Summary Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is Malcolm Gladwell’s second book. It was first published in 2005 and explores connections between psychological and neurological research and human intuition. Through various anecdotes and detailed examples Gladwell uses Blink to explore how someone’s subconscious affects their decisions. Especially when it comes to quick judgments.

The introduction is titled The Statue That Didn’t Look Right, and it recalls the time in 1983, when the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased a statue that turned out to be forged. It began when an art dealer who claimed to have a Greek statue for sale approached the Getty. The museum ran multiple experiments on the statue and in 1986 when it was finally approved as authentic,

Gottam analyzed the couples’ facial expressions and tones. This introduced the idea of “thin-slicing,” which Gladwell refers as our unconscious’s ability to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very limited experience.

In the second chapter, Gladwell tells the story of Vic Braden, one of the world’s top tennis coaches, who realized he always knew when a player was about to double-fault. He was troubled by the fact that he did not know how he knew. Towards the end of the chapter, Gladwell provides an example that involves speed dating, where he shows that people are attracted to someone who is the opposite of what they are consciously looking for. In brief, this section examines why we cannot explain how our subconscious mind

In 2000, when the U.S. Military’s Joint Force Command organized war games, they intended for Riper to be the enemy. Surprisingly though, Riper did the opposite of everything they thought he would do and beat them against the odds. Gladwell also provides examples of a NYC Improv group called “Mother” who played a show in the basement of a supermarket on Manhattan’s West Side. The group went onstage with nothing planned and took random suggestions from the audience to then make up a 30-minute play. To point out, Gladwell compares the Improv thinking method to the same thinking discussed in the book. This method, he argues is about making complex spur of the moment decisions, without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. However, Gladwell reasons that the group has weekly rehearsals; therefore, the Improv is not entirely random and