Blink : The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell Available on Audio Book

The Tipping Point was one of the best books I've ever read. Blink is better.

Gladwell explains in a readable and understandable way why that snap decision you made turned out to be correct. He also tells us why "less is more" in some decisions. For example,

Quite the opposite: that all that extra information isn't actually an advantage at all; that, in fact, you need to know very little to find the underlying signature of a complex phenomenon. The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters. John Gottman took a complex problem and reduced it to its simplest elements: even the most complicated of relationships and problems, he showed, have an identifiable underlying pattern. Lee Goldman's research proves that in picking up these sorts of patterns, less is more. Overloading the decision makers with information, he proves, makes picking up that signature harder, not easier. To be a successful decision maker, we have to edit.

"Thin-slicing" is the art of observing small bits of behavior and developing the ability to predict outcomes based on that information. John Gottman has done extensive research with couples and predicting how their marriage will turn out. Another practitioner is Vic Braden who can predict a tennis serve "double fault" with stunning accuracy. He doesn't know how he knows, he just knows.

A more subtle concept is "priming." Simply put, this says that what you see first influences your opinion later. Consider:

This test was devised by a very clever psychologist named John Bargh. It's an example of what is called a priming experiment... [they] staged an experiment in the hallway just down from Bargh's office. They used a group of undergraduates as subjects and gave everyone in the group one of two scrambled-sentence tests. The first was sprinkled with words like "aggressively," "bold," "rude," "bother," "disturb," "intrude," and" infringe." The second was sprinkled with words like "respect," "considerate," "appreciate," "patiently," "yield," "polite," and "courteous." ...After doing the test - which takes only about five minutes - the students were instructed to walk down the hall and talk to the person running the experiment in order to get their next assignment. Whenever a student arrived at the office, however, Bargh made sure that the experimenter was busy, locked in conversation with someone else - a confederate who was standing in the hallway, blocking the doorway to the experimenter's office. ...The people primed to be rude eventually interrupted - on average after about five minutes. But of the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority - 82 percent - never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces?

Blink is a terrific book that will help you with decisions, relationships, and getting what you want. It's a fast read and well done.