REVIEWING MALCOLM GLADWELL’S

BLINK:THE POWER OF

THINKING WITHOUT THINKING

COHORT NINE

Waheed Alao

Uduak Okpanefe

Yetunde Adebiyi

Godwin Abii-Ndoh

Imaobong Ekanem

Keke Nweledim

Adedayo Alimi

Members

STRENGTHS AND FLAWS

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW

WHEN WE BECOME FORCED TO BLINK

RELATIONSHIPS AND OUR SUBCONSCIOUS

PRIMING

BLINKING IN BUSINESS

THIN-SLICING

AN OVERVIEW OF BLINK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AGENDA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Malcolm Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England on September 3, 1963 to Graham Gladwell, a British mathematics professor and Joyce, a Jamaican psychotherapist

As a teenager, Malcolm was an exceptional middle-distance runner

He graduated with a degree in History from University of Toronto, Trinity College, Toronto in 1984He is the author of four other books: The Tipping Point, Outliers, What Others Saw: and Other Adventures, and David and Goliath,

Gladwell is also a speaker and has worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 1996

His works deal with research in the areas of psychology, social psychology and sociology

Malcolm Gladwell appeared on the Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people

AN OVERVIEW OF BLINK

Blink is a non-fiction book with seven chapters. Its paperback edition consists of 320 pages

Blink is written in a scientific, yet conversational style and is aimed at the

broadest possible audience

Gladwell describes the main subject of his book as "thin-slicing": the ability to use limited information from a

very narrow period of experience to come to a conclusion. He suggests that spontaneous decisions are

often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones

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.

Gladwell says snap decision-making can make you better at your job, improve your relationships and

unlock new worlds of understanding.

CEOs, managers, employees and consumers often make bad choices because they’ve been given too little

information, and other times because they have too much.

THIN-SLICING

The term explains how we can make very quick inferences about the state, characteristics or details of an individual or situation with minimal amounts of information.

The Statue that Did Not Look Right

A story about how a simple hunch emerged victorious over months

of research

Getting to Know you Without Actually Meeting You

An experiment on learning about strangers’ traits either through short or lengthy information gathering

Cohort Nine

BLINKING IN BUSINESS

CEOs Race to Reach Greater Heights

A survey that proves how features like height and race influence how we perceive people

When Pepsi had Coca-Cola Trembling in Their Pants

In the 1980s, Pepsi’s sales figures began to catch up with CocaCola’s. How did Coca-Cola respond?

All Na Packaging!

How elements like packaging, branding, colour and aesthetics are as important as the products themselves.

PRIMING

Are We Smart Because We Think

We Are?

An experiment about how seemingly

harmless questionnaires

influence academic performance

Let’s Play the Word Game

Can an otherwise random series of words influence the way we

behave?

RELATIONSHIPS AND OUR SUBCONSCIOUS

The Which-Couples-Will-Stay-Married GameHow one can accurately predict the outcome of a couple’s relationship by merely watching them interact for 15 minutes.

The Four Horsemen

Defensiveness Stonewalling Criticism Contempt

WHEN WE ARE FORCED TO BLINK

Diallo Diallo.. Why Amadou Diallo Was Killed

How things can go tragically wrong in moments where we become forced to make snap decisions.

The Man Who Didn’t Pull the Trigger

How experience helps us thin-slice better

WHAT WE THINK WE KNOW

What’s Your Ideal Kind of Man?

How women often contradict themselves in their dating habits

Or…

This?

This?

Stereotypes, Prejudice and the Power of First Impressions

How these reveal themselves eventually, even though we often staunchly deny them.

FLAWS

Blink was too hasty in drawing inferences from its illustrations and experiments.

Gladwell drew too many conclusions from a variety of fields where he had no real expertise

Blink failed to truly analyze or prove many of the theories it promotes

Although Blink emphasizes the importance of experience in employing intuition efficiently, it still often comes across as contradictory and implausible in its theory of thin-slicing

In terms of structure, Blink often failed to distinguish clearly between the subject matter of its chapters

THANK YOU!