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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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Released: 2006-02-23 Rating:  More Details: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking @Amazon Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking @aStore |
Amazon.co.uk
: For Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling The Tipping Point explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell’s major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing’. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. Much of this is utterly mysterious but some of the most astonishing and useful examples of thin-slicing can be learned.
Gladwell hopes to convince us that our snap judgements and first impressions can be educated and controlled so instead of merely praising the mysterious process of instinct and intuition he is interested in those moments when our instincts betray us, the situations where our powers of rapid cognition can go awry, where we fail to read the signs. Most disturbing of all is the degree to which culturally determined preconceptions and prejudices control us. Without reducing matters to racism and sexism Gladwell shows us that there are facts about people’s appearance—their size or shape or color or sex—that can trigger a very similar set of powerful associations which explains why utter mediocrities (such as U.S. President Warren Harding) can sometimes end up in positions of enormous responsibility; or why tall people earn substantially more than their shorter colleagues; or why car salesmen unconsciously charge prices according to race and gender.
Gladwell’s conversational prose style is concise, informative, accessible and entertaining. The stories, scientific findings and psychological tests are consistently surprising whether he is dealing with speed-dating, record promotions, police shoot-outs, the human face, or the reasons doctors get sued. --Larry Brown END
Customer Reviews:
A highly entertaining book
I like this book. Gladwell assembles a collection of interesting anecdotes, interviews and stories about how our gut intuition can often be right.
I'm not sure I learned anything of practical benefit that I can apply in my life, but then that's not the point of the book--at least I don't think it is.
If you would like to be thoroughly immersed in a world of popular psychology and observations about how our unconscious brains can often be more right than our rational, conscious minds, you could do much worse than to pick up this book.
BLINK
This book is written in a nice story-style and thus good to read. Intelligent information and practical advices are to find on almost every page of this book. Recommended!
Gladwell Gets It Spot On 
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the thoroughly fascinating Blink, has yet again found some incredible case studies to illustrate his take on the notion of 'first impressions'. His thesis can be reduced to the idea that our gut instincts are very often overlooked as being kneejerk and inessential, when really, if we took notice of them and processed them correctly, we could make much better use of our initial reactions. Starting with the simple truth that, when crossing the road, we tend to rely entirely on our instincts and usually survive the trip, he then takes us on a journey, using fascinating examples along the way.
The chapter that totally sold me on his latest, possibly best work, is the section on a scientist who studies married couples arguing over petty disagreements. As the psychologist who wrote Get Real! Relationship Success is an Inside Job , I could easily have been dismissive of his process of working out if a couple were likely to divorce based on one small conversation, but Gladwell frames the process so brilliantly, the evidence becomes incredibly compelling. Much like the rest of his fantastic book.
What's so new?? 
This book is very much alike "The Tipping Point". It tells you what you already know and then adds a few anecdotes to illustrate the point. In summary, Gladwell tells us that we don't need lots of data to analyze an issue. By what Gladwell calls "thin slicing", but we other mortals call "gut feeling", we can make accurate instant decisions. The writer then goes on to tell us we need to be careful though because our "gut feeling" can be biased by our prejudices. Did he really need to write nearly 280 pages to tell us that? Whilst in "The Tipping Point" the anecdotes were entertaining, the ones used in "Blink" are boring and uninteresting. I'm not impressed.
Interesting but not a page-turner 
My expectations were high having read the tipping point a few years ago, which I very much enjoyed. However this book from Malcolm Gladwell was a bit disappointing. Everytime I picked it up I read about 10-15 pages and then I felt a bit bored. Some passages was better than others but in all it seemed like the subject was to narrow for a whole book and I felt that the supporting real life examples sometimes dragged on forever.
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