Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell


Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How did gender discrimination has been radically eliminated from classic music world, with the percentage of women in major symphony orchestras in the United States skyrocketed from meager 5 percent to close to 50 percent over twenty-five years? Affirmative actions, boycotting, public awareness campaign? No, just simple procedural change–introduction of blind auditions, which radically changed decision making (and associated biases)

The book by Malcolm Gladwell tells the stories how our brain make intuitive decisions, how these decisions shape our life for good or for bad. How simple quiz with words associated with elderly make you to walk slower. How people in Emergency Room radically improved heart attack diagnostics and saved many lives (and money for hospital). How New Cola miserably failed despite all marketing researches. How rough commander with outdated military equipment managed to beat state-of-the-art Blue Team (resembling movie “Down Periscope”). How unconscious racial bias affect hiring decisions. How police end up with brutality (and how they could avoid it trough very simple changes in procedures).

The book addresses three questions: Why and how our brain take these fast, intuitive decisions (thinking without thinking)? When these decisions are good and when are bad? When we should rely on these intuitive decisions, and when we should deliberately take time to make rational decision?

Gladwell is a great journalist–he collects and references interesting researches and compliment them with real life accounts, thus telling the whole story. The book is very well written and easy to read. However, if you are more interested in substance, rather than whole story, you could read just introduction, as author laid out whole argument there. If you are more interested in subject of brain work, you could read thick volume “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman (he got the Nobel prize in 2002 for “having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty”), which goes into details of thinking and decision making.

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