Summary Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

In the book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", the author Malcolm Gladwell explores the world of intuition and snap judgements, which he refers to as "thin-slicing". In order to support his thesis, Gladwell implements a variety of examples pulled from real experiments conducted by psychologists around the country. Gladwell's thesis of the book is that often snap judgements are far more accurate than well though-out, carefully analyzed reasoning. Gladwell supports his thesis with the use of experiments conducted by other psychologists, or instances that agree with his claims, such as the Coke-Pepsi experiment, or the kouros statue incident. His thesis has an abundant amount of support, due to the fact that he gives several experiments and incidents as evidence. Some of the evidence stated includes the Coke/Pepsi experiment, the kouros incident, the marriage experiment, the President Harding story, the success of

When talking about the kouros statue incident, Gladwell summarizes the main concept into three short sentences: "Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But they knew." These sentences help to understand how the mind works. In many instances, our human intuition tells us that there is something wrong. We may not know why, or how, but we have an internal feeling of danger that lets us know when something is off. This is evidenced by the kouros incident, where the statue that the museum wanted seemed to have all the right documentation and evidence, but just from a glance, several people had the feeling that something was not right about it. This is used as evidence that even with an abundance of facts and documentation, our intuitive state can still sense something is wrong with a 2 second glance at the statue. Although the people who sensed something off could not point out exactly what was so disturbing about the statue, they knew something was