Reaction To Malcolm Gladwell's 'Blink'

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell I had an overall good reaction to this book. My first thought when looking at the cover was that it was going to be boring but as I began reading it, I realized that not only is it not boring, it's actually rather interesting, but it could also help me in my life as well. I have a tendency to over think even the simplest things and when I do make a quick decision, I always second guess myself. "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell is a book that really makes you think about the way you react to things and why you react that way. It shows that the decisions we make quickly are just as good as the ones that require a lot of thought. It explains to us why we should trust our instincts, however, sometimes it's not good to follow
up on those snap judgments because they can go completely wrong. Gladwell states "We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.” Gladwell's purpose is to help us become better decision makers by showing us how to make better, rapid judgments and how important
those rapid judgments can be. Throughout the book, Gladwell explained how our minds can make accurate decisions in a short amount of time, otherwise known as thin slicing, which is basically the ability to understand something within the blink of an eye without having to analyze it. Most of the information in this book was centered around that theory. According to Gladwell, “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” He showed this through a compatibility experiment. I found this very interesting because they were able to show if couples were compatible just by listening to them have a casual conversation. Although these people were having a normal conversation about dogs, the researchers were able to tell that the couple would face problems in the future because of their facial expressions, body language and gestures that revealed deeper problems in their life. This chapter showed that a person can thin slice without even knowing that they are doing it. Something Gladwell said about thin slicing that really caught my attention is that the only way human beings are able to survive for as long as we have been is because of making very quick, and effective judgments based on no information, or thin slicing. It is something we as people have been doing instinctually since birth and still do now, for example, in car accidents, we just never realized. The book also talked about how there is a down side to thin slicing as well. Since most of thin slicing is based on personal experiences, these experiences can sometimes cause us to make the wrong decisions. In life, we all have those moments where we feel like something's just not right.
Whether it be the food we're about to eat not tasting good or whether something bad is about to happen at a party you're at. We've all felt it, we've just never been able to pinpoint what exactly that feeling is. In the last chapter of "Blink", Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of a firefighter who answered a call about a fire in the kitchen in the back of a one-and-a-half story house. When the firefighters started to attempt to put the fire out with water, the fire didn't subside like it should have. When the fire lieutenant noticed that the fire wasn't going away, he knew something was wrong and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they left the building, the floor in the kitchen they had been standing on collapsed and they realized that the fire had been in the basement and not the kitchen like they had thought. After seeing this, Gladwell found it interesting that the lieutenant couldn't explain how he knew that something was wrong and to immediately get out. According to Gladwell, the fireman just "blinked" and made the right decision from behind the locked door in our brain and if he hadn't trusted his instinct all those fireman probably would have died. From this book, we learn that a lot of the time we don't understand why we make most of the decisions we do, even when they end up being the right decision. However, Gladwell tells us that the reason we make those decisions
lies behind what he calls the locked door in our brains. I found this anecdote interesting and scary at the same time because the gut feeling that something is wrong is a sensation we're all familiar with and because it showed how quickly and devastating not following our instincts can be. Malcolm Gladwell has actually made me more interested and curious about psychology and the various types of insight it has to offer me. I've learned that our adaptive unconscious is able to make quick decisions for us without us being aware of it and it's able to send messages throughout our body that allows us to react to things without us being aware of why we’re reacting that way. The point of this book, I think, is to make us aware of those decisions and their importance. I would recommend this book to a friend. It was a very good read and deals with a lot of problems that teenagers, as well as adults, face. It could help us figure out how someone's really feeling just by learning to watch their facial expressions and body language which I'm sure could help everyone out a lot. I would recommend this book again for a summer reading assignment just for the simple fact that it teaches us more about ourselves and that we should trust our instincts and quick decisions.