Blink

Malcolm Gladwell

📚 GENRE: Miscellaneous

📃 PAGES: 296

✅ COMPLETED: November 13, 2023

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

There’s a lot of power in our instincts and gut feelings. Malcolm Gladwell explores the concept of rapid decision-making and intuitive judgments, using various anecdotes and examples to highlight the strengths and limitations of intuitive thinking in our daily lives.

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Trust Your Instincts — Our initial gut instincts in many situations are often more accurate than we realize. You don’t always need a mountain of information before making a decision. Learn to trust your intuitive thinking.

2️⃣ We’re Not Sure — Most of us don’t really know what we want. When asked, we’ll give an answer describing what we think we want. But often what we say we want and what we actually want are two very different things, which is why market research is hard to trust. 

3️⃣ Presentation Matters — Because associative memory is a real factor when people experience things in life, how you package and present your product or service really matters. This is partly why Steve Jobs was always so obsessed with how Apple products were designed and packaged. Every detail of the customer experience matters, even something as simple as how it’s boxed. 

Favorite Quote

“But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. 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.”

Book Notes 📑

Introduction

  • The Getty — The book begins with an anecdote about the sale of a fake statue at J. Paul Getty museum in the 1980s. To summarize, the museum bought a kouros (a freestanding Greek sculpture of a naked youth) from a man for $9 million. The statue was claimed to have been discovered in the fifth century BC, and over the span of 14 months, the Getty’s top scientists, lawyers, and historians investigated the statue and all submitted paperwork before determining that it was legit. But it turns out that it wasn’t legit — it was fake. They found out it was fake after a few top scientists in the U.S. had a hunch that there was something “off” about the statue, and those claims were backed up by Greek scientists when the Getty shipped the object out to Greece to have it looked at. The purpose of the anecdote is to show that our brain can fire off accurate opinions (hunches) in a matter of seconds, and we should trust those instincts. 
  • “Adaptive Unconscious” — Gladwell uses this term to describe our quick, instinctual mode of thinking. It’s the part of our brain that leaps to conclusions and connects the dots. It’s the part of our brain that makes quick judgements based on very little information. We’re often told to gather as much information as possible before making a decision, but that’s not always the best approach. Sometimes we need to trust our instincts and intuition. Many of the scientists at the Getty had a hunch that something about the statue was not right, but they didn’t trust their instincts.
    • Quote (P. 12): “Whenever we meet someone for the first time, whenever we interview someone for a job, whenever we react to a new idea, whenever we’re faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use that second part of our brain (adaptive unconscious).”
    • Quote (P. 14): “But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. 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.”

Ch. 1: The Theory of Thin Slices: How a Little Bit of Knowledge Goes a Long Way

  • Thin-Slicing — This refers to the ability of our unconscious mind to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. It essentially refers to our ability to come to conclusions and judgements without needing a huge amount of information. For example, one study found that random strangers were able to make fairly accurate predictions about the personality of selected college students just by being in the students’ dorm room for 15 minutes. The strangers were using a thin slice of information (observing the students’ rooms) to come to conclusions. This is what Gladwell calls ‘thin-slicing.’
  • The Four Horsemen of Divorce — Psychologist John Gottman has become famous for his ability to predict whether a married couple will stay together or divorce by simply observing them for a short amount of time in his lab. His accurate prediction rate is in the 90+% range. He has pinpointed for main traits that lead to divorce. These are red flags that Gottman looks for when observing couples.
    • Defensiveness
    • Stonewalling
    • Criticism 
    • Contempt  
  • Contempt: The Worst of the Horsemen — According to Gottman, the most alarming of the above four traits by far is contempt, the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration or worthless. Contempt is when you see yourself on a higher level and someone else is “beneath” you. In Gottman’s view, there’s no coming back from that type of dynamic in a relationship. When one party views himself/herself above the other, every little word or action will be seen through a faulty life lens. You should never feel like you’re “above” someone else.
    • Quote (P. 33): “Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community.”
  • Chapter Takeaway — We’re good at thin-slicing, or being able to make instinctual decisions based on a small amount of information. We’ve been doing it forever, so it’s hard-wired into our DNA. 

