Why think more about less

BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING

By Malcolm Gladwell

Little Brown, $25.95,

265 pages

REVIEWED BY JON WARD

Powerful men continue to fall prey to packs of bloggers — Dan Rather and Eason Jordan being the most recent — but many in the major media continue to ignore blogs.

Conservative columnist and talk radio host Hugh Hewitt recently wrote that when he mentioned how blogs were tracking Mr. Jordan’s comments that U.S. soldiers were killing journalists to two well-known news anchors, they didn’t know what he was talking about.

But why and how could people whose job it is to be in the know not be paying attention to the hottest trend in media? An editor at a major paper recently answered that question. He said he did not have enough time to read blogs.

We live in an age long on information and short on time. It is a difficult environment in which to make decisions.

Along comes Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point” and staff writer for The New Yorker. The premise of his new book, “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” is that we can be better decision-makers by thinking more about less.

“Blink” is a book about the judgments we make in the first two seconds of our encounters with people and things with our “adaptive unconscious.” Mr. Gladwell says we should trust this part of our brain more, and not because it will save us time (though it will do that).

The brain has a “decision-making apparatus that’s capable of making very quick judgments based on very little information,” Mr. Gladwell writes. “Whenever we’re faced with making a decision quickly and under stress, we use that second part of our brain.”

“Decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately,” he writes. But sometimes, “our instincts betray us.”

“Blink” says that we can train ourselves to have more accurate snap judgments, and more confidence in them, by improving our “thin-slicing — filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.”

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