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Book: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Quotes of Book: Blink: The Power of Thinking
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  1. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.
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  2. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.
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  3. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
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  4. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    {O}ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT {Implicit Association Test} measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.
    book-quoteimplicit-association-testimplicit-biasunconscious

  5. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. {...} The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters
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  6. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way-who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites-it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren't betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.
    book-quoteracismsubconscious-racism

  7. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The "professor" group didn't know more than the "soccer hooligan" group. They weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a "smart" frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier-in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked-to blurt out the right answer.
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  8. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.
    book-quotethinkingknowing

  9. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    That's not because journalists know more about Japan. It's because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.
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  10. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.
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  11. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.
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  12. Malcolm Gladwell _ Blink: The Power of Thinking

    Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.
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