Critical Thinking Regarding the Book Blink

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 that a decision that takes place in the blink of an eye actually was the best choice. Throughout this paper there will be several stories of how critical thinking doesn’t have to be drawn out and can take place in just a blink. To live in today’s society you really have to be an open-minded individual. Open-minded means that the person is tolerant of divergent views and sensitive to the possibility of his or her own possible biases; they respect the rights of others to have different opinions (Facione, 2011). When I was younger I always pictured myself dating guys that were tall, muscular, blonde, blue eyes, and dumb. That is so I could be the smart one in the relationship. In high school I dated one or two guys that fit this description and I thought all my hopes and dreams were coming true. I was going to marry my “prince.” However, as I got older I realized that there was more out there than just my perfect guy. How could someone live thru life being so close-minded? Once I realized the problem was my biases towards men, I changed the way I looked at things. Now I am engaged to the best man I could ever ask for and there is a chance I might have missed out on this opportunity just because I had not been open-minded. Asking

References: 1. Gladwell, M. (2005). Blink: the power of thinking without thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Company. 2. Facione, P. (2011). Think critically. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall.