Blink

Gladwell's argument is that the adaptive unconscious can reach accurate conclusions from a thin slice of experience, sometimes better than deliberate analysis, and that good decision makers learn to filter a few factors that matter from many that don't. He also argues the reverse: snap judgments can be corrupted by prejudice, appearance and priming, and more information often makes decisions worse.

Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, published Blink in January 2005 as the follow-up to The Tipping Point. Like his other books it is reported and narrative, popularizing the work of researchers such as marriage psychologist John Gottman and facial-expression expert Paul Ekman through stories rather than data.

Critics questioned the evidence. Richard Posner, reviewing it in The New Republic, argued that Gladwell made unsupported assumptions, mischaracterized the evidence for his thesis and failed to follow his own advice about thin-slicing. The Daily Telegraph made a similar complaint about bold claims on flimsy evidence, and Daniel Kahneman later said the book helped spread the false belief that intuition works like magic. The book never fully settles when to trust a first impression and when to distrust it; Kahneman's own work is the rigorous treatment of that question.

Read it for the stories and the questions they raise about expertise and bias, then read Thinking, Fast and Slow for the evidence.

1. Experience compresses into instinct. An expert's first impression can be right before they can say why, but only in domains where they have deep, tested experience.
2. More data can make decisions worse. Cook County Hospital diagnosed heart attacks better by focusing doctors on a handful of indicators instead of everything they could measure.
3. Looks distort judgment. The Warren Harding error is a warning about halo effects when you size up a CEO, a candidate or a pitch.
4. What people say they want isn't what they buy. Taste tests and focus groups steered Coca-Cola wrong and nearly killed the Aeron chair, so be skeptical of survey-driven forecasts for new products.
5. Fix the setup, not just the mind. Screens in orchestra auditions reduced bias more reliably than asking judges to ignore it; strip irrelevant information out of a decision process.

The book moves from the power of snap judgments to their failures and then to how to manage them.

1. The statue that didn't look right. The Getty Museum's kouros passed scientific tests, but several experts sensed at first sight that it was fake. Gottman's thin-slice predictions of which couples will divorce follow.
2. The locked door and the Harding error. Experts often can't explain their own snap judgments, and priming shapes behavior without our knowing. Warren Harding won the presidency largely because he looked the part, and implicit associations color how car salesmen treat customers.
3. Paul Van Riper's big victory. In the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game, a retired Marine general using improvisation and low-tech messengers beat a data-heavy US force. Cook County Hospital improved chest-pain diagnosis by having doctors focus on a few key indicators.
4. Kenna's dilemma. Market research misleads: sip tests pushed Coca-Cola toward New Coke, the Aeron chair tested poorly before becoming a hit, and the musician Kenna won over insiders but not focus groups.
5. Seven seconds in the Bronx and listening with your eyes. The 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo shows snap judgment failing under stress. The conclusion describes orchestras that began hiring more women once auditions were held behind a screen.

The landmark book that has revolutionized the way we understand leadership and decision making -- from #1 bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. In his breakthrough bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant--in the blink of an eye--that actually aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work--in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of blink: the election of Warren Harding; New Coke; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of thin-slicing--filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.