Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most popular psychology writers out there today, and it's easy to see why.  His second book, Blink is every bit as entertaining and easy to read as his first book, The Tipping Point.  It combines "man bites dog" counter-intuitive headlines with some interesting research, along with Gladwell's gift for the written word.

The underlying premise of Blink is that your first assumption, your instinctive reaction, is frequently the right one.  Despite all the cautions of everyone who argued against snap judgments, it turns out that snap judgments are often in fact correct.  Gladwell provides ample evidence to this effect, and I found myself convinced.

If you'll forgive a quick digression, this book meshed well with a book I read ages ago, called The Gift of Fear. [3]  This book also hinged on "follow your instincts," but it was written by a former FBI top dog, and was aimed specifically at women.  

One of the most rewarding things about the book is that the author understood and implicitly acknowledged the fact that the world is far more dangerous to women than it is to men.  It is my experience that when women and men have this conversation, the gulf of understanding is typically vast.  Most men seem not to understand this fundamental fact of life as a woman.  However, the overt message of The Gift of Fear (encoded right into the title) was, "Ignore that societal impulse which tells you to squash your instincts, because your instincts are usually right."  

What stuck with me best from The Gift of Fear was when the author interviewed women about their experiences.  They all admitted that something had "felt wrong" about the situation, but they had ignored that gut instinct.  Later, after intense scrutiny, all of them were eventually able to recall what specifically had struck them as wrong about the situation.  

One woman recalled an alarming micro-expression on the man's face as she walked into the elevator.  Another woman remembered having seen a flash of denim - the attacker's jeans - in her car's rear view mirror.  And so forth.  The take-away message being that your "gut instinct" doesn't come out of nowhere.  It is instead the result of your subconscious mind noticing the briefest flicker of something important, and trying to flag the situation with your conscious mind.

Back to the topic at hand, I think Blink owes a lot to The Gift of Fear, even though Gladwell never explicitly references it.  If he hasn't read it, then he should.  Gladwell spends little time discussing physical and sexual attacks on women (although he does cover the attack and murder of innocent Amadou Diallo, by the NYPD).  Instead, he keeps his conclusions to the safe side of the fence.

Where The Gift of Fear was meant as a hard hitting book meant to wake up the audience and help them sharpen their instincts, Blink has no such mandate.  This, even more so than the "dude never met a social science experiment he didn't like" squishy aspect, is what I found most frustrating about Blink.  The only possible use any of it serves is as clever fodder for the next office or dinner party conversation.