Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
GLADWELL, Malcolm.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.
First Edition of Blink; Inscribed by Malcolm Gladwell and Signed Twice by Jacket Designer Yoori Kim
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005.
$475.00
In Stock
Item Number: 151831
First edition, early printing of this exploration of the power of “thin-slicing”- the unconscious mind’s ability to find patterns and make rapid, accurate decisions based on minimal information. Octavo, original publisher’s half-cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page, “To Jeff Malcolm Gladwell.” Additionally signed twice by jacket designer Yoori Kim: on the front panel and the rear jacket flap of the jacket. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Yoori Kim.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005) is the second book by Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian-born journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker whose gift for translating complex social science research into compulsively readable popular narrative made him one of the most influential nonfiction writers of the early twenty-first century. Drawing on research from psychology and behavioral economics, the book examines the adaptive unconscious — the mental processes that work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information — and considers both the strengths of rapid cognition, particularly in expert judgment, and its pitfalls, such as prejudice and unconscious stereotyping. The central concept Gladwell advances is what he calls "thin-slicing" — the human capacity to draw accurate conclusions from very narrow slices of experience — which he illustrates through an eclectic range of case studies: a psychologist who can predict divorce from a brief observation of a couple, antiquities experts who recognize a forgery at a glance, and military war games in which instinctive decision-making outperformed elaborate analytical models. The book also examines the significant failures of rapid cognition, including the election of Warren Harding and the tragic police shooting of Amadou Diallo, arguing that the same unconscious mechanisms that enable brilliant snap judgments can just as readily produce catastrophic errors rooted in bias. Blink, along with Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Outliers, reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list, cementing his reputation as a popular intellectual whose work demonstrably shifted public conversation about human psychology and decision-making.
