blink

The Power Of Thinking

Without Thinking

Malcolm GLADWELL
 Introduction: The statue that didn’t look right
• Blink is a book about the first two seconds.

• Fast and frugal

• Our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of a situation:
 The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We
think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we came up with an answer.
This strategy is logical and definitive. It’s slow, and it needs a lot of
information.
 There is a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It’s really
smart, because it picks up the problem almost immediately. It has the
drawback, however, that it operates-at least at first-entirely below the surface
of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels,
such as the sweat glands in the palms of our hands. It’s a system in which our
brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching
conclusions.
 Introduction: The statue that didn’t look right

• The internal computer

• The part of our brain that leaps to conclusion like this is called the adaptive
unconscious. It’s a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes
a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings. It’s a
decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments
based on very little information. We toggle back and forth between our
conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation.

• Our unconscious is a powerful force. But it’s fallible. It’s not the case that
our internal computer always shines through, instantly decoding the “truth” of
a situation. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive
reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions
and sentiments.
 Introduction: The statue that didn’t look right

•The first task of blink is to convince you of a simple fact: Decisions made
very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and
deliberately.

• The second task of blink: When should we trust our instincts, and when
should be wary of them?

• The third task of this book: Our snap judgments and first impressions can
be educated and controlled.

• The power of knowing, in the first two seconds, is not a gift given
magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can al cultivate for
ourselves.
 One: The theory of thin slices:
How a little bit of knowledge goes a long way

• “Thin Slicing”: Rapid cognition that refers to the ability of our

unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow
slices of experience.

• That’s how our unconscious works: When we leap to a decision or have a

hunch, our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing
out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters. Our
unconscious is really good at this, to the point where thin-slicing often
delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
 One: The theory of thin slices:
How a little bit of knowledge goes a long way

• The secrets of the bedroom

• It’s quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent
only 20 minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who
we are than people who have known us for years. Gosling says, that a
person’s bedroom gives three kinds of clues to his/her personality. There are:
 identity claims
 Behavioral residue
 Thoughts and feeling regulators.
•You can learn as much-or more-from one glance at a private space as you can
from hours to exposure to a public face.
 One: The theory of thin slices:
How a little bit of knowledge goes a long way

• The power of the glance

• We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of

something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we
have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden
fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very
thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot. As
humans, we’re old hands at thin-slicing.
 Two: The locked door:
The secret life of snap decisions
• Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest
slices of experience. But they are also unconscious. Snap judgments and rapid
cognition take place behind a locked door. If we are to learn to improve the
quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of
our snap judgments. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know
without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off
that way.

• What we think of as free will is largely an illusion: Much of the time, we are
simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act-and how
well we think and act on the spur of the moment-are a lot more susceptible to
outside influences than we realize.

• Sometimes we’re better off if the mind behind the locked door makes our
decisions for us. The machinery of our unconscious thinking is forever hidden.
 Two: The locked door:
The secret life of snap decisions

• Experiments conducted by John BARGH showed that we have such

powerful associations with certain words that just being exposed to them can
cause a change in our behavior.

•We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to
come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.

• Everyone has not only one mind but two, and all the while their conscious
mind block, the unconscious is sifting through possibilities, processing every
conceivable clues. And the instant it will find the answer, it will guide them,
silently and surely, to the solution.
 Three: The Warren Harding Error:
Why we fall for tall, Dark, and handsome men

• The dark side of thin-slicing

• Thin-slicing is extraordinarily powerful, and what makes thin-slicing
possible is our ability to very quickly get below the surface of a situation.

• There are facts about people’s appearance-their size or shape or color or sex-
that cab trigger a very similar set of powerful associations. People stop to dig
below the surface. The way people look carry so many powerful connections
that it stop the normal process of thinking dead in its track. That’s where exist
the dark side of rapid cognition. Part of what it means to take thin-slicing and
first impressions seriously is accepting the fact that sometimes we can know
more about someone or something in the blink of an eye than we can after
months of study. But we also have to acknowledge and understand those
circumstances when rapid cognition leads us astray.
 Three: The Warren Harding Error:
Why we fall for tall, Dark, and handsome men
• Blink in black and white
• IAT: Implicit association test: We make connections much more quickly
between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do
between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us. Our attitudes toward things
like race or gender operate on two levels:
 First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to
believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior
deliberately.
 Our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level-the
immediate, automatic associations that humble out before we’ve even had
time to think. We don’t deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. We may
not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently
crunches all the data it can from the experiences we’ve learned, the books
we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen, and it forms our opinions. That’s what is
coming out in the IAT.
 Three: The Warren Harding Error:
Why we fall for tall, Dark, and handsome men
• Blink in black and white
• IAT: Implicit association test: The disturbing thing about the test is that it
shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our
stated conscious level. The IAT is more than just an abstract measure of
attitudes. It’s also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of
spontaneous situations. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that height-
particularly in men- does trigger a certain set of very positive unconscious
associations. Most of us, in ways that we are not entirely aware of,
automatically associate leadership ability with physical statue. We have a
sense of what a leader is supposed to look like, and that stereotype is so
powerful that when someone fits it, we simply become blind to other
considerations.

• Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into
positions of authority in companies and organizations? It’s because when it
comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good
deal less rational than we think. We see a tall people and we swoon.
 Three: The Warren Harding Error:
Why we fall for tall, Dark, and handsome men

• Snap judgments are dangerous when it comes to race and sex and
appearance.

• If something is happening outside of awareness, how on earth do you fix it?

We are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up
from the unconscious-from behind a locked door inside of our brain-but just
because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of
control. Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our
environment, which means that we can change our first impressions, we can
alter the way we thin-slice, by changing the experiences that compromise
those impressions. Taking rapid cognition seriously, acknowledging the
incredible power, for good and ill, that first impressions play in our lives,
requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
 Four: Paul Van Riper’s
Big victory: Creating structure for spontaneity

• When experts make decisions, they don’t logically and systematically

compare all available options. They would size up a situation almost
immediately and act, drawing on experience and intuition and a kind of rough
mental simulation.

• The structure of spontaneity

• Spontaneity isn’t random. How good people’s decisions are under the fast-
moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and
rules and rehearsal. In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action.

• The perils of introspections

• Allowing people to operate without having to explain themselves constantly
turns out to enable rapid cognition.
 Four: Paul Van Riper’s
Big victory: Creating structure for spontaneity
• The perils of introspections
• Verbal Overshadowing: Our brain has the left hemisphere that thinks of
words, and the right hemisphere that thinks in pictures, and what happened
when you described the face in words is that your actual visual memory is
displaced. Your thinking is bumped from the right to the left hemisphere.
When it comes to faces, we are an awful better at visual recognition that we
are at verbal description. We all have an instinctive memory for faces. But by
forcing you to verbalize that memory-to explain yourself-you are separated
from these instincts, because what you are drawing on is your memory of what
you said, not your memory of what you saw.
• When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of
insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly
impaired. As human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight
and instinct. All our abilities are incredibly fragile.
• People are so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never look
at the problem holistically.
 Four: Paul Van Riper’s
Big victory: Creating structure for spontaneity

• When more is less

• The more information decision makers have, the better off they are. All extra
information isn’t actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know
very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon. The
extra information is more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.

• It doesn’t seem to make sense that we can do better by ignoring what seems
like perfectly valid information.
 Four: Paul Van Riper’s
Big victory: Creating structure for spontaneity
• When more is less
• Successful decision making relies on:
 Balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. Deliberate thinking is
a wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, the help of a computer, and
a clearly defined task, and the fruits of that type of analysis can set the stage
for rapid cognition.
 In good decision making, frugality matters. Overloading the decision
makers with information, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier.
To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit. When we thin-slice, when
we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this process of editing
unconsciously. We get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted-
when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t
let us edit. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and
if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that
frugality.
 Five: Kenna’s dilemma:
The right-and wrong-way to ask people what they want
• When more is less
• Successful decision making relies on:
 Balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. Deliberate thinking is
a wonderful tool when we have the luxury of time, the help of a computer, and
a clearly defined task, and the fruits of that type of analysis can set the stage
for rapid cognition.
 In good decision making, frugality matters. Overloading the decision
makers with information, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier.
To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit. When we thin-slice, when
we recognize patterns and make snap judgments, we do this process of editing
unconsciously. We get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted-
when we can’t edit, or we don’t know what to edit, or our environment doesn’t
let us edit. Snap judgments can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and
if we want to protect our snap judgments, we have to take steps to protect that
frugality.
 Five: Kenna’s dilemma:
The right-and wrong-way to ask people what they want

• The blind leading the blind

• Sensation transference (Louis CHESKIN): When people give an

assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department
store, without realizing it, they transfer sensations or impressions that they
have about the packaging of the product to the product itself. The most of us
don’t make a distinction-on an unconscious level-between the package and the
product. The product is the package and the product combined. Thin-slicing
has to be done in context.
 Five: Kenna’s dilemma:
The right-and wrong-way to ask people what they want

• “The Chair Of Death”

• The problem is that buried among the things that we hate is a class of
products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us
nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us some time to
understand that we actually like them. The word “ugly” is just a proxy for
“different”.

