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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | 
| Manufacturer: Back Bay Books
Category: EBooks
List Price: $10.99
Buy New: $8.79
You Save: $2.20 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  940 reviews
Sales Rank: 86
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Dewey Decimal Number: 153.44
ASIN: B000PAAH3K
Publication Date: April 3, 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like. --Barbara Mackoff
Product Description
Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea. Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making.In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like
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| Customer Reviews: Read 935 more reviews...
 Almost... August 8, 2008
First, let me say that this is a good book. It's well worth your time to read. I don't think that it's as good as the Tipping Point though. This one seems to go a little longer than what is necessary maybe. It seems to be like Mr. Gladwell is trying to stretch it out a bit. The good thing about all of it though, is that it is a very quick read, and you won't have a lot of time invested into it. So definitely pick this one up, you won't regret it!
 Two seconds make all the difference August 3, 2008
Gladwell offers an intriguing look at how the subconscious or intuition of a person works in different situations, as well as how it can be trained and the importance of sometimes taking a step back before acting on a situation. This is a relatively quick read with some intriguing ideas offered in it. If you like this book, you may find it useful to track down some of the writings by people he references as they go into more depth than Gladwell does.
I picked this book up on a whim - good decision August 1, 2008
Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is subtitled The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Because that pretty much summarizes my life, I decided to read it even though it's an "intellectual" book and I usually steer away from too much heavy reading. I'm glad I made an exception.
Blink had my attention from the beginning. Gladwell has assembled interesting vignettes from normal worldly life and used them to illustrate his point about the value and dangers of making snap judgments. He doesn't advise us to discard all cognitive reasoning or experience as background for coming to a decision, but he points to many past decisions that could have been better if reams of information, scientific facts, and expert opinions had been ignored. Thin slices of experience, as opposed to lengthy studies or long periods of familiarization, often produce more satisfying and productive decisions.
Gladwell presents many examples of better decisions through snap judgments. A quick analysis of couples by observers produced a higher accuracy rating in the chances of their marriages making it as opposed to lengthy studies of their compatibility, small talk patterns, and body language. A singer's music CD inadvertently fell into the hands of the co-president of a large record company who loved it and passed it around. The singer's success was almost immediate because he was thin-sliced by top executives who knew and liked good music and knew how to promote it. But then market research firms published opinions by mainstream listeners from around the country who found him lacking and unlikely to find a core audience or to gain significant radio air-play. People who had never seen him, and only listened to a couple of his songs, completely stalled his career.
Large symphony orchestras, traditionally mostly male, have improved their performance by hiring females who audition from behind screens, masking their sex. Innovative military commanders who rely on experience and seat-of-the-pants decisions have regularly trounced better prepared forces with superior equipment and manpower.
Gladwell points out that all is not good with this technique if some fundamental safeguards are not applied. Four police officers in the dark entrance of a Bronx tenement pumped 41 shots into a scared and unarmed Guinea immigrant. When heart rates go up, cognitive reasoning goes down, according to Gladwell. Only seven seconds passed from the time the officers first saw the victim, called out to him, thought they saw a gun, pulled their guns and fired 41 shots into him. Quick decisions were made with fatal results. Mind-reading abilities were probably impaired by elevated heart rates causing a series of misjudgments to be made.
I highly recommend this book for a look into the world of decisions. We have to make them every day and we have to live with those made by others. Gladwell presents a well-researched study that is fascinating.
View of the capacities of the subconcious July 30, 2008
This book is excellent on the discovery of how the subconcious works, and can work for you. It is an interesting exploration. It also compares "intuition" with more obvious forms of over-analyzation, which our culture is taken over by. A real heads-up to what is going on around you.
 Blink and Branding July 29, 2008
The Book on the Nightstand - July 08
The book falling off the nightstand this month is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The take-away from this text is why and how we make snap decisions, and to what degree these decisions should be trusted. I walked away with a solid understanding of the why and how, but less so on the trust and accuracy of snap decisions. Statistically you should go with your first "gut decision", except when you shouldn't. The text left me feeling vague in that area.
The Art of Digital Branding contrasts the Margaret Thatcher quote "I make my mind up about someone within the first ten seconds and I very seldom change it" with the research of psychologist Alexander Todorov, that "most people actually make a judgment about someone based on his facial appearance within one-tenth of a second", (page 27).
How is this used in design? A study by the Human-Oriented Technology Lab at Carleton University shows that "people can make an instinctive decision as to whether a web site is good or bad in 1/20th of a second", (page 34). An on-line consumer has made a decision to purchase within the first 40 seconds of entering a web site.
The design and balance of the first or home page of a site is critical, one of the primary metrics of Google Analytics is the "bounce rate". Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors. A high bounce rate from the main page reflects that people fled your site after a fraction of a second that your material was unsuitable for them. Like the Prime Minister, they probably won't be back.
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