Blink - the book

I was really disappointed with "The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell but had heard good things about "Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking", so decided to check it out. I am glad I did.

The basic premise is that our intuition, our snap judgments are often correct, even when we can't explain why or how we came to that decision.

Some of the book was anecdotes. A fake piece of artwork that curators spent months investigating and felt was real, while art critics knew instantly that something was 'off' about it. A 'fantastic' artist who every music manager instinctively loves, but who doesn't play well to focus groups. I don't like anecdotes. They can too easily be cherrypicked.

The author does use some more scientific observations, which I really enjoyed. A researcher who videotapes short interactions with couples and is able to predict which will get divorced based on very short segments, focusing on traits such as defensiveness and flexibility. A study that showed that it took participants drawing 50-80 cards to recognize that red cards caused losses and blue cards caused profits, yet their body 'knew' and started reacting within 10 cards.

As usual, I would have liked more proven studies and less anecdotes, but compared to other books of its type, I was pretty impressed.