Blink: the Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Accredited journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, delves into the hidden truth behind the subconscious mind and explores the psychological process of intuitive thinking, both good and bad, in the novel Blink. Gladwell’s purpose is to exploit how the unconscious works and to expose the connection between your intuition and the real world which helps educate the reader on how to develop advanced decision making skills. He adopts an informative and passionate tone in order to establish credibility with his older audience and emphasize his dedication toward his works. Through the use of rhetorical questions and repetition, Gladwell demonstrates that a thin-slice of information can be used to deduce deeper comprehension.

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.

Malcolm Gladwell is interested in what makes some people more successful than others. Overall, how would you describe his thesis, or central premise? Do you agree or disagree with his ideas?

Part One of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath was a wonderful read that I connected to greatly, probably more so than the other sections. This segment dealt with our perception of advantages and disadvantages. This was due to the fact that Gladwell used stories that I related to more and found most interesting as a whole. I especially loved Chapter Three’s subject dealing with a student by the name of Caroline Sacks and her choice between going to a large university versus going to a small one because it was a conflict that I myself had. I have since been very happy with my choice to go with a smaller school and was surprised to see how many statistics supported the idea. As someone who loves studying history, one of my favorite ways Gladwell structures his narrative is when he uses historical events to make his very personal points. He begins the Caroline Sacks chapter with an anecdote about the French Impressionists and how they decided that it was “better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond that a Little Fish in a Big Pond” (Gladwell 74). This, of course, ties into Caroline Sacks’ decision,

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

Throughout the book, cherry-picking information is one of the most obvious problems, Gladwell seems to only use information

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008. Print

When they hooked up each gambler up to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands below the skin in the palms, the scientists discovered something interesting: “the gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured out the game” (Gladwell 4). They had been making adjustments in the way they were playing before they even realized the trends and patterns in the game. This experiment illustrates to the readers how our minds work. In such situations, the brain utilizes conscious and unconscious strategy to make sense of the situation. Another anecdote that Gladwell provides his audience with is an experiment performed by Nalini Ambady, a psychologist.

If managers are to put Gladwell's theories into practice, they must abandon a certain degree of top-down decision making. In our textbook, Greenberg defines top-down decision-making as an approach that puts the power to make decisions in the hands of managers, leaving lower level workers with little or no opportunity to make decisions. Gladwell also recognizes that in order for people to make effective split-second decisions, they must be given the right set of inputs. In other words, employees must be properly trained before they can trust their instinctive decision making ability. However, once employees have been given

Whilst reading this scenario you may have noticed that you were constantly presented with situations where your mind was forced to jump to a set of conclusions and make a decision in the space of about two seconds. Blink is a book about those two seconds, about thinking that happens in the blink of an eye, thinking that Gladwell refers to as rapid cognition. You’re probably thinking that ‘rapid cognition’ is just a fancy way of saying instinct or intuition, so you may argue then that this book is simply about that; intuition. Whilst you may not be wrong, you’re not right either. In fact, intuition doesn’t even appear in the book. Gladwell refers to intuition as that gut feeling, emotional,

Making decisions is no easy feat, especially when it comes to choices that have the ability to change the direction of one's life. Decisions like choosing what college to go to and what career path to head down are often encouraged to be deliberated as far as years in advance, solidifying the common belief that the more educated the decision, the better it is. English Canadian author Malcolm Gladwell challenges this notion by arguing that snap decisions made by the adaptive unconsciousness have the ability to be controlled and utilized to to become equally as powerful as conscious choices can be. Gladwell executes this message through a well written introduction split up into three parts; the first providing an extended example, the second

“Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant – in the blink of an eye – that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. The book deals with the smallest components of our everyday lives—the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new person or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress.