Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (2005)

TL;DR: You make snap decisions all the time. It can be biased so learn how to affect it.

It begins with what Gladwell calls a "thin slice". It is a small sample size of a moment or moments. It is often indirect or emotional. ie. viewing a person's room or his bookshelf, a couple's 15 minute talk about mundane things, a doctor's interaction and not necessarily his diagnosis. 


Then he writes about the Unconscious, which he calls the "Locked Door". The unconscious is Highly Susceptible for Priming. It doesn't know it until you tell it. This is given deeper explanation in Robert Cialdini's book Pre-Suasion.


The downside of thin slices is: it is susceptible to bias. It can be influenced. One way to counter this is to slow down; Turn on the Analyzing brain system. Daniel Kahneman writes of this as System 2. This really looks like Gladwell wrote a pop science book about System 1.

  • Running a decision through a well-built Algorithm works better than collecting more and more sporadic information
  • Sometimes testing and focus grouping does not correlate with success. Sometimes people don't know what they want, until they can see it. If a product is too radical, people will reject it. 
  • Instead of focus grouping average people, seek out the experts
  • The environment and your body has an effect to your judgments
Reaction: Something seems vague and indefinite with this book. Like in the introductory story of the statue in the book, I can't quite pinpoint what and why. It could be that Gladwell is a storyteller first, before an actual scientist. But that doesn't undermine the research and work that he's done. It may just be that since 2005 a lot of ground has been made in the way our brain and cognition works. So reading this now, seems pale in comparison to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.



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