Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Summary

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[MALCOLM GLADWELL] has written the best term paper of the year. After having covered topics ranging from prime-time soaps to SUVs, Gladwell has learned to extract and recount the most interesting elements of any subject, and in Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, he has expertly exploited the 'wow factor" of current research in marketing, social psychology, and unconscious processing. There is certainly no glut of material. Gladwell aims to tie a wealth of scientific research together with numerous anecdotes from outside the academe into a coherent and engaging description of rapid, instinctive, and generally unconscious cognition. His goal is to give a popular readership what will likely be a surprising and counterintuitive glimpse into what modern psychology has revealed about inner mental life. The sheer volume of examples that Gladwell uses is remarkable for a book of this length, but it is clear throughout that the author is a journalist by both profession and approach - he remains much more concerned with reporting the evidence than interpreting, critiquing or expanding it.

This theme is highlighted most in the second section of the book, which many readers will find the most interesting. Here Gladwell reviews what he calls "The Locked Door" - the opaque barrier behind which our unconscious mental lives remain inaccessible. John Bargh's work on unconscious priming, Damasio's Iowa gambling task, and Schooler and Wilson's work on verbal overshadowing are combined with a number of anecdotes from less well-known research on subjects such as speed dating and sports psychology. Gladwell slowly and convincingly builds the case not only that the underlying machinations of our decision-making processes remain unknown to us, but also that we tend to automatically construct fanciful but entirely false assumptions to explain them. Moreover, while this unconscious system is in many cases more powerful and accurate, intervention by the conscious one often impairs this accuracy. Many of these ideas are as old as Freud, but the studies Gladwell describes placed them among the most exciting areas of psychology at the end of the last century, and the author's conversational style conveys this excitement with an eloquence that is absent in most texts - academic or otherwise.

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Extract

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

MALCOLM GLADWELL Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking New York: Little Brown, 2005, 288 pages (ISBN 0-3161-7232-4, US$25.95 Hardcover)

Reviewed by AZIM SHARIFF

Malcolm Gladwell has written the best term paper of the year. After having covered topics ranging from prime-time soaps to SUVs, Gladwell has learned to extract...

See the full content of this document

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