Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell looks at instinct and the opinions formed within those first few fleeting moments when people are introduced to new people, objects, and ideas. While negative connotations associated with prejudice involving race and gender are generally believed to be the wrong attitudes to have, Gladwell goes one step further and looks at subconscious prejudices that even the most open minded, warm hearted person might not know they have. He also includes many examples where these first impressions are in fact a good thing, the results of experts in certain fields possessing a certain extinct that even they cannot properly describe.

Stop the presses, folks. Can you believe that I've finally found a Gladwell book that I didn't love? I read this on a day where I was stuck at an office desk, bored out of my mind, when just about anything would have sufficed. I got more joy from the office supply catalog.

My main problem was that, unlike The Tipping Point and Outliers, Blink seemed like and endless discussion of studies and clinical trials and very little in the way of real world action. What examples there were were intriguing, but unfortunately few, far between, and far too short. Not every study was a snoozer -I loved reading about the Pepsi Challenge and the resulting creation of everybody's favorite disaster, New Coke- but reading about a man who assigns numbers to facial expressions, with very little in the way of descriptions of those features, was pretty freaking torturous. The only good part of that story was the man talking about how, in 1992, he noticed that Governor Bill Clinton had a peculiar expression that looked like a child with his hand in the cookie jar, about to get caught. Though he offered to help Clinton change this expression, his handlers declined the offer.

See, it's not all bad. If you like reading about scientific studies you'll love it. I, on the other hand, am glad this wasn't my first Gladwell book -I probably wouldn't have attempted the others. Just to end this on a positive note, I leave you with the link to the quiz he discusses that deals with different subconscious prejudices. I read about it a few months ago on his blog and took a few different tests. I'm proud to say that I showed no bias toward any race, gender, or most religions -apparently, I really love the Jews.

http://thechickmanifesto.blogspot.com/2009/04/blink-power-of-thinking-without.html