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Is there an ENCORE after the "Tipping Point"? - The answer is BLINK - A FABULOUS Book!!!!

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2007

If you wanted to sum up Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink", I would tell you to see the very first "Star Wars" movie. Remember in 1977 when Luke Skywalker while piloting his fighter hears Obi-Wan Kenobi tell him to turn off his radar while attacking the evil star ship? Obi-Wan wants Luke to rely on the FORCE. In other words, give up his conscious thought patterns and go with your gut.

This is what BLINK is all about. Our ability to instantly know what is real from what is fiction. What is good from what is bad? Gladwell is telling us to go with our right (creative) brain, and for the moment to shut down our left (logical, analytical) brain, and oh he is so right.

In example after example, the author goes through diverse instances where people in just the time it takes to BLINK, can make FABULOUS decisions that turn out to be the right ones. Others using the power of their analytical minds can take days, weeks, and even months, and come to the wrong decision. There's something going on here, and Gladwell is onto it. Human beings have five million years of evolutionary history behind us, and consciousness for only the last 15,000 or 20,000 years.

Somehow, we have TURNED OFF the power of our unconscious instinctual patterns, and overridden them with our super analytical ways of logic. The result is inferior decisions to what we had before we became conscious. Hey, when a lion was chasing down our ancestors for a meal, you didn't have much time to think.

By the way, every page of this relatively short book is fascinating. You will literally not be able to put it down. Let's look at a few of the topics that Gladwell covers in depth and convincingly.

A) The J. Paul Getty Museum & the Kouros Statue

The cash-flushed Getty Museum wanted to buy a 7-foot Greek statue for $10 million. With contract in hand they call in some of the greatest experts in the world who after running exhaustive scientific tests, agree that it's the real thing and you should jump to buy it. At the same time a handful of other experts just looking at the object instantly announce it's a fake, and you should walk away. Learn who was right and why. Hint: it took 2 seconds of looking to KNOW the answer.

B) Who's a good Professor in less than 30 seconds

Remember when we went to college we would attend a lecture or two to determine if we wanted to take the entire course with a certain professor. In BLINK you will see scientific studies that prove you can come to the same decision by watching a video of the professor for 30 seconds. Who's kidding whom?

C) What if you could tell how long a potential marriage would last?

This one is mind blowing. John Gottman of the University of Washington has shown in tests that he can do this with accuracy. Watching one hour of a couple talking, and Gottman can tell with 95% accuracy if 15 years later, they will still be married. Blink goes into it in detail. Too bad, I didn't learn about this study sooner.

D) Why do some doctors get sued, and others not at all?

You would think that the risk of being sued if you are a doctor is all about making mistakes, or improper medical care. BLINK shows that its really about words like "RUSHED, IGNORED, and TREATED POORLY."

E) Can a President of the United States be elected on looks alone?

Read BLINK and you will see how an entire nation got suckered into electing Warren Warding President just for that reason, unbelievable but true. Read how and why, and be mesmerized.

F) Only 14.5% of men are six feet and over. Why are 58% of CEO's six feet, or taller?

Pretty wild when you think about it, yet true. Could there be some kind of unwritten or unconscious criteria for being a Fortune 500 CEO that involves height? There aren't enough tall people to COMPLETELY staff any one company. Why is it that the tall ones seem to rise to the TOP?

G) Blue Team versus Red Team

This is my personal favorite. The American military runs war games all the time. The good guys who are us are always the BLUE Team. The enemy is always the RED team. In preparation for the first Iraq war in the early 1990's, the government ran the exercise, and put General Paul Van Riper in charge of the bad guys, the RED team.

The bottom line is that the bad guys blew away the good guys, the Americans by using unconventional "BLINK" type thinking, while the BLUE Team relied on conventional, overwhelming force, and inside the Beltway type bureaucratic thinking. This illustrates why this book is so important. You will learn out of the box type thinking.

You will also learn when to use it, and when to go with your logical left brain type thinking. By the way in the war exercise when the bad guys, the RED Team beat the good guys the BLUE Team with ease, what did the Pentagon do? They announced that the game would be done over again, and they outlawed the techniques that the bad guys the RED Team employed.

The result, the good guys won. The problem is that nobody told the bad guys in Iraq during the second Iraq War that these techniques were outlawed, and thus our Generals as usual find themselves in some difficulty to say the least. Read BLINK, and find out how and why. This book is FASCINATING, and NOT TO BE PUT DOWN, ONCE YOU START READING IT.