Ch. 2: The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions

  • We Don’t Know What We Want — We think we know what we want, but usually we actually don’t. This has been proven in several studies by psychologists. We go into something saying we want a certain thing, then our mind changes in the moment. It’s human nature. That’s why you can’t really trust market research; our behavior doesn’t always match our words. 
  • Priming — Numerous studies by psychologists have shown that our unconscious mind is very susceptible to priming. It’s hard to believe sometimes, but out behavior can be influenced by something as simple as a set of priming words. 

Ch. 3: The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall For Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men

  • Downsides of Thin-Slicing — Although thin-slicing can help us make quick, and surprisingly accurate, judgements based on limited information, it can also lead to misreads. It can open the door to our deeply rooted biases. The Halo effect, supporting everything about somebody because you like their looks (for example), comes to mind here. 

Ch. 4: Paul Van Riper's Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity

  • Less Isn’t (Always) More — Sometimes we can get overwhelmed by the amount of information or choices available to us. In many cases, less is actually more. When we have too much of something, it can cause problems. Too many jams to choose from? Fewer sales of jam. Too many procedures and rules to follow? Slower execution times. Sometimes we need to just make decisions in the moment and trust our instincts. Too much information or too many choices can cause paralysis as we pore over the data and options. 

Ch. 5: Kenna’s Dilemma: The Right — and Wrong — Way to Ask People What They Want

  • Presentation Matters — Research has proven time and time again that how you present a product or service matters almost as much as the quality of the actual product or service. This is partly why Steve Jobs was so obsessed with the design of his products AND his packaging. Using products like 7-Up, Pepsi, and others, researchers have shown that how the product is presented (via packaging, branding, product design, etc.) influences how customer feel when they actually use/experience it. The packaging and branding tap into associative memory. Always look to maximize your presentation and user experience — it matters. 
    • Quote (P. 165): “Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations, and it is foolish of a company to service one dimension and ignore the other.”
  • Trust the Experts — You are considered an expert in something when you’ve accumulated a significant number of hours doing that particular thing. And when you’re an expert, your instincts and opinion should matter far more than anybody else’s. Trust the experts — they know what they’re talking about.

Ch. 6: Seven Seconds in the Bronx: The Delicate Art of Mind Reading

  • Facial Expressions — Our facial expressions give direct insight into what’s going on inside of our mind. For the most part, everybody is extremely good at reading facial expressions. In a microsecond, we can tell when a person is upset, happy, annoyed, excited, etc. Facial expressions also serve as a universal language — a look of disgust, for example, means the same thing in the U.S. as it does when it flashes across someone’s face in Japan, or Argentina, or Italy. The face gives a direct clue to what’s going on inside. 
  • Autism — A condition that robs a person of his/her ability to read nonverbal cues, like facial expressions, body language, gestures, emotion, etc. They also lack the ability to empathize — putting themselves in another person’s shoes and seeing things from their perspective. People with autism interpret the world almost exclusively through other people’s literal verbal language. Another way to put it is that autistic people aren’t able to read another person’s mind or emotions; they just don’t pick up on nonverbal cues. Everything is taken literally. 
  • Fight or Flight — A number of interesting things happen to our body when we go into fight or flight mode. In response to danger, our body will go into this hyper-focused mode where things almost seem like they’re slowing down. Blood flow redirects from our outer muscle layer and into core muscle mass in an effort to harden the body and turn muscle into a kind of armor to limit bleeding in the event of injury. Some functions of the body temporarily shut down while others are boosted by the adrenaline. We can run faster, lift more weight, and our vision improves. If your heart rate gets too high, however, your body begins to get clumsy and basic functions become very difficult. This is why some people have trouble even dialing 911 when an emergency breaks out. 
  • Temporary Autism — Gladwell makes an argument that we become “temporarily autistic” when we get into fight or flight mode. He uses past police shootings as evidence, making the point that some of these police officers who have wrongfully shot and killed innocent people were in fight or flight mode and did not have access to their normal face-reading functions. They weren’t racist; they were just victims of their own adrenaline rush. When we’re in fight or flight mode, certain cognitive functions shut down. Pair that with the fact that decisions in these situations must be made in a split second, and it becomes difficult to make proper reads.Â