Summary Of Blink By Malcolm Gladwell

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Business Analysis and Decision Making
September 24, 2014

To Think or Not To Think, That is The Question

“Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers” (260). Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a book about understanding how we arrive at the judgments we make. There are two ways that we make every decision: in the blink of an eye or with well thought out decision making processes. In this book Gladwell explores the many different ways that we make decisions using our adaptive unconscious. He attempts to convince the reader that snap decisions can be just as good as ones we ponder upon. In all aspects of our life we are continuously making decisions. Often times we go with our
This is the process where you slow down what is happening. You take thin slices of time and use the pieces of knowledge you gain from that slice to make your decision. Gladwell draws on multiple studies and experiments to explain this. The study that is the most prevalent and mentioned throughout the book was what would become The Mathematics of Divorce by John Gottman. In this study Gottman videotaped couples engaging in a discussion about a contentious topic in their marriage. There were multiple sensors monitoring the couple’s physical changes, such as heart rate and movement. He found that by breaking down the videotaped interaction into fractions of a second and applying the information to a mathematical chart he was able to predict divorce rates among the couples. After watching just an hour of video tape per couple, Gottman is able to predict the divorce rate in the span of fifteen years with ninety-five percent accuracy. The next section of the book explains what defines a snap decision. When you experience something there is a feeling of knowing. You can’t explain how you know, you just know. He gives the example of tennis coach Vic Braden. Braden is able to predict when a tennis player is going to double-fault on his serve before the player had even released the ball from his hand. Braden was searching for an answer as to why he was able to do this and he couldn’t find one. It was a snap
We all have associations between certain things that are ingrained in our unconscious minds and we’re not even aware of them. There are stereotypes inside everyone, even when we consciously think there are not. Gladwell explains that “unconscious attitudes are not compatible with values” (85). Our experiences create our first impressions, including those experiences that are negative. As I stated earlier, associations become ingrained in our unconscious minds even if we’re not aware of them on a conscious level. That is a case where a snap decision would be one made without having enough information. The opposite can be true as well. Sometimes we have too much information. Gladwell tells the story of heart attack diagnoses at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago. The doctors were running many tests and gathering too much information to accurately separate patients of different heart attack probabilities. The hospital reformed the way they analyzed heart attack patients by talking extensively with them along with doing some minimal testing. Using this new system proved to be more effective than when they were amassing a large amount of data. The author states that “truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking”