and my hands didn't stink or feel oily. Your hands have never smelled oily.
Bill: Yes, sir.
Sue: I've never let my dog get oily.
Bill: Yes, sir. She's a dog.
Sue: My dog has never gotten oily. You'd better be careful.
Bill: No, you'd better be careful.
Sue: No, you'd better be careful.... Don't call my dog oily, boy.
1. The Love Lab
How much do you think can be learned about Sue and Bill's marriage by watching that fifteen-minute videotape? Can we tell if their relationship is healthy or unhealthy? I suspect that most of us would say that Bill and Sue's dog talk doesn't tell us much. It's much too short. Marriages are buffeted by more important things, like money and sex and children and jobs and in-laws, in constantly changing combinations. Sometimes couples are very happy together. Some days they fight. Sometimes they feel as though they could almost kill each other, but then they go on vacation and come back sounding like newlyweds. In order to "know" a couple, we feel as though we have to observe them over many weeks and months and see them in every state-happy, tired, angry, irritated, delighted, having a nervous breakdown, and so on-and not just in the relaxed and chatty mode that Bill and Sue seemed to be in. To make an accurate prediction about something as serious as the future of a marriage-indeed, to make a prediction of any sort-it seems that we would have to gather a lot of information and in as many different contexts as possible.
But John Gottman has proven that we don't have to do that at all. Since the 1980s, Gottman has brought more than three thousand married couples-just like Bill and Sue-into that small room in his "love lab" near the University of Washington campus. Each couple has been videotaped, and the results have been analyzed according to something Gottman dubbed SPAFF (for specific affect), a coding system that has twenty separate categories corresponding to every conceivable emotion that a married couple might express during a conversation. Disgust, for example, is 1, contempt is 2, anger is 7, defensiveness is 10, whining is 11, sadness is 12, stonewalling is 13, neutral is 14, and so on. Gottman has taught his staff how to read every emotional nuance in people's facial expressions and how to interpret seemingly ambiguous bits of dialogue. When they watch a marriage videotape, they assign a SPAFF code to every second of the couple's interaction, so that a fifteen-minute conflict discussion ends up being translated into a row of eighteen hundred numbers-nine hundred for the husband and nine hundred for the wife. The notation "7, 7, 14, 10, 11, 11," for instance, means that in one six-second stretch, one member of the couple was briefly angry, then neutral, had a moment of defensiveness, and then began whining. Then the data from the electrodes and sensors is factored in, so that the coders know, for example, when the husband's or the wife's heart was pounding or when his or her temperature was rising or when either of them was jiggling in his or her seat, and all of that information is fed into a complex equation.
On the basis of those calculations, Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent. Recently, a professor who works with Gottman named Sybil Carrre, who was playing around with some of the videotapes, trying to design a new study, discovered that if they looked at only three minutes of a couple talking, they could still predict with fairly impressive accuracy who was going to get divorced and who was going to make it. The truth of a marriage can be understood in a much shorter time than anyone ever imagined.
John Gottman is a middle-aged man with owl-like eyes, silvery hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. He is short and very charming, and when he talks about something that excites him-which is nearly all the time-his eyes light up and open even wider. During the Vietnam War, he was a conscientious objector, and there is still something of the '60s hippie about him, like the Mao cap he sometimes wears over his braided yarmulke. He is a psychologist by training, but he also studied mathematics at MIT, and the rigor and precision of mathematics clearly moves him as much as anything else. When I met Gottman, he had just published his most ambitious book, a dense five-hundred-page treatise called The Mathematics of Divorce, and he attempted to give me a sense of his argument, scribbling equations and impromptu graphs on a paper napkin until my head began to swim.
Gottman may seem to be an odd example in a book about the thoughts and decisions that bubble up from our unconscious. There's nothing instinctive about his approach. He's not making snap judgments. He's sitting down with his computer and painstakingly analyzing videotapes, second by second. His work is a classic example of conscious and deliberate thinking. But Gottman, it turns out, can teach us a great deal about a critical part of rapid cognition known as thin-slicing. "Thin-slicing" refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. When Evelyn Harrison looked at the kouros and blurted out, "I'm sorry to hear that," she was thin-slicing; so were the Iowa gamblers when they had a stress reaction to the red decks after just ten cards.
