Blink

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell (New York and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2005) 254 pp.

In a world obsessed with the idea of the ‘sophomore slump’, Malcolm Gladwell’s sophomore effort does exactly what he continually pushes his readers to do: defy convention and tradition by challenging accepted ‘fact’. Blink is all about the decisions we make that seem to be instinctual, especially when they go against our acquired knowledge.

Gladwell argues that there are different aspects to the phenomenon – known as thin slicing – that are important to understand because it will aid us in our ability to constantly improve our thin sliced decisions. The most essential is understanding that your Blink abilities are innate only in proportion to your knowledge. An astrophysicist will never develop the thin slicing abilities in regards to automobiles that a mechanic has, and vice versa. The difficulty arises when – like tennis coach Vic Braden, who can almost flawlessly predict a tennis player’s double fault mid-serve – our brains make the connection for us, but we are unsure of how the connection was made.

This gap between introspective evaluation and the knowledge our brain has acquired and retained is, as Gladwell shows, able to be primed without conscious acceptance or allowance. Whether it is a random word association test or Bronx policemen shooting down a suspect who pulled out his wallet (not the gun they ‘saw’) this action is in fact a type of profiling. As sentient beings with moral compasses we are often taught only the pejorative definition of profiling. Gladwell asks us to consider the benefits of profiling as well.[1]

Finally, cognizant of our abilities, limitations, and biases as thin slicers Gladwell illustrates the value of spontaneity in assessing various ‘standard operating procedures’ as used by various institutions. His most colorful and insightful example is the story of how Marine Paul Van Riper crushed the US government’s wartime strategies in one of its most famous war games, Millenium Challenge ’02. Van Riper’s overwhelming strategy was simple, overall guidance would be provided by top commanders, but specific guidance was never passed down, just intent. The controlled spontaneity that Van Riper used to win the quarter billion dollar game was the product of years of honing his thin slicing abilities, understanding his limitations, and controlling his biases as best as possible.

Unlike The Tipping Point before it and Outliers after it, Blink is a solid front-to-back piece that is eminently useful in literally any walk of life. Gladwell’s prose is readable, and the intertwined stories are illuminating and fun.

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[1] Ironically, the article “Dangerous Minds: Criminal Profiling Made Easy”, included in Gladwell’s collection What The Dog Saw succeeds in showing how criminal profiling is not nearly as exact or successful as one might think, often garnering a false positive for the act of conscious profiling.