Blink
The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell
How can an art expert differentiate between a fake and an original piece of
art within seconds? How can a marriage analyst know within minutes whether the
couple will stay together or not? Some ideas like this and much more gain a
true resolution in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Gladwell.
The best selling author dissects and discusses the art of human intuition
and elaborates on how humans can, by developing it to perfection, be able to
make quick yet accurate and effective decisions. Termed as ‘snap judgements’ in
the book, the author elaborates by using situations how ‘snap judgements’ can
be more efficient than reasoned ones, which borders on deliberation.
However, the book is not just an analysis of ‘snap judgement’; rather the
book elaborates its usage in situations that happen on a daily basis for enabling
a quick attention to the finer details from among a host of variables.
About the author
A speaker, journalist and a bestselling author,
Malcolm Gladwell’s works revolve around academic findings on social psychology,
sociology and psychology. His writing technique involves a thorough research
and analysis on the subject along with fruitful interpretations.
From Amazon Book Description
Main Ideas in the Book
Learn how to use unconscious snap judgments to your
benefit.
Many of us tend to trust our intuition when making decisions. But there are few things we should know about it:
First, we probably use it a whole lot more than we realize. Even in cases where we think we’ve rationally analyzed a situation.
Second, our intuition can often produce better judgments than a thoughtful analysis. This is because it cuts through irrelevant information, and focuses only on the key factors.
But the drawback is that it’s also affected by
unconscious factors like preconceptions and prejudices that can lead us astray.
Knowing when or when not to trust your intuition is a crucial decision to make.
We should trust our intuitive judgments - they can often be superior to your conscious ones.
The human brain relies on two strategies to make decisions in any given situation:
One strategy is to consciously record and process information, to weigh the pros and cons, and come to a rational conclusion about the best way to go. This process is slow and takes a lot of time.
So, a second and much faster strategy was developed
during human evolution, the unconscious which makes quick judgments based on
gut feelings rather than thorough lengthy analysis.
Many people only trust their conscious judgments and are uncomfortable basing their decisions off their feelings or intuition. However, it turns out that snap decisions are far superior to those made after a analysis.
The unconscious mind recognizes patterns and regularities faster than the conscious mind. It’s in these moments that we should trust our spontaneous decisions.
Though meticulousness can often be a virtue, in decision-making it rarely makes sense to inspect every last bit of information. Usually it’s more effective to focus on a few important facts and block out the rest.
In decision-making situations our unconscious makes distinction for us by differentiating between significant and non-significant information.
We make far more snap judgments than we realize,
and often formulate rational justifications for them later.
However, many people tend to trust facts over
feelings, which is why they usually come up with logical explanations for their
snap judgments after making them.
Our decisions are greatly influenced by our
unconscious associations.The unconscious influences our actions in a very
specific way. Also, our unconscious associations constantly influence our behaviour.
However, stress can make us momentarily autistic
and drive us to wrong judgments. We all are telepathic too, we can all read
minds. All we have to do is look at a person’s face: emotional expressions
reveal exactly what that person is thinking.
Scientists have shown that emotional expressions are a universal phenomenon. Everyone in the world can recognize a happy, angry or sad facial expression.
However, there are some people – like those suffering from autism – who are blind to non-verbal signals.
But in fact, even non-autistic people can be rendered
temporarily autistic because of stress and time pressure. When under stress, we
tend to ignore many signals like facial expressions and go into a narrow
vision-mode, devoting our entire attention to the most relevant piece of
information.
If one wants to avoid this kind of autistic “seizure,” one has to slow down and reduce the stress in their environment. Beyond a certain stress level, the logical thought process can stop completely and one may become very unpredictable.
Market research is not always a good indicator of
true consumer behavior.It’s a market researcher’s job to figure out which
products will work in the market and which won’t. However, researchers often
fail to predict consumer behaviour.
Unrealistic conditions of testing often results in an appraisal that had nothing to do with customers’ buying behaviour
One more thing to consider in market research is that generally, consumers tend to rate principally innovative products negatively in initial tests. The fact is, consumers have to get used to product before they start to like it.
Prejudices do exist and they actually do influence
our everyday behavior. Prejudices like skin colour, gender and height all shape
the way others perceive a person.
If one doesn’t want to fall prey to such
prejudices, one has to look for ways to change these unconscious attitudes, and
the only way to do that is by meeting new people and experiencing new things.
If one wants to avoid bad snap judgments, they have
to ignore all irrelevant information. Strong unconscious prejudices and
stereotypes can influence our decisions. If we want to avoid this, we have to wilfully
shield ourselves from potentially injudicious information.
Negating unconscious snap judgments can be as simple as deliberately ignoring information that’s not relevant. To avoid prejudices and to make correct judgement, we need to start taking our unconscious mind more into consideration.
Ruchika Verma
If you like the ideas presented in the book summary
you should read the wonderful book which is available at Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment