"Blink"
Little, Brown, 277 pp., $25.95Blink and you could miss 'the power of thinking without thinking'
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Consider the power of what appear to be snap judgments:
* A psychologist who studies divorce can watch a couple discuss their relationship for 15 minutes and predict, with 90% accuracy, whether they will still be married in 15 years.
* Students who watch a silent, two-second video of a professor they never met and are asked to rate the teacher's effectiveness will come up with ratings very similar to those of students who were in the professor's class for a semester.
* An expert who studies facial expressions recalls seeing Bill Clinton for the first time in 1992 and saying, "This is Peck's Bad Boy. This is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar and have us love him for it anyway."
They're among the examples from experiments and real life that Malcolm Gladwell cites in Blink, a readable and intriguing exploration of how a part of the brain can leap instantly to conclusions based on very little information.
And that's not so bad, he says: "Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberatively."
Gladwell, a writer at The New Yorker, is best known for his first book, The Tipping Point, a surprise best seller about how trends spread. Blink, his second book, is a similar blend of anecdotes and academic research woven together to explain "the power of thinking without thinking."
As a researcher, Gladwell doesn't break much new ground. But he's talented at popularizing others' research. He's a clever storyteller who synthesizes and translates the work of psychologists, market researchers and criminologists.
He also makes connections that specialists might not see. His chapter on "Creating a structure for spontaneity" deals with a Pentagon war game, improvisational comedy and how doctors at a Chicago hospital -- the one that inspired ER, the TV show -- learned how to better treat heart patients with less information.
Blink also describes "the dark side of rapid cognition": how voters elected Warren G. Harding, one of the worst presidents, because he looked presidential, and how New York police shot and killed an unarmed immigrant because they misread his intentions.
Gladwell's writing is straightforward. He tries to converse with readers rather than lecture them. At one point he writes, "You can be forgiven if you found the previous paragraph confusing. It is confusing." He then goes on to describe how people are often too quick to try to explain things they can't really explain.
Gladwell loves analogies. Here's one for his book: If Blink were a college course, it wouldn't be a graduate seminar on the cutting edge. It would be a popular introductory survey course, and for most readers, that's good enough to start us thinking in new ways about how we think.