liiiiink

I was really impressed with this book. Gladwell writes with an engaging style that keeps you interested while pouring over anecdotes, psychological studies, and real life experiences to show how sometimes not thinking is better than thinking. More precisely, Blink shows us that snap judgments are not necessarily to be placed inferior to a careful, extensive, and all-encompassing analysis. Sometimes, too much information is a problem. The author's "semi-conclusion" (he doesn't want to state absolutely in what he calls a "mysterious" world), is that simple decisions work best with a carefully thought out analysis, and complicated decisions work best with snap decisions, intuition, gut-feeling, whatever you want to call it. This seems counter-intuitive, but after reading the book, it makes sense and I agree. There are plenty of very interesting studies to back up this claim. I had almost as much fun learning about all the random facts contained in the book as I did learning about the "blink" idea--like the emotion that best predicts divorce is contempt, police officers hold their flashlights away from their bodies when in the dark to avoid getting shot, that even though plenty of people can tell the difference between pepsi and coke when tested with a "triangle" test hardly anyone can tell them apart, and that at least one civil war general used hot air balloons for reconnaissance. All of these examples and more have everything to do with the blink principle, I promise. Highly recommended. I'm kind of sad that there isn't any more to read.

2022-11-14 18:01