Richard Stoyeck

60 people found this helpful

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Tom the savvy consumer

from that conclusion he advances the idea that your opinions of and interactions with other people are just as easily revealed a

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2014

Blink presents some loosely related phenomena that demonstrate we can briefly be conditioned to make a predicable association or link. For example as a test subject you might be asked to view a video screen and very quickly key a response to what you see. (My example) - the screen flashes the number sequence 1 and then 5 repeatedly then flashes the number 1 and prompts you to quickly type the next number - you will type 5 but without the earlier displays you would likely have typed 2. From this the author of Blink believes he has revealed in you a concealed belief the number 5 immediately follows 1; from that conclusion he advances the idea that your opinions of and interactions with other people are just as easily revealed and manipulated. I suspect most readers will reject this concept and rightfully so. Undoubtedly our views and opinions are shaped but shaped by a multitude of unique and continuing life experiences. Any test that depends on flashing associations and "hit the button quick" is not a revealing glimpse of the soul but merely a momentary logical response even if the above sequence of 1 and 5 is altered to display "criminal and minority".

The cover notes suggest the book is concerned with the process of thinking or perhaps about great thinkers but in reading Blink the only continuity we encounter has to do with social ills we visit upon each other.

Mr. Gladwell sees a world of social injustice and colossal errors committed by .... well committed by those among us who are not women and not members of any minority group. Apparently these evils are caused by hasty thinking or perhaps too much thinking both of which can be fixed or made better if the perpetrators help themselves to some life skills found in his book.

While assuming the condescending demeanor of an elementary school teacher he admonishes and instructs us in the science of forming opinions using a grandiose scientific tone and yet offers no evidence his conclusions are accepted in the scientific community. What we get instead is a series of opinions and chats with the odd researcher who appears to be conducting independent and poorly designed experiments.

For example Mr. Gladwell writes of research revealing car sales persons in the Chicago area are "cheating" women and minorities when selfsame agree to purchase a car at a price higher than that paid by white males. The author declines to inform the reader the sales personnel themselves may be women and minorities and clearly prefers to have us believe only male whites sell cars in the Chicago area - which of course simply isn't true. So no study is done to examine this phenomenon when both buyer and salesperson share the same characteristics. This aside we generally accept that skills are learned through repetition - so how many times had the white men in this study negotiated and purchased a car compared to how many times the women in the study negotiated and purchased a car - more, less, same? We don't know and neither does Mr. Gladwell. The author seems to omit or ignore explanations contrary to his narrative of social injustice. One wonders if this is the same kind of cheating that goes on when most men purchase jewelry, vacation deals or groceries?

Later in the book the author locates a clearly unjustified police shooting/murder involving four white police and a black victim. Mr. Gladwell then suggests the entire event was avoidable had the officers used the book's suggested technique of reading facial expressions (after midnight, in a building hall, on a dark skin face) a skill made difficult under the best circumstances of daylight in a open area with maximum contrasting facial features. I'm easy to agree with the concept but the example offered seems misplaced and designed to support the underlying theme in Blink.

The author closes with yet another injustice owing to hasty thinking, this time it seems women have been underrepresented in brass horn sections of orchestras, apparently piano, string and woodwind sections are in good standing. Happily we learn the brass horn problem itself has long been resolved by placing auditioning musicians behind a screen, presumably the screen removed both the bias and all attempts to balance the orchestra to the audience demographic - now if we can only get some racial and cultural balance in Hollywood movies and pop music (a much better topic more suited to the talented Mr. Gladwell's quest ).

All in all Blink is a study of the obvious in human behavior embellished with some silly ideas. Obviously deciphering tone of voice and facial expressions is innate. Equally obvious we all know when we feel good in a relationship even when we can't articulate the details. Further it is generally acknowledged a group/mob is more aggressive than an individual . Also it comes as no surprise we perform best when we are relaxed and focused. Finally subliminal suggestion might influence our behavior sometimes briefly except when numerous studies show it doesn't.

Blink could be dismissed as a harmless hash of observations related to how we form opinions were it not for Mr. Gladwell's insistence that we pit one ethnic/gender group against another for no apparent reason other than to inject drama into this pseudo-science in hopes of selling a book.

Social injustice exists aplenty, Mr. Gladwell would do well to pursue the subject but with a more honest approach - good luck Mr. Gladwell Hollywood is ripe for the taking.

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From the United States

ChicagoLarry

Could have been said in a quarter of the space

Reviewed in the United States on January 6, 2008

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This book gave me a keener awareness of how much information is communicated through facial expressions and first impressions, and the pragmatism of learning to read and interpret them better--but little on how to do that.

The book would have been enormously better if written in less than a quarter of its length. The author drones on and on with example after example, often needlessly coming back to earlier ones. This lack of conciseness contributes to a general feeling of wondering what he's trying to say--and wondering if it's really clear in his own mind. On the one hand, we should be able to size people up in an instant, and on the other, that's how we perpetuate stereotypes. It's really not until the Afterword that the author acknowledges, more straightforwardly, that a balance is not easy to learn or achieve. Only experience over time can help us get a feel for it. In the end, we're left with no really practical advice to implement in our daily lives, beyond greater awareness.

At one point, I got excited, thinking some practical advice was just around the bend. We are told there exists a training tape for learning facial micro-expressions. In 35 minutes of training, one can go from seeing none of such expressions to seeing them all! "This is an accessible skill," we're told. And then, end of discussion. No mention of how WE can learn from this tape (rent it, buy it, go to a seminar, employ a consultant, read a synopsis?). This is the one thing the author has built us up to want to know, and we're left with a sort of "Gotcha!"

I found the entire Afterword to be a lazy avoidance of revising the book before reprinting. All the points made there, including too much rehashing, should be incorporated into the book itself. Both here and in the body of the book, I always had the feeling the author was still thinking--not really sure exactly where he wanted to take this book. I especially did not appreciate the tediously elaborated military examples; talk about too much information! We did not need to know every little facet that the author mused while digesting his research and mountain of anecdotes.

I don't feel the little I learned was worth the time spent hanging onto the book in the hope of finding its redemption.

6 people found this helpful

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jaross

Anecdotal, and unscientific. For a business class, not a social science class

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2016

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The first third of this book was fascinating. The studies he mentions are interesting, however some of those even seem flawed. For instance the one where students are primed with words associated with old people. Perhaps the students always left slower then they came? Or perhaps it was due to the time of day. Or even the harvard test he mentions seemed a bit flawed. They would need to randomize the words in order to get a truly accurate result. Whats more, many of the important details from these tests are left out, such as how many test subjects there were. From there the book gets worse. He describes extraneous stories and draws disconnected conclusions based of of these stories. I am sure there is a lot of psychological research out there to backup much of what he concludes, but instead he opts for an interesting, lighthearted pop-culture tie-in of why some guy can't get a record deal for is music.

It was an interesting read. It went quickly and if taken with a grain of salt it doesn't seem to be flat out wrong in many of its conclusions. It also was a bit light handed in its dealings with people in charge of mass marketing. Many of the tactics used in marketing tie into the unconscious and are heavily researched. These tactics are often immoral or devious and he fails to point this out.

2 people found this helpful

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Chris

Interesting, but could've been written in 30 pages. Look up a summary online instead; spend your time on more practical material

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2016

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This book touches on a brilliant idea: we make decisions rapidly, even if we can't always explain exactly HOW we make those decisions. Gladwell does an excellent job at providing evidence to back up his claims. Really... he provides a plethora of examples to support these claims. In my opinion, WAY too many examples.

I'm a bottom-line kind of person and I don't read for fun; I read to gain applicable knowledge. Gladwell proved his concept in the first 30-50 pages and that was good enough for me. He then proceeded to continue proving the concept for another 200 pages. I hardly learned how to actually apply the concepts of rapid-cognition from this book and I'm annoyed at how much of my time was wasted. I wish he proved the concept in 30-50 pages and followed it up with actual ways to take advantage of that concept.

This book verified something that I believed to be true (rapid-cognition) without providing ways to practically exploit the theory. I'm not buying anything else of Gladwell's, but I would recommend looking up the sparknotes/summary of this book.

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33 year old lawyer

Audio CD review: buy the book instead or maybe just read an article!

Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2007

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I found that overall, Blink does not work well in Audio CD format. Gladwell uses the same words and expressions and concepts over and over. If I hear the phrase, "thin slicing" again, I might scream. It becomes highly repetitive and irritating. In my opinion, he speaks too slowly, and softly, which exacerbates the problem. If one were reading the book, one could skip forward or read more quickly to control this problem, and his voice wouldn't be an issue.

As a general comment on the CD--and I assume this applies to the book as well-- I found that Gladwell was not very scientific. And yet, he acts like he is. Numerous assumptions are made when describing the results of certain studies, tests, and situations, and WHY they turned out a particular way. I found myself feeling irritated as the Cd attempted to push me into accepting the explanations proferred by Gladwell or the social 'scientists' whose work he was describing.

I also think that ultimately Gladwell does not do a good job of actually pinning down the subject, or providing a very cohesive framework for it. He explores issues of faulty and correct decision making, and the CD provides a lot of food for thought, but if you think you will be able to increase your own decision making powers after listening to this tape, don't bet on it. The stories of how impressions can be accurate or inaccurate --regarding the authenticity of art objects, whether couples divorce, how to determine whether an artist can sell records, New Coke, issues of racial bias, etc.-- are all interesting, but don't leave one with a day to day framework for making decisions in one's everyday life. Generally, one is left with--be an expert, but don't over examine the issue to death or apart from a specific whole, make sure you are being objective, get a quick look at some types of things, but only in certain circumstances, sometimes you can't do a quick review unless you are aware of a key factor, beware of biases like looks and race, etc. Um....I either already knew it, or it's too vague to apply.

2 people found this helpful

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Radek

Mixed reading

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2009

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The premise behind this book is to enable/train the reader to learn how to "thin slice" a person or situation and gain "instant knowledge" with very little input. The author goes on and on about various examples of how many people were able to do this. However, that's not exactly what is going on. In the first example, he uses a story about a statue that one muesuem bought that turned out to be a fake. Several experts were able to just look at the statue and get a "feeling" or a "strong sense" that it was a fake. They couldn't explain how they knew, they just knew. This is what the author wants you to be able to tap into.

The reason that these experts were able to do that is because they are EXPERTS! The know what to look for instinctively. It's like an inspector examining something in their off time. They know what to look for. I have a friend who loves movies. He really enjoys pointing out the dot in the upper right corner of a movie. He tells me that they come in pairs all the time. Guess what....he is in the movie production industry. That is how he knows.

Chapter 5 is more than thin slicing. It is more along the lines of thick slicing. It totally goes against the whole premise of the book. Why would an author stick something in there that doesn't support his basic idea?

The nice part is that this book leads the reader to real material. You can look up the refereneces for some real reading. The author mentions Dr. Paul Ekman. Great stuff there!

Also, the book is a very easy read. It is a fun read. It gives enough information that you feel like you did read something, but it is definitely nothing that I would reference in real work.

2 people found this helpful

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Lea H. Becker

Entertaining but haphazard

Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2013

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This was my second Malcolm Gladwell book. I thought that the author failed in a well-meaning attempt to distinguish "thin-slicing" from what I have always thought of as a "first impression." I found it a bit tiresome when he kept referring back to a big mistake on the part of a sophisticated museum and using that example to illustrate a point. After reading about his views on why an expert could identify which marriages were in trouble, Gladwell really lost me. I thought I was beginning to read a book where the premises were based on "junk science." However, I read on and finished the book and found most of the chapters entertaining and some even provocative, especially the section about police training and behavior. I admire Gladwell's attempt to draw conclusions based on the ability of humans to make super fast judgments, since I do agree that these abilities exist. My objection is that so many variables enter into a person's decision-making that it is risky to count on quick impressions for certain types of human behavior.

The organization of the chapters seemed a bit strained, and I would have preferred a more scientific approach to the subject matter.

9 people found this helpful

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Jax

Belabored redundant

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2022

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Belabored redundant examples of the positive and negative use of "Blink" with no clear point to its use.
I felt it was an example of stretching what could have been 35 pages into a book.
After reading the wonderful and entertaining "Outliers", this was a major disappointment.

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M. Hahn

A Letdown, Whether You Thin-Slice It Or Analyze It

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2008

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I was looking forward to reading Blink. The combination of an interesting topic and critical acclaim had me excited.

The first few chapters of Blink were moderately intriguing. Gladwell seemed to be getting at the point that thin-slicing (drawing instantaneous conclusions subconsciously) is both powerful and accurate. Then the book starts to wander though and the reader is presented with many examples of thin-slicing being incorrect and even deadly. Gladwell then wraps it up (sort of) by offering that sometimes thin-slicing yields correct conclusions and sometimes it yields incorrect conclusions. Really? That seems like a trivial thesis and one that I probably didn't need to read 300 pages to reach. The material in this book could have been parsed significantly and served as the basis of an article, with greater final effect than this book.

Although there are some good stories along the way, I doubt many readers will find it hard to put this book down at points. Those that truly enjoy it will probably do so more for the anecdotes than because it offers any deep insight.

2 people found this helpful

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Diego G Schmunis

Long, dry and boring

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2019

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I really wanted to like this books as I tend to like the authors other books and thinking but just couldn’t get into it.

It’s one of those books where the author spends more time discussing other people’s studies and research than doing it’s own thinking, analysis and conclusions.

At times it drags on for way too long and if it’s not dragging along, it gets repetitive, goes in circles or jumps from one example to another without real connections.

I would have love if the author had spent more time explaining how our brain works to make decisions rather than spending some 400 pages to explain something that could probably have been done in 100.

6 people found this helpful

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Rai

Meh.

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2011

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The first half of the book was definately worth the read and i would suggest you buy it just for the ladder half, however about halfway through he gets entirely off subject and starts talking about Coke-cola and Pepsi in taste tests vs entire drink tests etc... How things are advertised etc...
I can see how it fits into the subject, about Thin slicing, but he got so far off subject that i was no longer able to hold an interest in the book and stopped about 3/4 the way through.

The first half of the book talks about Thin slicing; the process in which your mind relates the information it is receiving to past events in order to gain an understanding of it. He gives numerous examples of this and it is rich in detail. Definately a good read until he gets off subject. Two stars.

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