A new type of thinking is unveiled in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Blink. You know the guy with the afro who part-times as a culture commentator for The New Yorker and whose surprise best-seller The Tipping Point about how ideas become infectious became the inspiration for many in the intellectual literati—including backpack rappers The Roots, who named their recent album after the book?
His argument this time around is that snap-second decisions can often be better than those made after a long period of contemplation. Your first impressions may actually be more accurate than you might think.
Fair enough.
Gladwell acts as a dutiful reporter, bridging the gaps between fields as varied and disparate as classical music, racial politics, television sitcoms and food criticism. He’s an interdisciplinary sophist.
An expert researcher, Gladwell draws overwhelming data from a multitude of fields. Blink is chockfull of evidence—so much that often you’re not exactly sure how conclusively he’s substantiating his claim. Methinks a popular author might need a Writing 20 class.
He uncovers why New Coke was so astoundingly unpopular as well as why Rodney King was beaten so brutally. “Thin-slicing” is what he calls this method of arriving at conclusions quickly. The reason why these conclusions are correct is because, at least in part, the human animal is able to mind-read, and by doing this, our unconscious will lead our conscious to the right decision.
But you can thin-slice incorrectly too. That’s how America elected the worst president ever: Warren Harding. And how the whole Rodney King/ L.A. riot thing occurred. Or something like that.
It turns out you can only sometimes get it right if you rely on your first impressions. In fact, you’re actually more likely to be right if you’re an expert in the field of the thing that you're thinking about. Though, even then, some experts can get it wrong.
Gladwell also stipulates several restrictions on instant decision-making including, autism, personal bias or high blood pressure. The latter, Gladwell says, causes one to think like the common canine. Lastly, sometimes when you’re looking at something and you have a gut feeling, because you just don’t know what you're looking at, that feeling can be wrong too.
In fact, there’s a line buried in Blink that asserts the true claim of the book. Gladwell writes, “The first impressions of experts are different... What I mean is that it is really only experts who are able to reliably account for their reactions.” Here Gladwell again harps on the point that since experts have expert knowledge, their first impressions of whether an object or idea is bad or good are much more accurate than the normal person because of this acquired knowledge.
Thus, the real problem with Blink, besides some of its soporific text, is that Gladwell incredulously contradicts himself. He purports that every man is capable of mastering the art of the instantaneous decision and then says that this is definitely not the case.
Blink. So much for all that research.
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