Thin-slicing is part of what makes the unconscious so dazzling. But it's also what we find most problematic about rapid cognition. How is it possible to gather the necessary information for a sophisticated judgment in such a short time? The answer is that when our unconscious engages in thin-slicing, what we are doing is an automated, accelerated unconscious version of what Gottman does with his videotapes and equations. Can a marriage really be understood in one sitting? Yes it can, and so can lots of other seemingly complex situations. What Gottman has done is to show us how.
2. Marriage and Morse Code
I watched the videotape of Bill and Sue with Amber Tabares, a graduate student in Gottman's lab who is a trained SPAFF coder. We sat in the same room that Bill and Sue used, watching their interaction on a monitor. The conversation began with Bill. He liked their old dog, he said. He just didn't like their new dog. He didn't speak angrily or with any hostility. It seemed like he genuinely just wanted to explain his feelings.
If we listened closely, Tabares pointed out, it was clear that Bill was being very defensive. In the language of SPAFF, he was cross-complaining and engaging in "yes-but" tactics-appearing to agree but then taking it back. Bill was coded as defensive, as it turned out, for forty of the first sixty-six seconds of their conversation. As for Sue, while Bill was talking, on more than one occasion she rolled her eyes very quickly, which is a classic sign of contempt. Bill then began to talk about his objection to the pen where the dog lives. Sue replied by closing her eyes and then assuming a patronizing lecturing voice. Bill went on to say that he didn't want a fence in the living room. Sue said, "I don't want to argue about that," and rolled her eyes-another indication of contempt. "Look at that," Tabares said. "More contempt. We've barely started and we've seen him be defensive for almost the whole time, and she has rolled her eyes several times."
At no time as the conversation continued did either of them show any overt signs of hostility. Only subtle things popped up for a second or two, prompting Tabares to stop the tape and point them out. Some couples, when they fight, fight. But these two were a lot less obvious. Bill complained that the dog cut into their social life, since they always had to come home early for fear of what the dog might do to their apartment. Sue responded that that wasn't true, arguing, "If she's going to chew anything, she's going to do it in the first fifteen minutes that we're gone." Bill seemed to agree with that. He nodded lightly and said, "Yeah, I know," and then added, "I'm not saying it's rational. I just don't want to have a dog."
Tabares pointed at the videotape. "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. He's really being defensive. I kept thinking, He's so nice. He's doing all this validation. But then I realized he was doing the yes-but. It's easy to be fooled by them."
Bill went on: "I'm getting way better. You've got to admit it. I'm better this week than last week, and the week before and the week before."
Tabares jumped in again. "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. And with the happier couples, the spouse would hear it and say, 'You're right.' That stood out. When you nod and say 'uh-huh' or 'yeah,' you are doing that as a sign of support, and here she never does it, not once in the entire session, which none of us had realized until we did the coding.
"It's weird," she went on. "You don't get the sense that they are an unhappy couple when they come in. And when they were finished, they were instructed to watch their own discussion, and they thought the whole thing was hilarious. They seem fine, in a way. But I don't know. They haven't been married that long. They're still in the glowy phase. But the fact is that she's completely inflexible. They are arguing about dogs, but it's really about how whenever they have a disagreement, she's completely inflexible. It's one of those things that could cause a lot of long-term harm. I wonder if they'll hit the seven-year wall. Is there enough positive emotion there? Because what seems positive isn't actually positive at all."
What was Tabares looking for in the couple? On a technical level, she was measuring the amount of positive and negative emotion, because 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. On a simpler level, though, what Tabares was looking for in that short discussion was a pattern in Bill and Sue's marriage, because a central argument in Gottman's work is that all marriages have a distinctive pattern, a kind of marital DNA, that surfaces in any kind of meaningful interaction. This is why Gottman asks couples to tell the story of how they met, because he has found that when a husband and wife recount the most important episode in their relationship, that pattern shows up right away.
"It's so easy to tell," Gottman says. "I just looked at this tape yesterday. The woman says, 'We met at a ski weekend, and he was there with a bunch of his friends, and I kind of liked him and we made a date to be together. But then he drank too much, and he went home and went to sleep, and I was waiting for him for three hours. I woke him up, and I said I don't appreciate being treated this way. You're really not a nice person. And he said, yeah, hey, I really had a lot to drink.'" There was a troubling pattern in their first interaction, and the sad truth was that that pattern persisted throughout their relationship. "It's not that hard," Gottman went on. "When I first started doing these interviews, I thought maybe we were getting these people on a crappy day. But the prediction levels are just so high, and if you do it again, you get the same pattern over and over again."
