blink the power of thinking without thinking book

Van Riper’s group uses instinct, intuition, and on-the-fly adaptation to best the military’s sophisticated metrics and calculations. Marine Corps strategist Paul Van Riper joins a war game who leads a team against an American military strike force equipped with sophisticated computer analytics and massive data resources. The main insight in Chapter 4 is that overthinking a problem can produce results much worse than simply respecting gut feelings. These errors arise from unconscious bias, which can be ferreted out with implicit-association tests that reveal prejudice among even the most open-minded people. Chapter 3 looks at “The Warren Harding Error,' where people become mesmerized by a person’s appearance and draw erroneous conclusions about them. Speed dating participants sometimes know in seconds if they’re drawn to another participant, but their choices tend to differ from their descriptions of what they’re looking for.Ĭhapters 3 and 4 explore the ways in which rapid thinking can go wrong. Other researchers watch videos of doctors interacting with patients and can tell within seconds which physicians are likely to be sued for malpractice.Ĭhapter 2 describes how scientists alter test subjects’ behavior simply by changing a handful of adjectives in the test instructions.

Gottman can almost instantly determine whether a relationship is in trouble. In Chapter 1, married couples visit John Gottman’s “love lab,' where their interactions are videotaped and pored over for signs of marital difficulty. How do the experts know immediately, and how could the scientists be fooled?Ĭhapters 1 and 2 delve into the mysteries of the human mind’s uncanny ability to almost instantly grasp situations in everyday life. Careful scientific evaluation suggests the kouros might be authentic, but several antiquities experts merely look at the sculpture and declare it fake, which is later revealed to be the truth. The Introduction focuses on the Getty kouros, an ancient Greek statue that, if genuine, would be a highlight of the museum's collection. The book’s six chapters provide examples from many walks of life-art appreciation, couples’ therapy, tennis, politics, marketing, law enforcement, classical music-where rapid judgment can quickly solve problems if used correctly.

Blink contains three central ideas: “fast and frugal' thinking is a natural attribute of the human mind and often works better than slow-and-careful reasoning this ability can be distorted or misled and fast cognition can be trained and improved.

Blink the power of thinking without thinking book