The lesson from “Blink” (IM 682)

"Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking", written by Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderful book that describes the psychology of snap decisions and quick thinking, illuminating how subconscious biases affect the way we think and behave. This book explains how subconscious racial and socioeconomic biases affect how we think about other groups of people and the language we use to describe them. With many real life examples, he explores the concept of “thin-slicing, which is the quick process by which people size up an individual and come to a conclusions, based on limited past experience and using only bits and pieces of superficial information while lacking the truth. This book made me realize that we, human beings are bit too quick to come up with the explanations for the things we don't really need explanation for. He also proclaims that truly successful decision making relies of the balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. Blink, I believe convinces us that snap judgments can be as good or better than reasoned conclusions and shows the way to discover where and when rapid cognition proves a poor strategy, and to examine how the rapid cognition's results can be improved.