To make a decision about something, specially when it’s a complex problem and there are many choices and variables, we need a lot of information and a lot of thinking to make the right choice. That’s what conventional wisdom says. This book turns that idea not so much on its head, but it proposes that snap judgements are as powerful and valid as deliberate analysis and thinking. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking hypothesizes that your unconscious mind, that part of the brain that “thinks”, but that you’re not aware of, makes very fast and intelligent choices most of the time.

The author of the book is Malcolm Gladwell, who published the very influential book The Tipping Point, we’re he looked a social trends and observed that they behaved very similar to epidemics and viruses. He’s a staff writer for the New Yorker and was a reporter for the Washington Post. Soon he will publish his third book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t. I can’t hardly wait. In my mind, Malcolm Gladwell is one the most important thinkers in America right now.

The book is a journey through the different kinds of studies and research in psychology that’s trying to better understand that part of the brain, the “adaptive unconscious”, that makes rapid fire decisions. There are many real world examples throughout the book like how car salesmen can “read” a person instantly, the many things that facial expressions can tell us, how some people have perfected the art of speed dating and many more. 

However, sometimes this can go awry. “Sometimes our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values”. This is demonstrated in the third chapter of the book, where Gladwell goes through the Implicit Association Test(IAT). Also, in chapter six, it shows how cops use this to their favor, because it’s probably all they have when they are out there on the street. But sometimes it backfires.

There’s some criticism of Malcolm Gladwell saying that he connects disparate ideas into one cohesive whole, but this is a misunderstanding. His ideas don’t need to pass scientific scrutiny to be valid because this isn’t a sociology or psychology book, much less a scientific theory. It is meant for a general audience and is written in a conversational manner. It is a “what if” of how this “thin slicing” may be working. Overall, it’s a very intriguing read and I highly recommend it.