Happy New Year

Palan’s thoughts for the month: BLINK

 

I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.  It was all about three simple facts: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately, when should we trust our instincts and when should we be wary of them, the power of knowing the first two seconds is not the preserve of a chosen few; it is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.

Momentary autism is a term Gladwell introduces when describing what happens when our ability to read people's intentions is paralyzed in high-stress situations. You may remember we discussed this last time. 

He explains the situation when the cops misread a "terrified" black man for a "terrifying" black man, they didn't correctly understand his intentions in that moment, and as a result they completely misinterpreted what that social situation was all about.  It's only one of many neatly packaged catchphrases Gladwell sprinkles throughout his new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (Little, Brown, January 2005).

There's "rapid cognition," "thin-slicing," and the "Warren Harding error," but "momentary autism" is the one that you can quickly relate to like when you froze during the new presentation pitch.

Mention his impact, though, and Malcolm Gladwell modestly tries to brush it off -- leaning, like any good journalist, on data points to support his argument. "Remember," he points out, "even a book that's a best-seller still is only read by less than 1% of the American public."But as the expert in social epidemics knows better than anyone, it's not how many people you reach, it's whom you reach.

Gladwell and his ideas have reached a tipping point of their own, and evidence of his impact can now be found in all corners of our culture, from politics (Donald Rumsfeld used "tipping point" to describe the war in Iraq.