Analysis Of Blink By Gladwell

Most people would believe that we are shaped and defined by our values and moral character. However, Malcolm Gladwell argues, in the chapter “The Power of Context, Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime” In other words, The Power of Context is the social setting and or the environment around you and how it affects your behavior. Anticipating resistance from the reader Gladwell uses rhetorical strategies such as real life examples, controlled experiments and theories to help advance his claim and to help persuade the reader to side with his argument.

Criminal case is always tedious when it involves little or no information about the offender, like in the 9/11 terrorist attack which annihilated most of the workers in and damaged the New York Trade Center building. However, in an attempt to identify the offenders, government officials and investigators try out different ways such as criminal profiling and others. Thus, in the New Yorker article, “Dangerous Minds” by Malcolm Gladwell; the author informs the deeper problems with FBI profiling and argues that it is ineffective. He questions the usefulness of criminal profiling, “But how useful is that profile, really?” and uses other criminal cases, group research analyses, and analogies to refute

Gladwell presents an interesting concept of “thin slicing” I definitely recommend this book for others to read. I enjoyed reading this book. Malcolm Gladwell was right when he stated on the back cover of the book, that reading this book would change the way I understood every decision I made. It has changed the way I think about making decisions.

Visual media, such as the computer and television distract people from the natural world, and instead blinds them from reality. Fahrenheit 451 exposes the idea that mass visual media initiates problems of violence, unawareness, and ignorance. The advanced technology causes the people of society to stray farther away from reality, and they become trapped in their own world of unawareness. Thus, unlike in nature where everything is free, the advanced technology confines people within the boundaries that technology allows. The boundaries created by visual media imprison the people of society into a world of mental incapacity and illiteracy. This unfamiliarity with the world, shown by numerous characters, shows how society is negligent. For

Throughout Gladwell’s text he uses many paradigms. The first paradigm that he uses is in the introduction of the book. Gladwell begins by using a small town in Pennsylvania called Roseto. There was something very unique about this town. A doctor named Stewart Wolfe he found that the rates of heart disease in this little town were significantly less for those under the age of sixty-five, which during the time heart disease was a huge epidemic. Wolfe began to research the obvious things that one would believe to have an impact on heart disease. He looked at diet

Montag is someone who is shy and keeps his thoughts to himself, but thinks many things. He shows that he is distracted instead of being happy throughout the book. At the time, he was walking home from work and was looking at Clarisse. Clarisse is a girl who would roam the streets and was also Montag's neighbor. She walks over to Guy and they start to have a conversation while walking to their houses. They discussing if talking about to see if Montag is really happy or if he was lying. She keeps questioning him. Bradbury explains “He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as true state affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run across the lawn with the mask and the way

Does social media “shrink the world” by bringing us closer together? In his article Small Change, Malcom Gladwell asserts that social media might be connecting more people, but the bonds it forms allow us to stay comfortably separate and avoid impacting meaningful social reform. Gladwell makes it apparent that he believes social media and revolutions are unsuited for each other. His article, written just two months before the beginning of the Arab Spring, was written in response to what some contemporaries have dubbed, “The Twitter Revolution” in Moldova. This revolution, as well as another in Iran, was heralded as examples of the merits of social media, with some even nominating Twitter for the Nobel Peace Prize due to their belief that Twitter had played a major role in these uprisings. Gladwell writes against a sentiment of righteousness and accomplishment that advocates of social media maintain in an attempt to convince people that the true motivation behind social change is conviction. He raises the point that while it is exceedingly easy for someone to join a cause, such as hitting a ‘like’ button, it is far more effortless for them to quit. This sentiment seems to be fueled mostly by opinion, looking only at how social media did not cause revolutions and avoiding analysis regarding how

The human mind is vast and intricate, yet responsive. Everyone has their own special abilities and talents. Eidetic memory, artistic brilliance, and mathematical mastery are all special skills possessed by very few, but the one that Gladwell glorifies in his non-fiction story, “Blink”, is the power of thinking without thinking. He discusses how certain people’s subconscious mind has the capacity to respond to complex dilemmas and situations in less than two seconds. Similar to talents such as photographic memory and musical mastery, Gladwell states that the adaptive unconscious can be strengthened and improved.

The first device that Gladwell takes advantage of is plot progression. For the first chunk of the introduction, Gladwell utilizes a story about a forged Greek Kouros statue, and the

Gladwell uses many rhetorical modes to prove his central claim, whether they be examples, comparing and contrasting two success stories, and etc, but out of all of them the one that Gladwell uses the most is process analysis. By using this mode Gladwell brings out the best points of his arguments over and over. In every chapter Gladwell uses this mode to break down the story in such as way that the reader understands how the central claim fits into that specific success story. The other modes are also well used but this one dominants over all of them as it is used to describe everything from the success of a hockey team to Gladwell’s own success, thus making process analysis the

He uses a vigorous choice of wording and way to structure his sentences and paragraphs. Throughout his essay, he structures his paragraphs similar to keep a consistent and organized argument. He starts his first several paragraphs with an emphasis on one of his main points: content, intention, and conviction. He then goes on to explain how that point is important and provides examples. In his fourth paragraph, intention, he starts his paragraph by explaining intention with an unique style, the form of a question. Gladwell asks, “Was the remark intended to wound, or intended to perpetuate some social wrong?”. By using this style, it not only explains what intention means, but also implies it in the form of questions and examples. This leaves the reader wanting to know more and how Gladwell responds to his own questions. For example, after Gladwell asks the questions at the beginning of paragraph four followed by “I remember sitting in church, as a child, while our Presbyterian minister made jokes about how “cheap” Presbyterians were. If non-Presbyterians make that joke, it might be offensive”. Ending like this keeps the reader interested in what he has been through and how he is applying it to his argument. Overall, Gladwell’s use of style is necessary and a key within his essay. His style keeps his audience interested and wanting to know

Malcolm Gladwell explores the fascinating rationale of the human unconscious mind in its ability to negotiate the best possible decision in a negligible amount of time in Blink. In a creative way of describing human decision making, Gladwell speaks of “thin slicing”, a technique in which the unconscious mind takes a minuscule amount of data, essentially an amount limited to the time of a blink of an eye, and evaluates the information intuitively to make a split second instinctive decision.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is his second work. It follows another psychological masterpiece, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. First published in 2005, Blink explores the relationship between psychological and the boundaries of human knowledge, a major subject field of epistemological studies. The book includes the studies link to neurological findings. Whereas The Tipping Point delves into the spheres of influence humans have and the outside world on people's decision making.

When it comes to schemes employed in the introduction of Gladwell's book, rhetorical questions take the cake. Upon countless instances, Gladwell used this rhetorical device to force the reader into staying engaged and seeing all sides of his argument. As mentioned earlier, the first subsection introduced an extensive story about the Getty museum's purchase of a forged Greek statue. In order to keep focused on the purpose of the novel Gladwell placed well-spaced out questions, asking the reader “ Who was right?” and “Why ... did the museum buy [the statue] in the first place?”, compelling one to pause and reevaluate how Gladwell’s notion, was in fact possible (Gladwell 7,14). To further excitement and engagement in his message, Gladwell prompts the reader with questions that poke at what the world could be like if humans put more trust in their instincts and “stopped scanning the horizon with our binoculars and began instead examining our own decision making and behavior through the most powerful of microscopes” (Gladwell 16). Open ended questions such as these give the reader a broader understanding of what Gladwell’s aspirations for the book were, allowing them to better comprehend his newfound ideas.

Having established the fact that rapid cognition is not always as accurate as one would want it to be, Gladwell now goes on to the topic of reading the minds of others just by looking