Theme of the Week
Education or Business
Reader: Cindy Parkhurst
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Title: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Call Number: BF 448 .G53 2005
Rating: 5
Summary: I had heard a lot about this book before I read it and I was not disappointed with what I learned. This is a book about gut instinct - that instantaneous response we get when we perceive something. We’ve all heard it said that there is such a thing as love at first sight but sometimes we don’t believe that it is true. The author takes us on a tour of the first two seconds of human perception. He calls this critical two seconds rapid cognition and posits that it may be the most important seconds in human cognition. I was really intrigued with the idea that people can make very good decisions sometimes very rapidly and that in some areas we are much better relying on these "thin slices" of experience than decisions made with more sophisticated reasoning. The author describes this decision making process using examples from marketing, art, marriage counseling, politics, law enforcement and the music industry. The stories are fascinating and make this a delightful, easy read.
Although the author presents compelling examples of flawless decisions made quickly, he also spends a good deal of time warning that these "thin slices" of time can be influenced by deeply rooted prejudices that we might not even consciously recognize. The examples of racial and gender prejudice were disheartening. I came away from this book realizing that prejudice is unlikely to be eradicated by law. However, the law needs to support the intentions of good hearted people to prevent us from making decisions based on unconscious biases.
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