• Testing products or ideas that are truly revolutionary is another matter, and
the most successful companies are those that understand that in those cases,
the first impressions of their consumers need interpretation. We like market
research because it provides certainty-a score, a prediction; if someone asks us
why we made the decision we did, we can point to a number. But the truth is
that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty. New and
different are always most vulnerable to market research.
 Five: Kenna’s dilemma:
The right-and wrong-way to ask people what they want

• The gift of expertise

• The gift of expertise is that it allows them to have a much better

understanding of what goes on behind the locked door of their unconscious.
The first impressions of experts are different. When we become expert in
something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex. It’s really only experts
who are able to reliably account for their reactions. Introspection destroyed
people’s ability to solve insight problems. Specific explanations for why
introspections mess up our reactions. It’s that we simply don’t have any way
of explaining our feelings.

• We come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or

dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with
that plausible-sounding reason.
 Five: Kenna’s dilemma:
The right-and wrong-way to ask people what they want
• The gift of expertise
• Our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can’t look
inside the room. But with experience we become expert at using our behavior
and our training to interpret-and decode-what lies behind our snap judgments
and first impressions.

• Whenever we have something that we are good at-something we care about-

that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first
impression. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion
and expertise, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are
shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded
in real understanding. Knowledge gives first impressions resiliency.

• People who have a way to structure their first impressions, the vocabulary to
capture them, and the experience to understand them, would have counted for
more than a questionable findings of market research.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading
• Three fatal mistakes
• The most common-and the most important-forms of rapid cognition are the
judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. We easily
parse complex distinctions in facial expression. This practice of inferring the
motivations and intentions of others is classic thin-slicing. It’s picking up on
subtle, fleeting cues in order to read someone’s mind-and there is almost no
other impulse so basic and so automatic and at which, most of the time, we so
effortlessly excel. Mind-reading failures happen to all of us. They lie at the
root of countless arguments, disagreements, misunderstandings, and hurt
feelings. And yet, because these failures are so instantaneous and so
mysterious, we don’t really know how to understand them.

• The theory of mind reading

• Faces hold valuable clues to inner emotions and motivations. Face is a gold
mine of information. Every distinct muscular movement that the face could
make is called “ACTION UNITS”.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading
• The naked face
• The face is an enormously rich source of information about emotion. The
information on our face is not just a signal of what is going on inside our
mind, it is what is going on inside our mind. We think of the face as the
residue of emotion. Emotion can also start on the face. The face is not a
secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the
emotional process.
• Many facial expressions can be made voluntarily. But our faces are also
governed by a separate, involuntary system that makes expressions that we
have no conscious control over. Whenever we experience a basic emotion, that
emotion is automatically expressed by the muscles of the face. We can use our
voluntary muscular system to try to suppress those involuntary responses. But,
often, some little part of that suppressed emotion leaks out. Our voluntary
expressive system is the way we intentionally signal our emotions. But our
involuntary expressive system is in many ways even more important: it is the
way we have been equipped by evolution to signal our authentic feelings.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading
• The naked face
• We thin-slice other people. We can all mind-read effortlessly and
automatically because the clues we need to make sense of someone or some
social situation are right there on the faces of those in front of us. But there is
enough accessible information on a face to make everybody mind reading
possible.

• A man, a women, and a light switch

• The classic model for understanding what it means to lose the ability to
mind-read is the condition of autism. They have the difficulty interpreting
nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions or putting themselves
inside someone else’s head or drawing understanding from anything other than
the literal meaning of words. Their first-impressions apparatus is
fundamentally disabled, and the way people with autism see the world gives
us a very good sense of what happens when our mind-reading faculties fail.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading
• A man, a women, and a light switch
• Normal people, when they are looking at the faces, use a part of their brain
called the Fusiform gyrus, that allows us to distinguish among the literally
thousands of faces that we know. The inferior temporal gyrus is normally
reserved for objects. Autistic people, however, use their object recognition
area for both objects and faces. On the most neurological level, for someone
with autism, a face is just another object. Mind-blindness explain why
sometimes otherwise normal people come to conclusions that are completely
and catastrophically wrong.

• Arguing with a dog

• Extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that
time is slowing down. This how the human body reacts to extreme stress, and
it makes sense. Our mind, faced with a life-threatening situation, drastically
limits the range and amount of information that we have to deal with. Sound
and memory and broader social understanding are sacrificed in favor of
heightened awareness of the threat directly in front of us.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading
• Arguing with a dog
• Grossman: The optimal state of “arousal”-the range in which stress
improves performance-is when our heart rate is between and beats/minute.
Most of us, under pressure, get too aroused, and past a certain point, our
bodies begin shutting down so many sources of information that we start to
become useless. After , bad things begin to happen. Complex motor skills start
to break down. Doing something with on hand and not the other becomes very
difficult… . At 175, we begin to see an absolute breakdown of cognitive
processing… . The forebrain shuts down, and the mid-brain-the part of your
brain that is the same as your dog’s-reaches up and hijacks the forebrain.
Vision becomes even more restricted. Behavior becomes inappropriately
aggressive. Blood is withdrawn from our outer muscle layer and concentrated
in core muscle mass. The evolutionary point of that is to make the muscles as
hard as possible-to turn them into a kind of armor and limit bleeding in the
event of injury. But that leaves us clumsy and helpless. Mind-reading allows
us to adjust and update our perceptions of the intentions of others. Arousal
leaves us mind-blind.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading

• Running out of a white space.

• We become temporarily autistic also in situations when we run out of time.

Under time pressure, people begin to behave just as people do when they are
highly aroused. They stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses
and fell back on a rigid and underlying system, a stereotype. Our powers of
thin-slicing and snap judgments are extraordinary. But even the giant
computer in our unconscious needs a moment to do its work.
 Six: Seven seconds in the Bronx:
The delicate art of mind reading

• “Something in my mind just told me I didn’t have a shoot yet”

• The split-second syndrome: There is no time for thought. We act.

• Our unconscious thinking is, not different from our conscious thinking: in
both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and
experience. Mind-reading is an ability that improves with practice. This is the
way to prevent extreme arousal and mind-blindness under conditions of stress.
This is the gift of training and expertise-the ability to extract an enormous
amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.
Every moment-every blink-is composed of a series of discrete moving parts,
and every one of those parts offers an opportunity for intervention, for reform,
and for correction.
 Conclusion
Listening with your eyes: The lessons of blink.

• We are often careless with our powers of rapid cognition. We don’t know
where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we
don’t always appreciate their fragility. Taking our powers of rapid cognition
seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or
undermine or bias the products of unconscious.

• It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the
surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the
environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid
cognition
 Afterword
Listening with your eyes: The lessons of blink.
• Judgment is the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of
learning and watching and doing. Blink is an attempt to understand this
magical and mysterious thing called judgment. Judgment matters: it is what
separates winners from losers. From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the
ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But it is easy to disrupt this gift.

• Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to

be forgiving of the people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is
imperiled.

• We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited

amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the
arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our
homework. We have come to confuse information with understanding.
 Afterword
Listening with your eyes: The lessons of blink.

• The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We

are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.

• When to blink-And when to think.

• When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think
things through?
• On straightforward choices, deliberate analysis is best. When questions of
analysis and personal choice start to get complicated-when we have to juggle
many different variables-then our unconscious thought process may be
superior. “This is exactly contrary to conventional wisdom”. We typically
regard our snap judgment as best on immediate trivial questions. That may be
that big computer in our brain that handles our unconscious is at best when it
has to juggle many competing variables.
 Afterword
Listening with your eyes: The lessons of blink.
• When to blink-And when to think.
• When should we trust our instincts, and when should we consciously think
things through?
• Sigmund FREUD: “When making a decision for minor importance, I have
always found it advantageous to consider all pros and cons. In vital matters,
however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should
come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the
important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, by the deep inner
needs of our nature”.
• The best thing we can do is to try to puzzle out the right mix of conscious
and unconscious analysis on a case-by-case bias. It’s about how to combine
rational analysis with instinctive judgment.
• Attitude and motivation can’t be measured with formal tests and statistics.
They can be measured only by exercising judgment, by an expert with long
years of experience, drawing on that big database in his/her unconscious and
concluding, yes, they have it, or no they don’t.
 blink
• It’s not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our
unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works-and
about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgments-it’s our
responsibility to act.