Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown
Year Published: 2005
Rating: 
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Blink is a book about decision-making. More specifically, it’s about first impressions and how our initial reactions can be dead right – or dead wrong. In Blink, Gladwell tackles the complicated question of why and when should we trust our instincts.
Gladwell explains that there are two main types of decision making. In the first, we carefully analyze the data at hand and make a logical conclusion. In the second, our unconscious mind sends us a hunch, though we probably can’t explain why we came to that split second conclusion.
The ability of our unconscious mind to find patterns based on limited amounts of data – or as Gladwell puts it, ‘ very narrow slices of experience’ – is called thin-slicing. To demonstrate, he turns to the marital experiments of John Gottman. By observing one hour of a couple’s interaction, Gottman can predict with 95% accuracy whether they’ll still be married 15 years later. At only 15 minutes, he has a 90% chance.
Gottman wasn’t always so accurate. He’s spent years developing a system to catalog every emotion the couple experiences and tally the results. What he’s found is that there are only a few signs that are key indicators of divorce – defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. He’s gotten so good at picking out these indicators that he can now eavesdrop on conversations at restaurants and tell whether the marriage is in trouble.
Most of us don’t go through the rigorous data collection and analysis that Gottman has, so we’re notoriously bad at explaining the reasoning behind our gut instincts. And without that background, our hunches can be subject to influence.
In another experiment, NYU psychologist John Bargh looked at how words influence our immediate actions. He asked undergrads to read one of two sentences before going to talk to a different experimenter to receive their next assignment. The first sentence contained words like ‘aggressively,’ ‘bold’ and ‘rude’ while the second had words like ‘polite,’ respect,’ and ‘courteous.’ In all cases, when the student arrived, the experimenter was engaged in conversation with another person.
The purpose of Bargh’s experiment was to measure how long it took for students to interrupt – and whether the words they just read would influence the students’ actions. As it turns out, those who read the first sentence interrupted after about 5 minutes. 82% of those who read the second sentence – those primed to be polite – never interrupted at all.
After citing a few more studies with similar results, Gladwell writes:
The results from these experiments are, obviously quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
Much of Gladwell’s book focuses on how consumers make their initial first impressions – and how those impressions should be interpreted with a grain of salt. One prime example of this is the New Coke debacle. In blind taste tests, Pepsi outperforms Coke. When this first came to light, Coke struggled to make sense of the data and eventually sweetened their formula. But when they released New Coke, there was such an intense public outcry that Coke had no choice but to pull New Coke from the market within 6 months.
How could this be? As it turns out, a sip is a lot different from how most people experience cola. Initially, we go for the sweetness. But when it comes to drinking the whole glass, the sweetness overwhelms many people. In addition, most people drink Coke because of the brand and all those experiences we associate with Coke. That’s what market researchers left out of their equation. And that’s why New Coke failed.
Blink is told through engaging anecdotes with a handful of scientific studies mixed in. The findings, however, are somewhat vague. I didn’t come away from the book with a cohesive theory but a collection of ideas. Here are a few of them:
- Experts who have studied a particular topic for years are more accurate at making split decisions because they’ve trained themselves to pay attention to critical details and ignore others.
- Collecting and analyzing data is initially very important to educate us about all the possible ways we could act. But too much data at the point where we need make quick decisions – such as in war or evaluating whether someone is having a heart attack in the ER – can hinder our judgment.
- Facial expressions reveal all. If you take time to study them and learn to read emotions, you’ll be much more accurate in predicting others’ behaviors.
- Without training, we make terrible decisions in fight-or-flight response. Rookie cops, for instance, often become aggressive when scared and take the wrong action. Only after numerous simulations can they learn to think clearly when faced with such danger.
- People tend to report that they dislike things that are different from the status quo. They must experience the product/music/service several times to familiarize themselves with it before it grows on them.
I think the tagline, ‘Don’t think – Blink!’ is the most misleading part of the book. Blink seems to conclude that the only split second decisions that are accurate and reliable are those made by experts who have devoted their lives to the underlying mechanics of why something is what it is or behaves as it does. Regardless, you’ll have lots of ideas to ponder once you put the book down.
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