Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking | Malcolm Gladwell | I picked this book up on a whim - good decision

books:

Blink: The Power o...

	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell Back Bay Books, 2007 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 958 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

View of the capacities of the subconcious

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.

I picked this book up on a whim - good decision

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.

for more information click here

Blink and Branding

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.

for more information click here

Perverse obsession

A fascinating book, but as others have pointed out too many of the ideas here rely on anecdotal information. I got the feeling after a while that the author cherry-picked the stories he wanted to tell in order to bolster his thesis, and that another researcher could just as easily have formed a different thesis about decision making by selecting different stories.

Another thing about this book that struck me, as odd, was the author's obsession with a person's appearance, particularly whether the person was short or tall. Some of the descriptions are as follows.
P22, 'he is short and very charming'
P49, `he is a small and irrepressible man'
P61, `a tall, striking woman'
P73, `his bigness of frame'
P87, `who is both on the short side - five foot nine - and black'
P99, `is tall and lean with a gleaming bald dome'
P132, `is a tall man with a runner's slender build'
P148, `is very tall and strikingly handsome'
P190, `He was short and unassuming'
P197, `He was short and thick'
P202, `although he is of medium build, he seems much larger'
P251, `is tiny'

Seldom does the person's size matter to the thesis about decision making that the author presents. Even in the last example where a woman musician is described as `tiny', Gladwell admits that her size ought not to determine whether she is hired to play the French horn. Yet throughout the book he includes a person size as though it has some importance to his argument. This just struck me as perverse, and I wondered at his 'decision' for including this mostly useless information.

for more information click here