One way to understand what Gottman is saying about marriages is to use the analogy of what people in the world of Morse code call a fist. Morse code is made up of dots and dashes, each of which has its own prescribed length. But no one ever replicates those prescribed lengths perfectly. When operators send a message-particularly using the old manual machines known as the straight key or the bug-they vary the spacing or stretch out the dots and dashes or combine dots and dashes and spaces in a particular rhythm. Morse code is like speech. Everyone has a different voice.
In the Second World War, the British assembled thousands of so-called interceptors-mostly women-whose job it was to tune in every day and night to the radio broadcasts of the various divisions of the German military. The Germans were, of course, broadcasting in code, so-at least in the early part of the war-the British couldn't understand what was being said. But that didn't necessarily matter, because before long, just by listening to the cadence of the transmission, the interceptors began to pick up on the individual fists of the German operators, and by doing so, they knew something nearly as important, which was who was doing the sending. "If you listened to the same call signs over a certain period, you would begin to recognize that there were, say, three or 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 like in Munich? So you fill out a little card, on which you write down all that kind of information, and pretty soon you have a kind of relationship with that person."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blinkby Malcolm Gladwell Copyright ©2005 by Malcolm Gladwell. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Back Bay Books; 1st edition (April 3, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 296 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316010669
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316010665
- Lexile measure : 1100L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.88 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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About the author
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Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
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Customers find the content interesting and edifying. They also find the stories fascinating and hard to put down. Opinions are mixed on the writing style, with some finding it easy to read and sophisticated, while others say it lacks conciseness and seems flawed.
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Customers find the stories in the book fascinating and well-chosen. They also say the idea is good in theory, but it's worth the short amount of time it takes to read.
"...Gladwell presented a more journalistic, dramatic and engaging set of lessons. Both are great reads!" Read more
"...He is a great storyteller regardless of the subject matter." Read more
"This book helps to demystify “intuition” and tells engaging stories that provide insight into the inner workings of how decisions are made in the..." Read more
"This is a very interesting book. With his characteristic easy-going style the author examines the first two seconds of human observation...." Read more
Customers find the content thought-provoking, informative, and relatable. They also say the book starts with a promising premise about the power of first impressions. Readers also say it's an innovative way to look at how people across the world make accurate decisions in only a few seconds.
"...Gladwell presented a more journalistic, dramatic and engaging set of lessons. Both are great reads!" Read more
"This book helps to demystify “intuition” and tells engaging stories that provide insight into the inner workings of how decisions are made in the..." Read more
"...signature everywhere, the language is clear and direct, the message is relevant...." Read more
"...that does not pretend to give all the answers but does raise some really good questions about a mysterious and important subject...." Read more
Customers find the book entertaining, interesting, and fun to read. They also say the humor is sprinkled throughout and is a great way to pass an airplane ride.
"...The stories are funny, relevant, and interesting...." Read more
"I thought The Tipping Point was a great book. Entertaining, enlightening and relevant...." Read more
"Gladwell is always easy to read and entertaining; a good way to learn...." Read more
"...It is a book that's worth reading and not at all a waste of time like some books are...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the writing style. Some mention the premise is interesting and the writing is very easy to read and understand. They also say the author is brilliant and the book has a sophisticated unconscious process. However, others say the lack of conciseness and the point of the book is self contradicting at times. They say the book occasionally lacks a cohesiveness and lacks good editing.
"...He states that there is a sophisticated unconscious process that takes place whenever we are facing a situation in which we are required to take..." Read more
"...by Gladwell, who provides several very entertaining and well-written stories detailing the split-second decisions that can be made, such as telling..." Read more
"...The distinctions he makes sometimes seem arbitrary, particularly if one takes just a little more than 2 seconds to mull things over...." Read more
"...(without actually using the terminology of many of them) to make it readable and useable for the general public...." Read more
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It’s great for anyone who enjoys learning more about how we can intuitively make decisions without being aware that we perceive more than we are cognizant of - or simply wants to read a fascinating book!
Gladwell also points out that there are many unconscious associations that are transmitted to us by our environment. Moreover, he asks the reader to engage on some exercises and test throughout the book in order to experience this and other assertions made by him. One direct implication of the previous is that our unconscious process can be educated or trained. Another implication is that these implicit associations may bias our intuition which reveals that our intuition can also lead us to make mistakes. Still this doesn't mean that we must only use our conscious rational thinking process as the only way to solve problems as data can also fools us. Worse, having extensive data won't necessarily protect us as too much data can prevent us from seeing the forest because of the trees. Information or knowledge means nothing if there is not any understanding of what these information means. Our "intuition" works with understanding, understanding requires a lot of preparation, education and experience, the alternative is just making random choices.
