Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

reviewed by Derek Thompson

Malcolm Gladwell writes small books about big ideas. His non-fiction debut The Tipping Point sought to dissect the science of what makes things popular. This brief study of how nascent ideas can become social epidemics represented both a warning against social engineering and a how-to manual for public relations and marketing firms. Gladwell's little book became one of the most influential of the decade.

In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Gladwell brings his pop-science style to psychology. In 250 pages, he weaves illuminating anecdotes together with pithy explanations to break down the science of the gut instinct. As Gladwell points out, his book is tackling the most miniscule of subjects - "the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation." But as brief as our snap judgments are, those fractions of a second can be the difference between love and indifference in a relationship, victory and defeat in war, and life and death, itself.

In our culture of 30-second advertising and sound-bite politics, the significance of instinct seems almost redundant. We all routinely betray our mothers' requests to "Never judge a book by its cover" and systematically judge every multi-dimensional issue by the first glossy image or witty remark to come our way. Moreover, we all know that our baser instincts place far below rational decision-making in the cognitive hierarchy. Indeed, when Jerry Seinfeld told George Castanza to listen to his inner man, Castanza replied: "My inner man is an idiot."

Regular Seinfeld watchers know that George is probably right, but according to Gladwell, most of our inner-men aren't idiots at all. Split-second reactions can be trained and refined to pick up stimuli that often elude drawn out decision-making. What makes Blink such a fascinating read is that it creates a new lens for readers to analyze their gut instincts.

Gladwell begins the book with a fascinating example of a Greek statue the Getty Museum bought in 1983. After a year studying the paper trail and convening a team of art specialists and geologists to verify its authenticity, the museum agreed the buy the statue. But one art historian on the board of trustees didn't feel right about the piece. Neither did a Greek expert, and the former director of the Met in New York could tell it was a fake. Why didn't the statue look authentic? The experts couldn't say exactly. Some thought it looked "fresh" - not a good thing for marble pre-dating Socrates. Others felt a wave of "intuitive repulsion." It turns out that the latter experts were right. The statue was a fake, and the Getty rescinded the purchase.

But how did a museum trustee see in a glance what had eluded a team of experts for fourteen months? It's a skill Gladwell calls thin-slicing. According to the theory of thin slices, in the first two seconds we meet a new person or a challenge, our unconscious naturally sifts through the stimuli and keys in on the important details.

Thin-slicing is not the prerogative of trained art experts. Everybody does it a thousand times a day. It's why we feel instantly attracted to some people and indifferent toward other attractive people. It's how bird watchers identify species from only glancing at its feathers and wings. It's why big-time producer Brian Grazer cast a virtual unknown Tom Hanks to star in Splash over hundreds of other actors. Our gut, it turns out, is one discriminating organ - sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but never insignificant.

But as Gladwell illustrates, the results are not always pretty. In 1999 a Guinea immigrant named Amadou Diallo was standing outside his apartment when a team of policemen turned onto his street. The officers asked Diallo what he was doing standing outside the apartment, but the twenty-two year old man with a stutter and imperfect English paused, ran into the vestibule and reached into his pockets as the policemen screamed for him to show his hands. Seven seconds later, the three policemen had fired 41 shots and Diallo was dead, wallet in hand.

The officers were not convicted of second-degree murder, but they were guilty of faulty mind reading and terrible thin-slicing. The policemen had interpreted Diallo's behavior as brazenness when it was actually terror. He reached for identification - the officers read gun. Instead of thin-slicing the fear and confusion in Diallo's face, the officers, in a rush of panic, probably lumped prejudices: A black man in a dangerous New York neighborhood reaching into his pocket meant trouble.

One of the book's most interesting examples of failing to recognize the power of thin-slicing is Coca Cola's epic product disaster: New Coke. When the Pepsi Challenge commercials debuted, Coke lost the Pepsi taste test consistently. This was not a question of manipulation: Folks regularly preferred sips from the Pepsi cup. Coke still outsold Pepsi, but Coca Cola panicked and responded with New Coke, a sweeter version of Coca Cola that tasted like a Coke-Pepsi hybrid. It flopped Edsel-style, and Coca Cola's revenue plummeted. When Coke returned with Classic Coca Cola, profits rebounded in a hurry.

What the Coke company failed to realize is that consumers in a taste test have different thin-slicing standards than regular consumers. Pepsi may have been more popular out of the test cup, but when we drink soda in our homes, we don't sip it out of shot glasses—we drink it by the bottle. And the slight bitter-sweetness that hurt Coke in taste tests actually makes it more appealing with meals, which is why Coca Cola has always outsold Pepsi cola.

What makes Blink so engrossing is that it challenges popular conception without being smug and explains the science and neurology behind the issues without seeming pedagogical or arcane. It may not produce the cultural windfall that turned The Tipping Point into a phenomenon. In other words, it won't change the way you think about thinking. But at the very least, Blink should make us take our baser instincts a lot more seriously.