Analysis Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

All in all, Gladwell helps paint a picture of what’s said to be behind the locked door of the subconscious. He uses repetition and rhetorical questions to stress how thin-slicing plays a crucial part in our world. The power of our minds are limitless but Gladwell is still searching for the key to unlocking the truth of our unconscious

He asks, “How are human beings connected? Do we all belong to separate worlds, operating simultaneously but autonomously, so that the links between any two people, anywhere in the world are few and distant? Or are we all bound up together in a grand, interlocking web? (Page 34)” Gladwell doesn’t actually expect readers to come up with an answer, but he does realize that readers wouldn’t consider these questions had he not put the questions in their heads to start with. By doing this he allows his audience to form their own opinions on the questions asked before he reveals what answers the questions were originally designed to expose. Gladwell effectively uses rhetorical questions to get the audience interested early on, therefore making the information given in the selection more important.

An ineffective device used by Gladwell was his use of repetition of evidence and failure to acknowledge counterexamples by forcing the reader into thinking that Gladwell’s theory is the only one possible to be correct. The lack of acknowledgment towards counterexamples thrusts the audience into thinking that Gladwell’s opinion is the only viable one. “Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles biography”, “nonstop show, hour after hour”, “Here is John Lennon”, and “playing all night long” are examples of repetition of evidence because the author already established that the

Rhetorical questions appear throughout the book, allowing Gladwell to emphasize key points of his message and to interact with the reader in a way that they understand. Rhetorical questions are often used as transitions which introduce the next concept. While wrapping up his chapter about prejudice from subconscious

Without these two strategies, Gladwell would have failed to draw attention and transition from section to section, or build up to and eventually defend his claim with any undeniable facts. Statistics and rhetorical questions do not only apply to arguments about success, but they are also rhetorical mediums that can be and are used in a variety of ways. Rhetorical questions can be seen on posters, in ads, and in any strong paper. How’s that for applicability? Statistics are most commonly found in visual advertisements and websites. They use evidence that cannot be discredited to credit any possible argument. The reason these two strategies work so well together is that questioning adheres to the visceral and emotional side of an audience, while cold, hard numbers build credibility and respect to logic and reasoning. This results in a powerful one-two punch that left many Gladwell readers wondering if they missed the chance to be great because of something as simple as a set of numbers and slashes on a

To start with, Gladwell uses ethos, an appeal to ethics, as a device to effectively explain how

Gladwell carefully constructs his argument by offering the real life story of Bernie Goetz. Gladwell uses this example in order to provide a

All children are not raised the same exact way. There are many different parenting styles, ranging from authoritative to neglectful parenting. Along with those many different styles also come many different opinions on which ones are better or worse for children. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that essentially looks into many factors that contribute to people's successes. In chapter four, Gladwell writes about how different parenting philosophies impact how successful the children will be when they are older. Gladwell claims that there are essentially only two main parenting philosophies, “concerted cultivation” and “accomplishment of natural growth” (Gladwell 104). Gladwell goes on to also claim that between those two parenting philosophies, children raised from concerted

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.

Blink is a book that analyzes the way people make decisions. According to the author, Malcolm Gladwell, people use one of two strategies to come to a decision. The first strategy is a conscious one. When using this strategy, people think about what they have learned and develop an answer. The second is an unconscious strategy in which a person's brain reaches a conclusion in a matter of seconds, often times without awareness. These conclusions are what we generally refer to as hunches or instincts and, it is the development and reliability of these types of conclusions that Gladwell focuses on in this book. In doing so, Gladwell sets out to accomplish three tasks. The first is to prove that decisions made very quickly can be as

Critical thinking is defined as purposeful, reflective judgment that manifests itself in giving reasoned and fair-minded consideration to the evidence, conceptualizations, methods, contexts, and standards in order to decide what to believe or what to do (Facione, 2011). I believe that Malcolm Gladwell is trying to tell readers of Blink that critical thinking can be done in just a few short minutes. “What is Blink about? It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in the blink of an eye.“ (Gladwell, 2005). You don’t need to take hours or days to do it. We have always been told that spending time to gather all the information is better, but is that necessarily true? Blink has several stories in it where we see

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a book intended to inform the readers about the vast mystery of the mind. The book goes off to talk about science projects and/or tests, that were conducted on humans which essentially allows the reader to learn a little more about the mystery of the mind. The mind has exposed itself to the public many times, and it’s the first thing the book doesn’t fail to do. Blink has been intentionally written to be easier to understand by the public, it is a combination of many stories that as an end result gives a closer look on how the brain works. For the most part, each chapter is designed to inform the reader of the many different ways the brain can function. The chapter The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Decisions,

Authored by Keith E. Stanovich, How to Think Straight About Psychology is a known work of the psychology world which was published in 1986. Beginning courses in psychology use his text frequently. Stanovich primary purpose for writing the text is to bring attention to his observation that the public’s understanding of psychology is different from psychology as a modern science. Psychology as a modern science explains the underlying functions that shape human attitudes and behavior. To the people who misunderstand this, the field of psychology is not a real science, but a pseudo-science instead. How to Think Straight About Psychology describes people’s several false impressions of psychology and it gives its readers a factual understanding of the field as a modern and scientific psychology while explaining how this science works.

“My book, Blink, is a book that’s about snap judgments and it's about taking snap judgments seriously. And it's not a book that says they’re great and it's not a book that says they’re terrible. It’s a book that says they are both. It can be really good and it can be really bad. And we need to understand them on a very much more sophisticated level if we were to construct a better world for ourselves.” (Malcolm Gladwell, On Books Podcast) This was a quick explanation of what the book is about from his professional point of view. In my explanation of the book, Blink is a book about snap