Blink : The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking 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

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

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

As Gladwell conducts his argument, he writes with confidence and authority, which expresses his passion and knowledge about the subject. Gladwell’s poise throughout the essay, combined with his resume, establishes his credibility and constructs a rhetorically effective argument. Being a best-selling author as well as a professional

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

The author explains exactly what the professional asserts and how particular pieces of evidence relate to Gladwell’s unconventional idea of success.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a book written by Malcolm Gladwell. This book introduces the concept of “thin slicing”. The concept refers to how in a split second or blink of an eye people can make an unconscious and accurate assessment of someone. Using the concept of thin slicing we can determine what is really important within the first few seconds when meeting someone. Malcolm Gladwell explained that first impressions or spontaneous decisions can be just as important as decisions that are made carefully and planned out. According to Gladwell, people make better decisions with quick judgments than they do with a lot of analysis. Gladwell believes that the power

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

Gladwell uses strong anecdotes and studies to prove all the claims he presents throughout his book. He explains he evidence well and ties everything back to the point he is trying to prove. This helps further understand Gladwell’s argument. But, even though Gladwell uses multiple anecdotes and studies to support his claims, the problem that is faced is that he merely suggests his sources are correct but never

Using tables and statistical evidences helped Gladwell to support his claims because throughout the essay, he has been trying to convince people with different mentalities by providing studies, tables, and other statistical evidences. He also added anecdotes from the story of Marita to add emotional appeal. As mentioned in the selection “The student's name is Marita. She's an only child who lives in a single-parent home. Her mother never went to college..….”. One can vividly cite the author’s use of various modes of persuasion as Pathos and Logos.

I wondered how many of the solutions to situations that he described were any more than finding ways to filter out information that was superfluous? This is evident in the case of the doctors who did not know if their patients were having heart trouble or not. The solution eliminated the questions that relate to risk factors and only focused on the actual symptoms. A risk factor is not pertinent to whether the person is having a heart attack at that very moment, though it seems it should be. Doctors attempt to weigh risk factors in their determination of someone’s heart health, when it should have no import. Eliminating that information is not “thin slicing” instead, it is increasing the efficiency of your diagnosis. The same idea can be applied to Gladwell’s arguments about the Getty statue (the letters were irrelevant to the authenticity of the piece), and the wrapping of margarine (The foil wrapping gives it a look of quality, even if it doesn’t change anything.) I also wondered if Gladwell assumed far too much. For instance, he often haphazardly tied in overall ideas to his smaller individual points. Such as in his chapter about Kenna, he says at the end of one sub-chapter where he describes experts’ taste tests between Coke and Pepsi: “Isn’t this what happened to Kenna?” It seems irrational to devote an entire series of sub-chapters to something and then apply it in such a vague and oversimplified way. He also assumes that “experts” are immune to the foibles of blind taste testing, while giving no evidence that they are any better, other than saying, “Would they be fooled by the Pepsi Challenge? Of course not,” as though it should just be accepted as fact, when in reality, many studies have shown that “expert tasters”, in particular, the

Many phenomena exist within the world; whether it be the butterfly effect, the small world theory, or even the laws of gravity, these entities shape reality. In the book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell analyzes an effect he coins the “tipping point”. The “tipping point” essentially is the point at which small, seemingly insignificant changes become significant enough to cause a large and often times important change . Throughout the text of this novel, Gladwell explores this notion more in-depth; he utilizes real world examples such as the re-emergence of Hush Puppies, a popular footwear item, and dissects the epidemic of the syphilis outbreak in Baltimore, Maryland in order to achieve this purpose. The underlying principles in The

I read the international bestseller “Thinking, Fast and Slow” of Daniel Kahneman (Winner of the Nobel Prize) over the last 3-4 weeks. I think it is a very interesting book and it is describing very critically the human brain and mind, which gave me many insights into decision-making and errors we are doing automatically without noticing it every day.

“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