It presents in popular science format research from psychology and behavioral economics on the adaptive unconscious: mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information.
The author describes the main subject of his book as "thin-slicing": our ability to use limited information from a very narrow period of experience to come to a conclusion.
To reinforce his ideas, Gladwell draws from a wide range of examples from science and medicine (including malpractice suits), sales and advertising, gambling, speed dating (and predicting divorce), tennis, military war games, and movies and popular music.
Gladwell also uses many examples of regular people's experiences with "thin-slicing," including our instinctive ability to mind-read, which is how we can get to know a person's emotions just by looking at his or her face.
[2] Gladwell uses the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, where four New York policemen shot an innocent man on his doorstep 19 times, as another example of how rapid, intuitive judgment can have disastrous effects.
The museum notes that "anomalies of the Getty kouros may be due more to our limited knowledge of Greek sculpture in this period rather than to mistakes on the part of a forger.
[5] The studies of Paul Ekman, a psychologist who created the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), indicates that a lot of "thin slicing" can be done within seconds by unconsciously analyzing a person's fleeting look called a microexpression.
The first group interpreted the movie funnier than the second, because the muscles responsible for smiling were used and then made the brain release hormones related to being happy.
[7] The book finishes with the case of sexism suffered by Abbie Conant, when she was the trombone soloist of the Munich Philharmonic, and its director, Sergiu Celibidache, relegated her to minor positions, made her receive a lower wage than her male colleagues and looked down on her from 1980 to 1993, when she finally left the orchestra.
[8] Richard Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago and a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, argues that Gladwell in Blink fails to follow his own recommendations regarding thin-slicing, and makes a variety of unsupported assumptions and mistakes in his characterizations of the evidence for his thesis.
: Why Crucial Decisions Can't Be Made in the Blink of an Eye (Simon and Schuster, 2006), Michael LeGault argues that "Blinklike" judgments are not a substitute for critical thinking.
He criticizes Gladwell for propagating unscientific notions: As naturopathic medicine taps into a deep mystical yearning to be healed by nature, Blink exploits popular new-age beliefs about the power of the subconscious, intuition, even the paranormal.
While allowing that mind-reading can "sometimes" go wrong, the book enthusiastically celebrates the apparent success of the practice, despite hosts of scientific tests showing that claims of clairvoyance rarely beat the odds of random chance guessing.