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| Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | 
 enlarge | Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £4.99
You Save: £5.00 (50%)
New (25) from £3.60
Avg. Customer Rating:  68 reviews
Sales Rank: 247
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0141014598
EAN: 9780141014593
ASIN: 0141014598
Publication Date: February 23, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Swift and thought-provoking August 20, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Which is better, thinking deep and hard or making snap judgements on instinct? Gladwell makes the case for quick thinking in his book of thinking without thinking. Gladwell argues that in many cases - emergency heart attack diagnosis being a good example - too much information not only doesn't help a bit, but actually makes decisions worse.
Humans are very capable of making quick, unconscious decisions - some brain damage or other disorders prove that, when that capability is lost. According to Gladwell we should pay more heed to our unconscious, as it often helps to make good decisions fast. However, it's not that simple: quick thinking without thinking leads to prejudice and trouble, if one is not careful.
Using lots of real-life examples, Gladwell makes a coherent case. The book is quite shallow, but that's what you should expect from a short bestseller like this. Blink, like Gladwell's previous success, The Tipping Point, is swiftly read. While it never delves deep or really satisfies the reader, it certainly succeeds in being thought-provoking and entertaining.
 A fascinating look at how we make decisions July 6, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
The book is an easy read and full of wonderful stories and vignettes that illustrate Malcolm's points. Essentially the book is about how people make rapid decisions, often before consciously processing the available data, and the good and bad consequences of this. We are all familiar with some of the negative consequences - racial stereotyping for instance - but Malcolm discuses some of the positive ways this impacts effective decision-making. Using a relatively small case of characters and some richly described stories he leads us through an understanding of how rapid cognition works, why it is different from how we analyze things and how it can be more or less effective that any approaches to problem solving.
I particularly enjoyed the stores about people who had trained their snap judgments so that they could make quick and accurate assessments of situations while not being distracted by misplaced reactions and those about how hard it can be to describe a reaction, even if it is a good one.
This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in how people make decisions.
underrated July 4, 2007
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
This book is a compelling read. It is initially somewhat like a novel, full of anecdotes, and this can lend an air of superficiality. However, in an efficient and very entertaining way, Malcolm Gladwell gets to the heart of how we make those split second 'gut reactions', and tackles an important subject in very accessible way. The anecdotal examples are a very useful tool, creating memorable scenarios in which to play out the concepts which are discussed.
He explores why sometimes these 'blinks' are right and sometimes they are wrong, and more significantly, how we can train ourselves to make more reliable instinctive reactions in future, by deliberate painstaking preparation and careful training of our brains with the necessary expertise, and also being aware of the standard errors, so that 'in the moment' it can make use of this absorbed knowledge to make accurate snap decisions.
Fascinating! And very accessible to the lay reader, with no advanced psychological background needed. Although it does touch on various existing concepts regarding false-positive defense mechanisms, overriding of red-flags, projection, dissociation etc, it is all explained in straightforward language, and in a quite individual style.
Useful - Not what you expect. June 27, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Blink is all about the power your mind has in the blink of an eye. It gives you an idea where and when this phenomenon occurs and gives many many examples. It also gets into 'priming' and some psychology of how the mind works. Very Enlightening Read, and it's highly reccomended for those that like to investigate how our minds work.
 Interesting enough, but an expanded article rather than a book February 22, 2007
47 out of 55 found this review helpful
Gladwell certainly writes well and entertainingly about an interesting subject - but as each new chapter started I began by thinking 'right, NOW we are going to have some advances, NOW the arguments are going to be explored and developed,' and basically, they never were. The book said what it had to say really within the first couple of chapters, with examples of where 'thin-slicing' worked, and examples of where it didn't.
In the end, what it came down to was 'well here are situations whereby 'intuition' or a snap response as opposed to an overload of information wins out' - and whoops, 'here we have situations where people have made some very serious errors of judgement because they have worked from gut feelings that are actually prejudiced, and their 'unconcious biases' have been lethal.' And here are some more examples of these situations. And here are even more examples. And - well here are a few more.
But the book as a whole didn't really go anywhere.
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