Ivan Varghese

6 Lauve | 2/10/2009
th

Big Research Essay

Section 1

Blink is a book about rapid cognition. Rapid cognition is the sort of

snap decision-making performed without thinking about how one is thinking,

faster and often more correctly than the logical part of the brain can

manage. Gladwell sets himself three tasks: to convince the reader that these

snap judgments can be as good or better than reasoned conclusions, to

discover where and when rapid cognition proves a poor strategy, and to

examine how the rapid cognition's results can be improved. Achieving three

tasks, Gladwell marshals anecdotes, statistics, and a little bit of theory to

persuasively argue his case.

Section 2

Malcolm Gladwell, the son of an English university professor father and

a Jamaican therapist mother, was born in London and grew up in Elmira,

Ontario, Canada. He studied at the University of Toronto and received his

bachelor's degree in History in 1984 before moving to the U.S. to become a

journalist. He initially covered business and science at the Washington Post

and worked there for nine years. He began freelancing at The New Yorker

before being offered a position as a staff writer there. Malcolm Gladwell has

an incomparable gift for interpreting new ideas in the social sciences and

making them understandable, practical and valuable to business and general

audiences alike. Malcolm is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. His

editor describes his work as a new genre of story, an idea-driven narrative

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that’s focused on the everyday and combines research with material that’s

more personal, social and historical. Gladwell's books and articles often deal

with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make

frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of

sociology, psychology, and social psychology. His father was British and

white, while his mother Joyce was a native of Jamaica and black. Like his two

brothers, Malcolm was encouraged to read in the television-free home. At the

age of age 16 he won a writing contest for an essay in which he interviewed

God. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto, and had a brief

career as an advertising copywriter before landing a job at the American

Spectator, a conservative political journal, before moving on to the

Washington Post in 1987 as a reporter. Over the next nine years he moved

up at the paper to become its science writer and then New York City bureau

chief. In 1996 he was lured away from the Post by Tina Brown, the then-

editor of the prestigious weekly magazine The New Yorker. Gladwell soon

carved out at niche for himself at the New Yorker with articles that offered

explorations of the curious, unexplained phenomena of everyday life.

Published in 2005, Blink examines how and why the human mind makes snap

decisions, which seem to rely on a hunch or a subconscious "feeling."

Traditional wisdom holds that these quick judgments are inferior to a more

careful, reasoned analysis in coming to a conclusion, but Gladwell argues

that most decisions we make are based on our subconscious and occur in

just a fraction of a second. Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on

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target, aware of the context and the concerns of the audience, informative

and practical, poised, eloquent and delightfully warm and funny. Looking at

Malcolm's career, you would think that there was something special about

him. If you took all the journalists in New York, and saw how many got paid

seven-figure advances for their books, and sell seven-figure totals, and have

adjectives ("Gladwellian") all of their own, the answer would be: not many.

Malcolm's different. He's special. He's distinct. He's an "outlier". In Blink he

analyzes intuition—the judgments we make unconsciously and instinctively—

and he explores how we can master this important aspect of successful

decision-making. His editor describes his work as a new genre of story, an

idea-driven narrative that’s focused on the everyday and combines research

with material that’s more personal, social and historical. Gladwell's books

and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the

social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work,

particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. His

father was British and white, while his mother Joyce was a native of Jamaica

and black. Like his two brothers, Malcolm was encouraged to read in the

television-free home. At the age of age 16 he won a writing contest for an

essay in which he interviewed God. Gladwell studied history at the University

of Toronto, and had a brief career as an advertising copywriter before landing

a job at the American Spectator, a conservative political journal, before

moving on to the Washington Post in 1987 as a reporter. Over the next nine

years he moved up at the paper to become its science writer and then New
 Ivan Varghese
6 Lauve | 2/10/2009
th

York City bureau chief. In 1996 he was lured away from the Post by Tina

Brown, the then-editor of the prestigious weekly magazine The New Yorker.

Malcolm is an extraordinary speaker: always on target, aware of the context

and the concerns of the audience, informative and practical, poised, eloquent

and delightfully warm and funny. Looking at Malcolm's career, you would

think that there was something special about him. If you took all the

journalists in New York, and saw how many got paid seven-figure advances

for their books, and sell seven-figure totals, and have adjectives

("Gladwellian") all of their own, the answer would be: not many. Malcolm's

different. He's special. He's distinct. He's an "outlier".

Section 3

Social commentator Malcolm Gladwell once again takes the pulse of

contemporary experience and, in Blink, comes up with this enlightening

exploration of the role of rapid thinking in everyday life. Gladwell shows how

what we call snap judgments, first impressions, or instinct are often right on

target and get to the core truths. He reveals that experts call this process

"thin-slicing"--the ability to dive for truth the way a basketball player grabs a

loose ball on the court, cutting through layers and levels of knowledge that

resist tortured analysis. He reports on current research in the fields of

science and psychology, and their applications in marketing. Gladwell writes

of the marriage therapist who can discern, by listening to three minutes of

the parties talking to each other, whether their marriage will last, and how
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thin-slicing operates in a job interview or when an insurance company wants

to identify which doctors are candidates for lawsuits. It might be a sense of

structures and patterns, or a Sherlock Holmesian sensitivity to the messages

we send out, or just the ability to filter out bad signals and bad information.

We meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will

last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who

knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact

with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here,

too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke";

and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision

makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most

time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing",

filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of

variables. The secret is knowing which information to discard and which to

keep. Our brains are able to perform that work unconsciously; when rapid

cognition breaks down, the brain has seized upon a more obvious but less

correct predictor. He reports on current research in the fields of science and

psychology, and their applications in marketing. Gladwell writes of the

marriage therapist who can discern, by listening to three minutes of the

parties talking to each other, whether their marriage will last, and how thin-

slicing operates in a job interview or when an insurance company wants to

identify which doctors are candidates for lawsuits. It might be a sense of

structures and patterns, or a Sherlock Holmesian sensitivity to the messages

 Ivan Varghese
6 Lauve | 2/10/2009
th

we send out, or just the ability to filter out bad signals and bad information.

We meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will

last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who

knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact

with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here,

too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke";

and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Gladwell examines how race

and gender affect car dealers' sales strategy, the effect of height on salary

and promotion to top corporate positions, and unjustified police shootings of

civilians to demonstrate that our unconscious biases have genuine and

sometimes tragic consequences. He also examines how the wrong thin slice,

in focus groups or in a single-sip test of soft drinks, can lead businesses to

mistake consumer preferences.