Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is about decision-making, in particular about making decisions on the spur of the moment. Gladwell's contention is that, however counterintuitive it may be, snap decisions are very often superior to those resulting from long hours of thought and research: having too much information, it turns out, can impede decision-making. The trick is that the person doing the deciding must be sufficiently informed about a topic that he can, consciously or not, isolate the salient factors in a given situation, disregarding extraneous information, and come to a conclusion based on them, a process known as "thin-slicing."

Gladwell peppers his book with intriguing examples of real-life thin-slicing: a fireman's snap decision while spraying flames in a burning kitchen to order his men out of the building—moments before the floor collapses; the immediate certainty of a number of art experts upon looking at a particular statue—a Greek kouros that exhaustive tests had indicated was genuine—that it is in fact a modern forgery, a suspicion later proved correct. In these cases, the experts could not explain at once the reasons for their snap decisions. Their unconscious minds had sifted through enormous amounts of information—about the fire's behavior and sound, for example—and had spat out a conclusion (the floor is about to collapse) without their being aware of the thought process. The examples Gladwell unpacks for us are unusually dramatic, but in fact we thin-slice all the time, when we interpret people's facial expressions, or decide whether a potential suitor is desirable or not, or determine whether it's safe to cross a heavily trafficked street.

Snap decisions, Gladwell demonstrates, can be very powerful, but they can also sometimes be very wrong. Gladwell explains how stress and the weight of our prior associations with what we're observing can pervert our first impressions. It is in this context that Gladwell discusses the police shooting of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx in 1999, a tragic case of individuals in a stressful situation being unable to "mind read," to properly discern another's intent from his behavior and facial expressions.

If my explanation of Gladwell's argument has been at all dry, then I have done his book a disservice. Blink is a simply fascinating read, studded with little mysteries—about military strategy and emergency rooms and Warren Harding and the Pepsi Challenge and innumerable other topics—that will keep readers glued to the page. Blink is also well researched and well argued and—and I don't say this lightly—stylistically flawless. This is nonfiction at its best.