Understanding translates into "good" judgment and "good" judgment into good decisions. In situation in which we are overwhelmed by information, variables and intricate consequences "intuition or judgment" is found by Gladwell to be better at making the call that our traditional conscious logic and verbal analysis, which ironically has proven far superior for making simple decisions.
The book ends with a reflection and a call to action. Both methods of taking decisions have their strengths and weaknesses; there is no panacea but a need for balance between these two methods. Moreover the observations made on this book are here to stay, but now that we have this knowledge about the human decision process, how are we going to use this knowledge to overcome the current deficiencies that we as a society have when taking decisions.
Along the book there is a Gladwell signature everywhere, the language is clear and direct, the message is relevant. Gladwell is not trying to construct a classical scientific theory, but to transmit his observations as directly and clearly as possible. In short , a fine reading.
Gladwell does some interesting investigative work to try to get some answers to that intriguing question. He suggests that `rapid cognition' is behind a `closed door' in our minds and follows certain unwritten rules. It is a logical process that he feels is not instinctual, but, surprisingly, can be more accurate than deliberate, rational thought, and follows certain rules that we are not even aware of. (Even improvisational comedians follow certain rules, though what they do often seems so random.) One must be careful though, since stereotyping and the immediate environment at the moment can influence the impression. All of this mental background action is going on without our even knowing it! The `closed door', it turns out, can only be peaked into.
There are lots of very good examples of `blink'. There is the case of the statue that didn't look right to experts at first glance. Fourteen months later, after much testing, it was discovered by other experts that the statue was a forgery. Then there was the case of the supervisory fireman who yelled to his men to leave the building immediately minutes before it collapsed; he sensed something was wrong when it was not at all obvious what it was. Another example has to do with internationally known and respected tennis instructor who can almost invariably tell when a pro will double-fault just before the serve is hit, and he doesn't know how he does it! Speed dating often shows people being attracted others that do not fit their criteria of what they are looking for, for reasons they are fuzzy about. All of this is very mysterious, to say the least.
Information and understanding are not the same things and sometimes less information is better. He gives very good examples of this in the medical and military fields. He talks about the `power of the glance', the ability of a great general to look at a battle field, weed through all the information, and make a rapid decision; he gives a great example of this in Lee's improbable victory at Chancellorsville. "Sometimes, we have to edit" our information down to something manageable, and make a decision on that. This was very counter-intuitive to me, and I'm sure, something to approach with caution. But I can't argue against results and he gives good evidence that it works.
Be aware that first impressions can be misleading. Spontaneous decision making is shown to be not infallible, and can even be dangerous at times; stereotyping can supplant logical decision-making in a time-crunch. He goes into some detail about this with an instructive example of a police action in the Bronx that went awry. Gladwell said in the interview at the end of the book that he tried very hard to make this point. Rapid cognition can be your enemy as well as your friend. Use it with caution.
It is tricky knowing how to measure the value of a product or a performer. Packaging can count too much, a great example of which is what he calls the `Warren Harding Error', a fascinating section of the book. Also, when surveying the response to a product, an opinion can't always be comfortably expressed in words (except by the experts), and as a result, some people will tend to look for a plausible reason, and give an incorrect opinion. The mystery of why someone likes something can't always be codified.
This was a fascinating book that does not pretend to give all the answers but does raise some really good questions about a mysterious and important subject. The so-called `locked door' is finally getting its due.
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But is it? This is where the stories and examples that the author has used in the book determines to explain that. Excellent research!
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Clear, well to understand language, great examples, available online material, detailed notes and index section make the book a great read which enables the interested read to dig deeper into this awesome topic. Recommend this book for readers who want to understand more about themselves as well as their environment, read this! It will turn some of your learnings upside down. 5 Stars.
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Reviewed in Germany on August 4, 2023
Clear, well to understand language, great examples, available online material, detailed notes and index section make the book a great read which enables the interested read to dig deeper into this awesome topic. Recommend this book for readers who want to understand more about themselves as well as their environment, read this! It will turn some of your learnings upside down. 5 Stars.
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