Blink: Understanding the Unconscious

First, an admission: I wasn’t that much of a fan of Blink. At least not in the way that I’ve raved about Malcolm Gladwell’s other two books, The Tipping Point and Outliers. I felt the book to be a little longwinded. The knowledge that the book carries is something important for everyone to understand, something I’ll cover in this post, but I feel the book could have served the reader in the same way if it had been 50-75 pages shorter.

Blink is all about how we think without thinking and the importance of those snap judgements. You may be the kind of person that looks at another individual and makes a concrete first impression, one that will likely never change. This could come from years of accurate first impressions, a fear of being emotionally hurt or another variety of reasons. Or you may be the kind of person that tries to pin someone down mentally, when you first meet them and then as your relationship progresses you come to find out that they’re pretty different from your initial thoughts. Either way, we all make first impressions about nearly everything we come in contact with, whether know it or not.

The book aims to tackle what we do what that information that we unconsciously and automatically take in. When are our intuitions or gut feelings correct and when are they best discarded for more of an in-depth look?

After two hundred sixty-eight pages of Gladwell’s book, he quotes Freud who gets to the point immediately:

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

Through all of his examples in Blink, this is essentially what Gladwell is trying to say. When we see something that doesn’t look right, for whatever reason, whether it be a fake piece of art trying to pass as a genuine or a baseball player that suddenly doesn’t look right in his frame, these things don’t look right because they’re not right; we should trust those judgements, even if we cant explain it in words. We know.

When we see that right answer on a multiple choice test and choose to overlook it for another answer that we somehow rationalize as being correct, our gut told us the first answer was right for a reason, even if we can’t explain it. Our reasoning for that gut decision or feeling is behind a “locked door,” as Gladwell says, a door that we cannot access but we need to learn to work with. Trying to discern what’s behind that door by a rational thought process will only lead to a destruction of that initial gut feeling. I did this so many times on the SAT it made me sick, thinking back, after reading Blink.

When you hear “Go with your gut,” you hear that for a reason. Scientific testing has proved, as Gladwell describes in Blink, that temperature, heart rate and small beads of sweat build when we get these gut reactions, these instincts. Our body knows that something is different about what we’re looking at or interacting with, even if we can’t describe it.

There is a profound amount of power in thinking without thinking, allowing our initial impressions to tell us way more than we ever thought they could. In short, we have these reactions and feelings for a reason. Use them.

  1. zackshapiro posted this