“Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell – a Non-fiction Book review

Are you easily influenced? Do you know when you are being influenced? I would like to have said no and yes, to those questions, but after reading “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell I’m not so sure.  Gladwell is the best selling author of “The Tipping Point” and most recently “Outliers”. All of these books have the potential to change the way we view ourselves and the society we live in.

“Blink” looks at the phenonmenum of split second decisions.  Are they good decisions, or will they lead us down a wrong path? As it turns out decisions made in the “blink of an eye”, without logical analysis, are often as valid, or more so, than those decisions we take time over. According to Gladwell, our minds are always working behind the scenes, gathering data and processing our surroundings, even if we are unaware of it. 

He describes one experiement in which people were given a list of words to perform a task with.  This list contained words related to getting old, among many other types of words. When the individuals left the room, every one of them walked more slowly as though they were feeling older. Another experiement where people were using simple word lists that contained either words related to patience or impatience, produced those same effects, patience or impatience, when immediately faced with a frustrating event. This phenomenum is called “priming.”

Gladwell discusses the concept of “thin slicing” which has enabled one psychologist to predict, within a few minutes of seemingly  unimportant conversation, whether or not a marriage will last. Many people without realizing use the same technique to make brilliant decisions. Others succumb to what has been called the “paralysis of analysis”. Usually, these people can’t explain what lead them to that decision. He describes a case where doctors made more accurate decisions about heart attack patients when their information was limited. It turns out that too much information can impair our ability to make an accurate decision. The problem is that the more information we have the more accurate we believe we are.

The brain is an amazing and complex organ. We are just beginning to understand how it works. Gladwell draws on cutting edge science to explain a small piece of this to us. This book is well worth reading. It will give you an appreciation of your minds ability to tap into the unconcious for making decisions, and also make you look more closely at the decisions you make based on what appears to be all the information.

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